The politics of movies' ratings

A new documentary, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, targets the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings system and its bias, following politics more than artistic values or morals.

From AfterElton.com:

This Film Is Not Yet Rated raises the question of whether a focus on gay sex affects acceptance of gay people in the United States. If images of gay sex are taboo, does that impact straight people's perceptions of gay people? Could it make straight people more uncomfortable with LGBT people?

The documentary works because it shows how the Hollywood ratings process, coupled with the commercial nature of the film industry, leads to censorship, decreases filmmakers' artistic freedom, and stifles the audience's ability to decide on their own what they think about a film.

The director speaks out:

If you show a certain kind of straight sex and you are allowed to see a certain level of nudity, but the rating system does not allow that same level of nudity with gay sex, then what you are doing is subtly suggesting to the audience that there is something wrong with showing the same amount of gay sex that you might show in a straight sex scene.
[...]
To go further, when the MPAA spokesperson, Corey Bernards, was asked why there is this bias against gay sex, her response was not to deny it but to say that 'We don't set the standards, we reflect them.' I thought this was appalling, because what if the standards were racist? Would they reflect those standards? What if the standards were anti-Semitic? Would they reflect those standards?

Basically, her response was a tacit admission that there was a homophobic bias in the rating system, and I think that is completely wrong.
[...]
I think that the MPAA and the studios benefit politically by censoring films with gay sex in them, because the MPAA is the lobbying arm of the six major studios that control 95 percent of the film business, and the rating system is a small part of what they do. Their main focus is in Washington lobbying Congress to get laws passed - particularly onerous, intellectual property laws which benefit the studios' bottom line -— sometimes to the tune of billions of dollars.

By coming down on or appearing to come down on sex, particularly gay sex, that ingratiates them with the right, which now controls Congress and allows the MPAA to get the laws through Congress that it wants. So the studios, which control the MPAA, will use any tool that they have control of to benefit the bottom line for those corporations. If it means setting up a rating system that censors gay sex, they will go ahead and do it.

Bastards.