in evaluating ratings for children, but tougher on sex and non-sexual nudity (frontal male nudity in particular). As Bramesco writes for Vox, citing the 2006 investigative documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated, “Sex scenes are picked through with a fine-toothed comb, any detail—a wiping of the chin, a moan too emphatically acted, any maneuver beyond the most vanilla standards—sufficient to bump a film up to the R zone and limit its reach.” It’s hard to predict what “vanilla” will mean for the MPAA; the rules are so opaque that directors like Bo Burnham often have to guess what it is about their movie that earned them an R rating. [...]
“In general, the US does tend to rate sexuality more harshly than violence, and that is pretty much flipped everywhere else in the world,” Betsy Bozdech, the executive editor of ratings and reviews for Common Sense Media, a non-profit that rates and reviews movies to help parents make decisions about the content their kids watch, tells Quartz. For her part, Bozdech says that Common Sense Media gave Eighth Grade a 14+ rating, and that both parents and kids on their site gave the movie a 12+ rating. “I hope that parents will take their kids to see it,” she said.
For many European movie ratings agencies, including the British Board of Film Classification, scenes that depict sex are deemed more acceptable for adolescents. European attitudes hold that sexual exploration is a normal part of growing up, and that kids should be allowed to see it on screen. That’s part of a broader difference between how Americans and Europeans view sex. For example, a 2013 Pew poll found that 30% of US adults still think that sex between unmarried adults is morally unacceptable, but in Europe, only 6-13% of respondents thought it was unacceptable.
There are some questionable dynamics at stake in the MPAA’s movie ratings. For example, the Classification & Ratings Administration has been accused of being biased against depictions of women’s sexuality and queer sex, much more so than against heterosexual or male sexual pleasure. That bias becomes evident when comparing American and European ratings of movies depicting queer sex: For example, the critically-acclaimed 2013 movie Blue is the Warmest Color had lengthy scenes of lesbian sex between a teenager and her older lover. The film was rated NC-17 in the US, but in France, where the movie was filmed, it was rated acceptable for kids above the age of 12—the equivalent of the American PG-13–by the French National Center for Cinema and Animated Image (CNC). When a Catholic group tried to sue the Ministry of Culture for its rating, saying the movie should not be allowed for children below 16, the country’s highest administrative jurisdiction, the Conseil d’état, ruled in favor of the “12” rating, saying that “Although true that the sex scenes in question, although simulated, present a character of undeniable realism, they are both free of all violence, and filmed without degrading intent.”
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