Netflix to Employees: If you don't like our content, you can quit

There is art that blurs this line. Lolita, for instance, blurs this line. Cuties is not anything like that. The emotions you're intended to register are very, very clear. The camera keeps panning away from the kids to reveal the shocked, saddened parents, and after the routine finishes the girl breaks out into tears. It's a traumatic moment.

The movie is about the way that little girls grow up in the society that we all actually live in. If you're not interested in seeing honest representations of the the world you inhabit, no one's forcing you to look, but don't think your decision to close your eyes has anything to do with protecting little girls.

Blowhards like you love to complain about books they haven't read and movies they haven't seen.

I saw the whole movie and it is a regular coming of age movie as I remembered

Don't understand what is the fuss about it from the conservatives

I really don't understand why people are down voting you for this. The end does not justify the means. There are much better ways to tell the story of how young girls are hypersexualized without sexualizing the young girls in the process.

You don't have to watch a documentary on the Zodiac Killer and get presented with unedited video of him actually killing his victims to understand that he was an evil individual. And you don't have to watch:

> Frequent scenes of 11-year-old girls dancing lewdly where the camera pans in and zooms in on the children's buttocks and midsections (both still in skin-tight clothes) Close up shots of the girls dancing with their leg spread above their head while camera focus on crotch area. These views are fairly frequent.

> Four preteen girls mimic the dance movements they see in hip-hop/rap music videos including: slapping each other's buttocks, kissing their hands and then touching their crotches, rubbing their buttocks together, and making seductive faces while sticking their fingers in their mouth.

> Two young girls in bed view the dance routine of a rival dance team. One (considerably older) girl from the rival team, Sweety Swag, lifts her shirt and bra and fully exposes her right breast.

To understand that the sexualization of young girls is bad. All those descriptions are from the IMDB parents guide https://m.imdb.com/title/tt9196192/parentalguide/nudity

I've heard it quipped that there's no such thing as anti-war movie. No matter how searing the criticism, no matter how horrifying the violence: war simply looks good on the screen, and the spikes of adrenaline we get during a war film excite us. The same could be said of films with any form of taboo sexuality, even when done in the spirit of satire or social criticism.

> I'm sure there are some snuff films with interesting character development too.

The criticism is absolutely worth considering, regarding the ethics of production. But it's worth contrasting like-with-like (not to shut down the argument, but to try to define the boundaries):

- Was the production of "The Professional" or "Taxi Driver" ethical? Both films sexualized young girls; and in the former case, Natalie Portman found the experience (particular the response and aftermath) moderately traumatic, and explicitly avoided roles with any sexuality until her late twenties.

- Was Kubrick's directorial process ethical, particularly in regard to The Shining, where he was blatantly abusive to Shelley Duvall (charitably, to elicit the best performance)? If that instance is over the line, exactly how hard are directors allowed to be on actors, and how much explicit prior consent should be necessary for "method directing"?

- To what extent is child labor in film-making ethical to begin with? We've converged on 14 as the minimum age for W-2 employment (notwithstanding family businesses, kids with apps, kids with YouTube channels, and "off-books" tasks for pocket money). If hiring a kid for a movie is fine, why can't that same kid sweep floors at a gas station? We could say "because there's no other way to make realistic movies"; but that's not that different from "there's no other way to tell a story about coming-of-age in a hyper-sexualized world".

- To what extent should such limitations be a product of individual ethical choices, vs social norms / taboos, vs "market ethics" (boycotts), vs public law and policy (either in the sense of labor laws, or indecency constraints on expression)?

Again, not saying that criticizing the production of Cuties isn't valid, or appealing to the status quo, and definitely not making some backdoor argument against child labor laws or age-of-consent; just that these questions are larger in scope, and don't have obvious answers.

> I am very weary of any "think of the kids" outrage, it's usually bullshit...except the LGBTQ indoctrination at a young age, that is real

That is probably one of the most obviously not real moral panics you could possibly fall for.

> You can't convince me that this is the base rate and up until now 1 in 5 people were LGBTQ but were just afraid of coming out.

