The Bias Imbedded in the Rating System

The MPAA rating system, although a fair idea in its conception, has been subjected to many biases since its creation. The first main bias was brought to the film industry in the form of the Catholic Church. As Leonard J. Leff explains in The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code, the Church, which held a lot of influential power, could decide whether or not they would "condemn" a movie based on the ideology of the Catholic religion. Being "Condemned" would not help the attendance in the theater, but the bias of the Church was minimal when compared to the prude, homophobic Classification and Rating Administration. This administration, as Kirby Dick investigated, is made of ten parents from Las Angeles that have acquired no formal training. In Dick's movie, The Film is Not Yet Rated, he gives examples of two sex scenes side by side - heterosexual and homosexual sex - and shows how one received an "R" rating while the latter was stuck with "NC-17." This is an example of what Dick referred to as the "homophobic bias built into the rating structure." Getting stuck with a rating such as "NC-17" is, as Harvey Weinstein stated, "economic suicide" for the movie. So, in order to avoid such a rating, film directors cut and edit their movies according to what the rating administration would allow. Movies produced, in accordance to the administration, have shown what Noel Murray and Scott Tobias described as the "blatant hypocrisies of the system." These movies reveal the biases that "the MPAA supports a set of values - permissive about violence, puritanical about sex, viciously anti-gay." These biases are reasonably justified in some cases, but not in others. The inconsistency, which has upset movie-goers, is that the parents in charge would rather have their children see violence than sex, and so they rate the latter more harshly. Although some of their biases may be justified, it is not fair that the Classification and Rating Administration has the ability to assign a rating which does not allow some people to see it, regardless of parental presence. Such ratings show censorship, which is "compromising not only the films in question but also the purpose of art."