More nuanced than I anticipated, the film was one more cultural artifact in a long line of “Exhibit As,” demonstrating that girls are under siege. Beyond outrage, I just felt sad, overwhelmed by what girls are up against as they are rushed down a steel-jaw trapped path on their way to “womanhood.”

Cuties is essentially a warning about what happens when we throw girls to the Big Tech/Big Porn/Big Pop Culture wolves: abandoning them to porn-inspired prescriptions about how they should act and be in the world. It is a social critique of what follows when we dismantle the guardrails and allow a misogynistic, violent, exhibitionist, internet culture to ravage girls — a culture that trains them to wield their immature bodies as currency; a culture that encourages girls on the outskirts of sexual maturity to present themselves as sexually mature and knowing; a culture that urges them to weaponize the limited tools at their disposal.