Why not? They use to not tell anyone because they were afraid of being murdered, that seems like the most obvious explanation, application of occams razor, etc..

I'm not sure you're disagreeing. It seems more like you are proving the parent post's point. You didn't watch the movie, yet you had an emotional reaction to it anyway, and used that to make a decision about the service. The parent isn't saying that's unethical or anything, just that the movie is being mischaracterized by people who did not watch it.

This post is getting downvoted, but it does bring up an interesting point. The idea of judging a book by it's cover seems to be universally criticized. But especially with movie trailers, it can be unambiguously clear how the movie is being sold and what the intent is. I haven't seen Cuties or its trailer, so I'm not speaking specifically about it. But I would say trailers say quite a bit more about a movie than covers say about books. OP said that the movie was actually a criticism of child sexualization. If that's the case (which it may or may not be) and the trailer would generally be considered as instead selling child sexualization (which it may or may not), then there's something missing unless the trailer is being ironic, which seems unlikely given that the topic doesn't seem like a very appropriate subject for irony.

Read yourself.

Dark was infuriating to watch. Visually stunning, great characters and performances, but ultimately an intentionally obfuscated and meandering story that only ends up disappointing you.

It's kind of similar to Westworld season 1 or Lost -- there's this style of storytelling where you drop a bunch of interesting clues to lead you towards possible theories about whats really going on, and then all of those threads are dropped on the floor as if they never mattered. I find it abusive and disrespectful to the viewer.

Unfortunately the dub for this one just wasn’t good enough to keep my attention. It constantly failed to match the expected tone of the scene to the degree that it pulled me out of the story and I shelved it. I, like a majority of Netflix subscribers, don’t enjoy movies with subtitles as it also destroys the immersion to be constantly reading. No doubt this is at least one of the primary drivers for its low penetration into the English zeitgeist.

Game of Thrones had a horrible final season. The first six seasons were maybe the best in all of television.

It's rare for a TV series to be excellent and stay excellent it's entire life.

This doesn't really seem unique to Netflix.

There's a ton of movies, shows, books - where the first installment is outstanding and the rest are trash.

My favorite example as a kid was Maze Runner. The first book has terrible prose - but is actually pretty well paced and a good story. The second two are utter garbage (fun fact: the editor quit after the first book AND the publisher dropped the author when the first one was the next best selling sci Fi / fantasy since Harry Potter... That's how bad the sequels were).

This happens more times than not.

(Can't edit) Ah, how did I forget, in this context, about the suicide being censored out of the first season of 13 Reasons Why, years after its release?[1]

That was along with the addition of 1) a disclaimer in the form of the actors talking directly to the viewer before the first episode and 2) an intertitle after every episode reminding of it, again with narration from the actors. 3) Trigger warnings before episodes were also added, but to no surprise at this point. What I certainly haven't seen before is such mutilation of a work as accompanying it with material so expressly immersion-breaking!

A song in the soundtrack was also replaced for reasons unknown, but I suppose that falls more into the general topic of silent alterations to published media that online consumption facilitates, an entire discussion to be had on its own.

[1] https://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=378736

The agenda clearly written on their website.

https://insidethemagic.net/2022/03/disney-exec-commits-to-50...

What labor shortage? In software engineering or other organizations? It's certainly not the former, at least not for companies of any notability (e.g. Netflix). I work for a well-known company, not as big as FAANG but well on its way and at least as big as any other major tech company in the news. Our engineering shortage is due to the artificial bar we set for hiring. Our recruiters each have dozens of resumes and applications to sift through on a given day. Far less than 1% of these ever make it to a tech screen, and I think the rate of our panel interviews is in the low double-digit percent of that figure. There isn't an engineering shortage. There's a shortage of engineers that don't meet some incredibly stupid, ego-driven arbitrary gate-keeping policies.

This is not true. People that are not aligned with the company's values create negative enterprise value.

