Bioethics, healthcare policy, and related issues.
Mingle2 – a blog that links a lot of quizzes, surveys, and other online game-type-stuff, offers this nifty service: What’s My Blog Rated? Enter the URL of your blog, journal or other Web site, and it gives you an MPAA-style rating of its content.
I’m delighted to report Sufficient Scruples received the following:
Why, however?
This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:
- sex (17x)
- abortion (14x)
- breast (6x)
- death (3x)
- drugs (2x)
- gay (1x)
Ah, yes. The old “dirty words census” protocol. Some anginal panty-sniffer with a clipboard checking off all the naughty words – predictably, mostly related to sex – that send his blood-pressure up gets to determine whether your interests – and your audience’s – are worthy or not. In this case, it’s obviously done with a script, which I guess is not as bad as that “CapAlert” clown crouching in the back of movie theaters obsessing over “the foulest of foul words” and “female body parts ghosting through clothing”. I gather this site is intended ironically, also. But even so, it functions as a kind of childish dirty joke – that is, that there could be such a rating system, and that it could function on a mere count of perfectly ordinary words like “sex”, “abortion”, “breast”, or “death”, and not be nonsensical or unrecognizable as a rating system, is a measure of how immature we still are as a society. We have allowed self-appointed evangelical Beavises & Buttheads to censor our airwaves, Super Bowl Halftime Shows, and now blogs (“It says ‘breast’, huhuhuh!” “NC-17!!!1!”). Mature people don’t let themselves to have their tastes dictated or censored by immature children.
From any reasonable perspective, rating Web sites on how often they use the words “sex” or “gay” makes as much sense as rating them on how often they use bold-face fonts, or adverbs – the idea that ordinary elements of language could be dangerous in themselves is comprehensible only in a world in which the crazies who have made certain elements of language objectionable are taken seriously. That world is long past its freshness date.
Hat Tip:: Echidne of the Snakes, and several others.
3 Responses to “Ghosting Through Your Monitor”
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June 24th, 2007 at 7:10 PM
Are you calling the blog rater or CAP Reports a joke? I’m almont certain that CAP is 100% serious. (By the way, look up his review of Dogma.)
Also it’s not “a measure of how immature we still are as a society“. There’s no “we” about it. I think the majority of people, adults and minors, realize how infantile this is and happily ignore the MPAA ratings.
Finally, isn’t it interesting that “gay” is in with the rest of these words?
June 24th, 2007 at 7:41 PM
CapAlert is certainly serious. The guy’s amazing. I do think the blog rating site, by contrast, is intended as more an amusement than a serious rating system.
My point is that the fact that it exists at all – even in that silly guise – tells us something about our society (i.e., that we still believe in “dirty words”, and that the use of sex-related words, or references to gays, is inherently worth noting or questioning). For instance, if there were a “Victorian decency rating” service that rated blogs by whether or not the legs of pianos were visible in them, it would just be incomprehensible – it would be at best an irony so deep most people wouldn’t even get the joke. We’re so far beyond being so easily offended by “bare limbs” that we feel we need to cover furniture legs* that it just doesn’t even make sense any more to talk about that. But today, still, everybody understands that “breast” is a “dirty word” to feverish wankers like anti-sex evangelicals. We’ve gotten to the point that most people don’t think like that, but not far enough that it isn’t still a salient part of our public discourse – or that the minority who are still so screwed up don’t have the political power to impose $500,000 fines for the momentary glimpse of a nipple.
* Yes, apparently even the Victorians didn’t really go quite this far. But you get my point.
June 24th, 2007 at 9:15 PM
I stumbled across CAP years ago and it completely fascinated me as I tried to figure out if it was serious. Terrifying that it is. In its limited defense, it claims to be rating movies for their appropriateness for children (for some definition). Clearly, it’s bullshit to claim that depicting, say, disobedience by children (a favorite of CAP) to have very bad consequences is just as damaging as depicting the same misbehavior as having good consequences. But it does seem a priori plausible that there are some things that it’s best to not even expose children to. Maybe drug abuse, for example. Would you happen to have any real research data on how developing children are affected by even negative depictions of (for lack of a better term) “adult” material? To me, this seems like a factual matter of developmental psychology: We can empirically see whether such things do harm (for various definitions of harm).