PYF Censorship and Ratings: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut

The Something Awful Forums > Main > Post Your Favorite: Carefully Curated > PYF Censorship and Ratings: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut

Panfilo: Aug 27, 2011; EXISTENCE IS PAIN😬

The bait and switch directors do with the MPAA is interesting. I gotta wonder if some of these jokes just flew over the heads of reviewers. The MPAA panel members don't seem like the hippest bunch.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2016 14:24

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 12:52

Panfilo: Aug 27, 2011; EXISTENCE IS PAIN😬

It's interesting to speculate how streaming affects censorship and the MPAA . how much sway is it going to have when most of this media is easier to access?

# ¿ Feb 19, 2016 00:00

Panfilo: Aug 27, 2011; EXISTENCE IS PAIN😬

It is interesting how most descriptions of 'nudity' in films tend to be limited to 'boobs' or 'butt crack'. If a guy is shirtless, or in his underpants, does the MPAA still consider this nudity? What about a woman breastfeeding a baby?

You rarely see genitalia in major Hollywood films. For men, you might have a split second of seeing wang, but it is usually played up for comedic effect; Watchmen really surprised me in that they kept Dr. Manhattan pretty much 'as is'. With women, they'll show pubes, but aside from stuff like Fatal Attraction you never really see labia or anything like that. So its funny how broadly they end up defining 'nudity'.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2016 04:53

Panfilo: Aug 27, 2011; EXISTENCE IS PAIN😬

Is there a reason the MPAA has to be so opaque in the way that it determines ratings? It is strange how much power (and ultimately money) they have control over in the film industry.

Are there any NC-17 films that didn't contain any nudity/sexual content? It seems particularly reserved for some of the more sexually explicit films. But often even those were just a product of 'X more minutes of exposed boobs' over an R rating, which feels awfully arbitrary. I heard, for example the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut had to get cut down to keep an R rating. I get the impression it was more about the duration of it, not what was actually depicted.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2016 12:54

Panfilo: Aug 27, 2011; EXISTENCE IS PAIN😬

Practical Demon posted:

Dicks show up in R movies pretty often, they just can't be erect. Jason Siegel did a full scene in the nude in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and was writing and directing a Muppet movie a couple years later. This highlights a problem with filmmakers in itself, where male nudity can be played only as a joke with no sex, but there will always be sex attached to a naked woman, at least in any mainstream movie.

Man butts have been showing up in network TV as well, and are pretty much good to go on cable, while lady butts are still forbidden on TV. Women's bodies are policed pretty heavily in every way when compared to men's.

Well, they sure nipped the problem of married couples having oral sex in the bud. Those pervs are going to jail.

What about the scene with Kathy Bates in About Schmidt? Are women's bodies always sexualized, even if they fall under a conventionally 'undesirable' group, such as older or fatter women?

If Melissa McCarthy did a nude scene, would audiences really interpret it as a 'sexy' scene, or would it get played for laffs the same way a naked dude would?

It's easy to generalize that we overly sexualize women's bodies in movies through censorship, but I notice this happens overwhelmingly with conventional 'Hollywood' proportioned bodies.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2016 17:01

Panfilo: Aug 27, 2011; EXISTENCE IS PAIN😬

Practical Demon posted:

Issues aren't universal, but they're apparent when you look at the whole. Female nudity is more common than male nudity, even though male nudity isn't censored as harshly. Filmmakers tend to be male, and they make movies with men in mind, for the most part.

Non attractive bodies are rare to see nude, and are usually played for a joke, but I'd say a non attractive female body is more rare than a male one for those jokes. I can think of maybe one or two other example off the top of my head other than that Kathy Bates scene, which was a big loving deal at the time. Even when a woman being fat is the joke, producers worry it'll stop people from seeing it. Melissa McCarthy was photoshopped to be thinner on all the posters for The Heat, even though the entire point of her characters tend to center around her size. In general, a woman's body is seen by producers as something to sell a movie to a male audience.

I wonder if they're really afraid of alienating their audience, or it is the characteristic cultural 'invisibility' society has on larger or older women; that they think nobody will care enough to bother seeing it in the first place.

For example Norbit got a lot of backlash, but it seemed more focused around negative African American stereotypes then 'lol fat chick' attitudes.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2016 17:41

Panfilo: Aug 27, 2011; EXISTENCE IS PAIN😬

I recall a Metal Slug game or games that made all the blood white. It didn't make the game any less gory, it just made enemies explode in a jizz shockwave which ended up being even more cartoony and ridiculous.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2016 08:35

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 12:52

Panfilo: Aug 27, 2011; EXISTENCE IS PAIN😬

Your Dunkle Sans posted:

Thanks for the 10,000 views! I appreciate the popularity this topic has gotten on PYF.

That being said, what are all of your views on censorship in general? While I agree that there should be parental controls on what kind of content the young children of parents are allowed to see, in general I support keeping content free of censorship.

Generally, if good media is made with sexuality or violence as part of its message, it's best to keep the authors' original message intact. By deleting or modifying the work, you lose the intent or impact the work is meant to make. See: Goodfellas, Scarface, etc as another poster mentioned. Without their violence in these cases, these movies lose their meaning.

Being uncomfortable is a good thing. If we do not flex the boundaries we are comfortable with, society is worse off in the long run.

On that note, I disagree with Germany's censorship of violence and Nazism. If we do not talk about these things and explore these topics in our art, we allow them to flourish in the darker corners of society where there is no oversight.

I think we really need to shift the responsibility on ourselves to determine what is appropriate. If the MPAA operated on some kind of rubric, and it was based on actual scientific studies about the effects of violent media and sexuality at various ages, it would have more credibility: "Best as our research shows, letting your kid see this content could mess them up". But it doesn't work that way, and its seen through a very narrow cultural lens.

My concern with some forms of censorship is giving it so much financial and political power that our culture slides into some 1984-esque dystopia where anything 'un American' is subject to sanction.

But on the flip side I don't think it's perfectly harmless to let kids see porn either. Exposure to porn is a common way molesters groom children to normalize sexual behavior. The type of parents that don't care if their kids see sexual content aren't always going to be the type of parents responsible enough to explain the context of what they are seeing.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2016 16:57

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