[Part 3 in a brief series about movie content and ratings. Links to earlier posts: Part 1 | Part 2]

Conventional wisdom says the US—and particularly the conservative watchdogs who discuss movie content the most— are far more tolerant of violent content than sexual content.

Before we discuss whether this should be the case or not—is one of either sex or violence worse than the other?—first let’s see if this is, in fact, true.  Are movie ratings in the US more ‘lenient’ for violent content than they are for sexual content?  Let’s do some research…

Kids-in-Mind was introduced in the previous section—a parental watch-group who rates movies in the standard PSV categories from 0 to 10, with 10 being the worst.  As with all similar sites, the PSV values are subjective and have any number of cases that I (or anyone) could nitpick about, but they at least give us a starting point for the discussion.  (And, conveniently, they have a searchable archive that makes database queries such as those I use below easy to do…)

First, let’s look at the totals—here are the aggregate total for all movies listed in the KIM database for each of the eleven possible values for profanity, violence, and sexual content.  The data is also put into a line graph for more convenient viewing:

• At low levels, there appear to be more movies with sexual content than violent content, however they switch after level “6” with a greater number of movies judged to be highly violent, than highly sexual.
• Filmmakers certainly have an obvious ‘comfort zone’ for profanity, don’t they?

How about ratings themselves, as they relate to content?   To analyze the effect on movie ratings, we need to control for content a little bit…

Let’s pick mid-range values for sex and violence, say 4 and 5, and look for movies with values of 4-5 in those categories, but smaller values (3 or under) for the other two categories, so that we’re reasonably confident that the sex/violence content was the primary catalyst for whatever rating it received.  Then, we should be able to analyze the actual ratings received by each of these movies and see if violent content in movies does, in fact, receive more lenient ratings than sex and nudity.

For movies with sex/nudity levels 4 and 5:
G: 0
PG: 11
PG-13: 43
R: 3

For movies with violence levels 4 and 5:
G: 11
PG: 120
PG-13: 65
R:  3

Here are the profanity totals, for completeness:
G: 0
PG: 15
PG-13: 115
R: 13

Two observations from this result set:

• There certainly seem to be MORE movies with mid-level violent content but low-levels of everything else, than for sex/nudity (199 vs. 57).  According to the original totals, there are actually more movies with 4-5 values for sex (794), than violence (757), but the disproportionate results in favor of violence once we look for lower values in other content categories seem to indicate that movies with sexual content also tend to have a fair amount of other stuff included as well, while violent movies are more likely to be ‘stand-alone’.
• The sexual content curve is clearly centered on PG-13 (as is the profanity curve), while the 4/5 violent movies are clearly centered around the PG rating, with a handful of G movies as well.  This would seem to present evidence that ratings are generally lower for ‘equal’ levels of violent content than for sexual content.

What about high levels of sex/violence that still avoided R ratings?

For PG-13 movies, there are:

• 68 films with Sex = 6
• 20 with Sex = 7
• None with Values 8 or higher

For PG-13 movies with violence, there are:

• 166 films with Violence = 6
• 86 films with Violence = 7
• 8 films with Violence = 8
• 1 film with Violence = 9 (“1492: Conquest of Paradise” from 1992)

Again, for completeness, here are the PG-13 movies with profanity:

• 34 films with Profanity = 6
• 1 film with Profanity = 7 (What’s the Worst That Could Happen from 2001)
• None with Profanity 8 or higher

This provides additional evidence that the ratings board has traditionally found higher levels of violence more acceptable than higher levels of sexual content, especially for non-R ratings.  It appears that the criticism of the US ratings board (and US culture in general) is correct: violence is tolerated to a greater extent than sex and nudity is.

Well, maybe…

The problem here is we don’t know if we’re comparing apples with apples.  The content values from 0 to 10 are completely arbitrary and relative only to themselves.  The only thing we know about a movie with a violence value of “5” is that it is more violent than a movie with a value of “4”.  Is a “5” in sexual content directly comparable to a “5” in violent content?