Yeah, I'm getting pretty close. I use it barely enough to justify the cost. We'll see after Russian doll season 2

It’s vocal, for sure, but it’s not that tiny. You can’t simply dismiss the concerns of 10-30% (+ allies) of your potential audience.

Negative PR — ineffectively countered — for Cuties and Dave Chapelle will have long term effects on customer and employee sentiment. They will see the problem in hiring first, which you may not be able to see clearly externally at first.

Netflix is a business. Their interest is art they can profit from. Art that drives a lot of people away probably isn't going to make the cut (unless they think it might draw in more people than it pushes away.)

They are a private company, they can do what they want, no?

"every employee of a company (and every shareholder) carries a small amount of the moral culpability for their company's actions"

At the same time, we shouldn't moralize about every disagreement or different perspective. Some things are morally neutral. Like a comedy special that doesn't advocate violence against anyone.

I agree with your points. Right or wrong, it seems plainly evident that the reputation of a company will rub off on the workers. It's logically in the interests of workers to protest against company decisions that will harm their own reputations. But it's also logically in the interest of management to maintain control over the direction of a company, so they're going to push back whenever workers try to have their way.

My point above is simply: This isn't a battle of censors vs anticensors; it's a power struggle between workers vs managers. Workers want power to guide content, but Netflix management wants to keep that power for themselves. Netflix management are not anticensors. The power to censor is being contested, not opposed.

Very well put. We each have some small effect on the world and we should stay mindful of it. Especially with the amount of power a corporation (read large group of people) can have on the world.

Netflix is giving them a way out of perceived culpability by asking them to leave though.

I mean, fair enough, we can set the law aside.

Again, my point is that trans people are not complaining about "people saying negative things" in a vacuum. They are complaining about a specific situation that is happening which goes beyond just the context of the Chapelle special. I don't believe you are actually responding to the most common trans critique of Chapelle and, in not doing that, you dismiss the actual critiques they are making.

Let me put it this way: we don't have to agree about if the Chapelle special is a problem (I don't happen to worry too much about it but I understand why people are angry). But, I want you to imagine that the loudest and most alarmist trans folks are correct - Chapelle is helping a trend of violence against trans people. If that were the case (which again, is not exactly my belief tho things are pretty bad out there) disagreeing with them would be supporting violence against them. The best way, in my view, to avoid accidentally supporting that kind of thing is to start your personal thoughts (and public arguments) from the POV of the vulnerable community. That's how we can all avoid accidentally erasing an important critique.

> If you are an employee and this is original content, your name is forever linked to it and so you should be able to have a say in it. If it was purchased content, maybe you could say you weren't involved.

Like working for a tobacco company, your name and reputation will be tarnished by that association. The solution is obvious: don't work for that company.

Or maybe Netflix will start to implement solutions like those used by the pornography industry; hire sys admins, programmers etc under a shell company that doesn't share the name of the main business. So rather than putting "Software Developer at Pornhub.com" on your resume, you can put tell people you worked for "MindGeek".

OP very clearly writes that they "don't think it's transphobic to push back on trans activists" who, unlike him, "demand the world accommodate".

Again, the only 'accommodation' that is asked is to just let them live. Seems like not a hard thing to do, and not something one would have to go out of their way of to 'push back against'.

If you don't like the thought of buttfucking, don't. If you don't like the thought of people who identify differently from their biological sex, don't. If you don't like the thought of eating kale, don't. It's simple, it costs you nothing. Nothing at all.

Nobody's trying to convert your family, you're just trying to stop your family from knowing LGBT people exist.

For me that's the only interesting discussion to be had here. Separation into female and male leagues were installed partially because of sex (so that it's fairer), but initially mainly because of gender (women must not do the same fun things we do).

Then again, it is 'unfair' that Simone Biles has the physique she has that fits to her chosen sport better than mine; Michael Phelps likewise; Alex Honnold processes fear differently from most of us, etc.

This is why you never, ever, ever take advantage of "mental health" or "addiction" resources provided by your employer.

It doesn't matter what they tell you about confidentiality. Just get the care you need through your insurance and avoid the potential honeypot.

