Thoughts on Ratings
“Would you do away with movie ratings?!” This was a question asked by a pro-censorship person who was on a panel with me a couple of months ago. It’s a question I’ve had lobbed at me more than once as some form of gotcha. The idea behind it is that book banners aren’t really about banning books; instead, they just want to do what we’ve done with movies, and to a lesser extent video games and music, by putting a rating on them so parents know what is in the book. The assumption is that these ratings are great and no one can possibly think differently. After all, MPAA ratings have been a ubiquitous part of our public life for more than 50 years. So this person was surprised when I happily announced they are pointless and terrible systems of censorship.
Ratings systems are built around social norms of the group that controls the ratings. They decide what is deemed “harmful” to justify a label that then controls distribution and access. If you’re curious about the most famous of these systems, the MPAA film system, the You’re Wrong About podcast just had a good episode on it. A now more classic take on it is the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006) which is on Kanopy if you have access. The MPAA works by assembling a secret group of “regular” folks who watch the film and decide what rating the average parent would want on it. This is rife with bias and stupid bullshit. One of the most amusing is the well-known two fucks rule: a film can get a PG-13 with one “fuck” but a second gets it an R. Why? Well the only explanation is that one fuck will not corrupt a 13 year old but the second is some kind of major danger. The MPAA treats nudity worse than violence. A naked breast or buttock will almost always lead to an R but you can be as violent as you want, as long as you hide the gore, and get a PG-13 because the MPAA judges violence to be more socially acceptable. There’s the longstanding argument that MPAA censors treat queer sexuality, especially queer male sexuality, differently than the same content involving straight folks.
The story of music ratings is even more amusing and stupid. It all started when Tipper Gore’s daughter listened to a Prince song and Gore was aghast at sexual references. Co-founding the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) in 1984 they demanded the above ratings. I have no idea what violent lyrics were but as another set of episodes from You’re Wrong About discuss, at the time it was only about metal and “porn” rock, and later rap, but never country music despite it having similar themes. The real fun though is the “O” for occult. If you’re not familiar, this was the era of the Satanic Panic in which Christian Right folks spread bizarre lies about Satanists being behind all kinds of conspiracies - they were basically the first version of QAnon nonsense that has seized a significant amount of the Republican Party today. What exactly is an occult reference is a hard thing to define. If my song is about the evils of witches does that count? This reminds me of people arguing on TV in the late 1990s that Harry Potter used actual spells and kids might summon demons in recreating the spells they read. Eventually this was replaced with the “explicit music” tag that did little more than advertise to kids the CDs that they wanted to have access too. Built throughout the music debate was an argument, made on behalf of largely wealthy white folk, that some music, associated with poorer people and people of color, was inherently dangerous. Sadly, it turns out that dozens of mostly Black men have had rap lyrics used to convict them of crimes, something that happens for no other genre of music.
One problem with the book banner’s ratings argument is that it is based in this same bias. The above image is from Utah Parents United’s Facebook post, coming from someone who describes herself as the curriculum director of the group. Their motto is “no porn in the libraries.” Here is one of the porn books. Note the underlined section. You can see two mentions of “sexual” - though I have no idea what nudity in a prose novel means - but then everything else is about non-sexual material. And the leading concern is “alternate sexualities” because to this group any depiction of LGBTQ people existing is inherently dangerous. This is why their ratings system specifically notes “alternative” sexual orientations and/or gender identity. The demand is that LGBTQ people are “mature” subjects. You can see this in other pro-censorship activity. Five U.S. senators, including the truly terrible Senator Mike Lee who I’m stuck with, demanded that TV shows add an LGBTQ rating to any show with LGBTQ characters to ensure “parents be informed about mature content before it is displayed to their children.” Just a few days ago, a Texas school district, with a new Christian Nationalist majority, voted to ban all books in all levels of school that mentioned trans people existing. One Michigan town voted twice, twice, this year to defund its entire library when the library refused to remove all LGBTQ books from its totally voluntary shelves. This is not a bug of ratings systems, it is a feature. The goal of ratings is censoring material one doesn’t like based on the idiosyncratic beliefs of the raters. This is why ratings would be unconstitutional if attempted by government - as the Supreme Court found when California attempted to legislate around video games ratings. Free speech law, today, privileges content neutral regulations of speech and ratings systems are the opposite of that.
That being said, I have sympathy with Tipper Gore in the 1980s. Not because Prince posed a danger to her child’s ears: learning about sex, seeing violence, or even, gasp, a naked person, isn’t harmful to minors. But I get it. Sensitive parents want to control their child and ratings provided some useful information to them. But today there is no limit to information available about all media. If the parent simply wanted to control their child’s consumption, they have all that they need. But that isn’t the goal; instead they want to control the reading of everyone else’s child. This is why they seek to deploy criminal obscenity statutes because that would make it a crime for anyone to provide access to the books - if they were obscene, which none of them are. Ratings are just another means of that. Built into the ratings are their judgment about harm: swearing, drug use, sex, and queer people existing. Those all must be purged from the book shelves. Demanding that government entities adopt their biased ratings is key to their censorship goals. Luckily few take the argument seriously and they represent an extreme minority. But sadly they have influence in the modern Republican Party that has doubled down on hatred of LGBTQ people as a key component of their recent electoral strategy, even though it failed spectacularly in the 2022 midterms, and this is another means of achieving the goal of queer erasure in schools.
