I first heard about Cuties on Twitter. Clips of the underage actors dancing sexually garnered hundreds of thousands of views across social media platforms. People launched petitions to remove the movie from Netflix and protested by canceling their subscriptions. The outrage even trickled into the mainstream with prominent government officials in the United States denouncing the film and calling for an investigation.

Even after watching the trailer, I was on the #CancelCuties train. It was disturbing to see young girls dressed and dancing like grown women, particularly dark skinned Black girls who are already hypersexualized by society at large. Additionally, the trailer appeared to be another story of a Muslim girl “freeing” herself from the religion through hypersexuality.

It wasn’t until I saw the screenwriter and director, a Black Muslim woman herself, explain the film that I decided to watch it. And I’m grateful I did. Not only is Cuties a good movie, but it’s a landmark film for its nuanced and intersectional portrayal of modern Black Muslim girlhood in a lower middle class family. It forces the audience, grown adults, to face the cost of the classist, sexist and anti-Black ideas of girlhood we’ve allowed to permeate our communities.

Cuties, or Mignonnes in French, is written and directed by Maïmouna Doucouré, who is French-Senegalese. The film is based on Doucouré’s childhood and buttressed by a year and a half of research that involved speaking to young girls about hypersexuality on social media.

The main character, Amy, played beautifully by Fathia Youssouf, is an 11-year-old Muslim girl who immigrated from Senegal to Paris. The catalyst for the film is Amy’s relationship with her father. Early in the story, Amy discovers that her father married a second wife without the knowledge of her mother, played by Maïmouna Gueye. To avoid a scandal in her community, her mother pretends to be happy about the marriage, although she experiences a breakdown. Witnessing her mother trapped in a performance of womanhood that places shame front and center pushes Amy to search for freedom elsewhere.

Amy then joins a group of girls, the Cuties, as they prepare to compete at a dance competition with an inappropriately sexual routine copied from the internet. In trying to free herself from the conservative patriarchal structures that emotionally torment her mother, Amy inadvertently entrenches herself in another form of patriarchy that peddles hypersexuality as freedom.

Watching Cuties so vividly reminded me of what it was like to be a Black Muslim tween girl. Growing up, I learned from TV and real life experiences that the relationship between the able, cis-gender female body and the world is transactional. Whether it be for respectability or popularity, both my strict Black Muslim culture at home and mainstream culture promoted this idea.

But unlike me, gender marginalized kids — including transgender and nonbinary kids — like Amy are on social media now. Social media connects all their communities and gives them access to an endless library of hypersexual, classist, anti-Black and gender exclusionary images of girlhood and womanhood. A lot of content has been created to address these themes, but where Cuties differs is in its portrayal of the effects on girls who are not rich, white and Christian.

Amy’s status as lower middle class inhibits her from participating in this sexualized girlhood. Throughout the movie, she’s referred to as “homeless” because of her clothing and hair and doesn’t have a cell phone. The only way for Amy to participate in girlhood was to steal money from her working class mother and a phone from her cousin.

Even central themes of girlhood like carefree play are tied to class. With her mother constantly at work to support the household, Amy acts as a caretaker for her two younger brothers, one of whom is a toddler. The little free time she has is devoted to dancing and social media, which causes her extreme spiral into her new hypersexual persona.

Doucouré also emphasizes the differences between Amy’s treatment and that of non-Black girls. As a dark skinned Black girl, Amy is especially vulnerable to patriarchal violence. Her social desirability to boys and girls alike is largely dependent on her performance of mainstream sexuality. With her new persona and sexual dance moves, Amy is finally admitted into the dance group, and the boys who harassed her now compliment her.

Contrastingly, in her home culture, her viability is dependent on her performance of modesty and obedience. The drastic shift in her personality is not met with earnest questioning; rather, an imam is called to exorcise the “evil spirit” compelling her to act out. It’s the imam who pinpoints the source of Amy’s angst: her father’s actions. It isn’t Islam Amy is rebelling against, but the harm caused by the patriarchal structures her community injects into it.

At the end of the film, Amy is nurtured by the most important person in her life: her mother. She’s given permission to choose what to do with her time, and she chooses to be a child, joyfully jumping rope in the street. All she needed to find her center again was the support of the adult in her life.

To be uncomfortable with the content of this film is to be uncomfortable with the way patriarchy has shaped the lives of young girls and gender marginalized children in the age of social media. The disturbing images and story points in Cuties are not pulled out of thin air: they’re ripped straight from the experiences of young girls and their interactions with and on social media. As someone who frequents TikTok, it’s clear the road to stardom is hypersexuality; just scroll through the most popular accounts. How can we as a society set an expectation and be shocked when it’s adhered to?

“We can’t blame our children for what we value in our society,” said Doucouré in an interview. Rather than shying away from our discomfort, Doucouré urges us to lean into it and stop being complicit. We, as adults, need to reimagine what a healthy and inclusive girlhood looks like. We need to promote a girlhood that has space for all children impacted by patriarchy and explicitly prioritizes the wellbeing and exploration of those marginalized by their gender identity, ability, race, religion and sexual orientation.