Edit: This comment is heavily biased towards an American audience where at will employment, and health insurance rather than government benefit, are the norm.

Do people tell you that you are not really an addict or mentally ill, that that's not even a thing, and that it's just a phase you grow out of once you simply make up your mind?

[edit] Ok, got it. I don't mean to question anyone's personal experience, and sorry that this is what's happening to you.

Also, I don't want to 'rank' the degree of marginalization different groups experience, that's not at all what I'm after. Ideally, none of this would exist and everyone would just live happily ever after.

What I mean is that I don't see a national debate, through politicians or 'celebrities', that deny the existence of, say, alcoholism.

But again, I don't mean to imply that those groups don't suffer. Also, I can just be wrong.

There's an important distinction here. To quote that page:

> Gender dysphoria is the feeling of discomfort or distress that might occur in people whose gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth or sex-related physical characteristics.

Being transgender is not the same as having gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria is the (sometimes) associated distress. It is effectively an administrated diagnosis, without it many trans people would not be able to access treatments they need.

The pages goes on with:

> The diagnosis was created to help people with gender dysphoria get access to necessary health care and effective treatment. The term focuses on discomfort as the problem, rather than identity.

We live in a country that stigmatizes, under-researches, and under-treats most mental disorders.

Most people who think pointing out "gender disphoria" is a "mental illness" is a good point would be shocked and disappointed when they find out what the standard treatment for patients with gender disphoria is.

The DSM is a book full of things that (a particular group of) academic doctors think should be considered to be illnesses. It's previously included homosexuality and "gender identity disorder" (transgenderism).

It's a not a bad source, obviously, but being in a book does not make things diseases or not.

That said, in my (medical) opinion, alcoholism and other addictions are much better to be considered (and treated) as diseases.

Correlation is not causation.

> it'd be very difficult to see a trans president anytime soon.

People would have said the same thing about the likelihood of having a gay president 15-20 years ago. Instead, we had an openly gay and married presidential candidate, Pete Buttigieg, do quite well in the last election with his homosexuality not being a major point of the conversation.

The amount of progress on gay rights and the public's perspective on LGBTQ rights has been extremely fast. I think (and hope) that you are wrong and that society will be ready for a trans president much sooner than you anticipate.

It really feels like there is real split in the "trans-community". Between those who actually just want to identify with their new gender quietly and get on with their lives. With only people around them accepting them.

And then the online and it's allied that push for all sort of weirdness and political visibility and gains.

Many don't have much issues at least those to air in public about first one. The later one seems to aim in places also ruin things that they enjoy. Just for signalling and power.

When exactly have you been forced to list your pronouns?

If you're accusing me, be good enough to be specific.

It's a global company -- they need to make and provide content to a global audience.

> Snowpiercer

So your example of woke propaganda is content made for other services that Netflix later acquired non-exclusive rights to?

> after the main plot focused on maintaining a lie, not discovering a truth (conventional screenwriting)

I have no idea what this means. I followed your reddit link thinking maybe it would explain what you're talking about, but "snow" appears nowhere on the page.

> Snowpiercer: Gave up after the main plot focused on maintaining a lie, not discovering a truth (conventional screenwriting).

What do you mean by this? The "geo-engineering backfired and made the world too cold" setting of the story? I found the movie schlocky and ham-fisted, but generally entertaining in a dumb-movie sort of way. I'm not sure what you mean by maintaining a lie and discovering truth.

It's worth noticing that the FCC regulations were aimed at broadcasts when children were up (6am-10pm), in an effort to protect kids, not adults. Also, those regulations existed on the limited resource of public airwaves. There is no reason you couldn't start the Hardcore Porn Cable Network other than it would flop. There is no reason to use time-based filtering anymore, so making non-G rated content available 24/7 is no longer an issue.

99.9% of Netflix content isn’t outrageous in any way. There’s a lot of attention for letting famous comedians do their usual routines in a recorded special, but we’re talking about less than 10 hours of television in a library of like 20,000 hours of Netflix originals.