Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux in "Blue Is the Warmest Color."
The MPAA’s backwards logic: Sex is dangerous, sexism is fine
Last week, Manhattan’s IFC Center ignored the Motion Picture Association of America’s NC-17 rating for Abdellatif Kechiche’s critically acclaimed film “Blue is the Warmest Color“ and allowed teenagers to see the film. The Parents Television Council is now objecting to the theatre’s decision.
The MPAA is regularly ridiculed for the incoherence of their ratings, as well as a bias against independent films. The documentary “Bully,” for instance, was released with an R rating for profanity. Its core audiences, young teens, could not see the film without an adult.
Imagine if our movie ratings considered sexism and racism as content that children should not be viewing without parental input. Just a thought.
The MPAA’s NC-17 rating, specifically designed to “protect children,” reveals the association’s sexist and patriarchal view of what content is allowable and what is “objectionable.”
The MPAA fails completely to take into account sexism and content that objectifies girls and women, turns them into commodities, employs them as props, represents them as property and prizes, and makes them the target of sexualized and domestic violence as a plot device to demonstrate the hyper-masculinity of male protagonists. And most protagonists are male.
As NPR’s Linda Holmes described this summer, “Of 617 showings [in nearby multiplexes], 561 of them — 90 percent — are stories about men or groups of men, where women play supporting roles or fill out ensembles primarily focused on men.” There were, as she pointed out, “nearly six times as many showings of ‘Man Of Steel’ alone as there [were] of all the films about women put together.”
Every year the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism also documents this onscreen gender gap.
Portrayals of women in American film have degenerated over time, not improved.
The MPAA does not make movies, but they do rate them and generally fail spectacularly to consider sexism and the portrayal of women when they do. This is even more glaringly obvious in films it has deemed acceptable for children. For example, the G-rated movie “Shark Tale“ can contain songs such as “Golddigger” (lyrics include, “When she look at you she only see ‘ching-ching’…Mill around your neck, mill around your arms… Look you in the eye, and tell a boldface lie… She’s a pimpstress…she’ll seize your assets like the I.R.S.”) Does the message that all women are manipulative, greedy, money-obsessed whores work for you?