From the result set, there were 11 G-rated movies that were given a value of 4 or 5 for violence, but no G-rated movies for comparative values of sex or profanity.  Here are those 11 movies:

• Anastasia (1997)
• Arctic Tale (2007)
• Chicken Little (2005)
• Chicken Run (2000)
• Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (2001)
• Monsters Inc.  (2001)
• 102 Dalmatians (2000)
• Pokemon the First Movie (1999)
• The Rugrats Movie (1998)
• Tarzan (1999)
• Babe: Pig in the City (1998)

For those who have seen one or more of these movies, the question is whether you considered any of these at the time to be “surprisingly violent”, given what you would expect for a G rating.
 
Now, compare that list to the list of movies that have been given values of 4 or 5 in the Sex/Nudity category and see if you consider the violent content of the first list to be “equivalent” to the sexual content of films in the second, which include “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” and “Austin Powers” among others.

Looking through the specific descriptions of violent content in the G-rated movies above, we can see that ‘violence’ is a fairly broad category which includes car crashes, explosions, people falling from heights onto the ground, and scary looking aliens or monsters—things that are categorically different than human bloodshed.   Is that directly comparable to sexual dialogue and images?
 
At higher levels, “violence” contains some pretty sick stuff—no question.  But at lower levels, though, it’s hard to make a case that what’s included in the violence category can objectively be considered to be as “offensive” as the relatively equivalent content in the sex/profanity areas with equal values.  If PSV material has some sort of psychological effect (which, again, we can’t prove, but we’re still just assuming to be the case, for now) it may be quite likely that the impact of violence doesn’t increase in a straight line, but rather in a curve that only starts arcing up dramatically at higher values.

Perhaps violence has to be MORE violent than its P and S brethren in order to for psychological effects to be seen.  If so, then we may have a legitimate reason why “violence” can be treated more lightly than sexual material, particularly at lower levels, without contradiction—not because violence is ‘better’, but because the definition of ‘violence’ is so broad it includes a large number of things which are not, morally speaking, offensive.

Back to the original question:  *should* either sex or violent content in movies be judged more or less harshly than the other?  Is the ‘right’ way to judge content the US way, with violence being judged more tolerably than sex, or the European way which reverses it.

In real life, of course, sex is preferable to violence any time.  (Obviously, you’d rather hear the news that your teenage daughter was found having sex with a strange man, than was found murdered in an alley by a strange man.)

In movies, of course, the violence and sex are fake (although nudity is still nudity), so the direct comparison to “real life” may not be that useful.  Watching violent movies doesn’t actually kill anyone—the question is whether exposure to (fake, yet realistic) violent images make the viewer more violent in real life (or at least alters one’s opinion and attitude towards violence in real life), versus whether watching sexualized images alters one’s attitude towards sex and nudity in real life, along with their relationships with the opposite sex.

I don’t think anyone can make a definitive conclusion one way or the other which is “worse”.  Violence is clearly individually worse, but violent acts are considerably rarer in real life, and the percentage of violent movie viewers who are led to real-life violence is undoubtedly very small.

On the other hand, sexual conduct considered ‘sinful’ by LDS standards is not rare at all, such that even if sexual activity is far better than violent activity in a vacuum, it is so much more common and widespread across society, that one can argue the net impact of changing sexual attitudes over the human population as a whole might be worse for society simply due to sheer volume.  Viewers may be far more likely to be influenced by sexual content in small ways—viewing casual sexual encounters as ‘normal’ and ‘expected’ in their romantic relationships, for example—versus being drawn to commit violent crimes, even if the latter has higher consequences.

(Even from a secular standpoint, it is arguable that more of the primary causes of poverty today are "sex-related"--as in teen/unwed pregnancies, single parents, adultery & broken homes, etc...--rather than "violence-related", thus there is good reason for social conservatives to be concerned about sexual content in movies and the possible influence of sexual material in movies on viewers.)

Judging the proper balance between caring about sexual content versus violent content is an impossible question to answer: how do you appropriately compare the two together, anyway?  How do you deal with the fact that "violence" seems to be a much broader category?  If the US is, in fact, more tolerant of violence than sex, is that good or bad?  Surely the best answer is to decouple the two categories together, rate them separately, and allow viewers to decide which one they care more about...

Next: "Ratings Creep" + the history of PG-13