wallwalker: Venetian mask, dark purple with gold gilding. (Default)
wallwalker ([personal profile] wallwalker) wrote in [community profile] personalapocalypse2011-12-14 07:37 am
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Meta Month 11: Interesting link on MPAA ratings in fandom

Link you might be interested in: Why MPAA Age Ratings In Fandom Suck: A Primer. (There are a couple of really interesting links within that post as well, in the first paragraph.)

I had known that MPAA ratings were controversial, and I still remember the outcry when ff.net decided to switch away from them for copyright reasons. But I had never really looked at their requirements or their politics. It's not surprising, but it's saddening all the same.

I had always known that they treated male and female sexuality unequally, and I had definitely noticed that male and female nudity was treated very differently. But I had never realized that a sex scene that shows a woman being coerced into sex, or otherwise giving only dubious consent at best, often finds it easier to get a lower rating than that of a woman actually enjoying herself and whole-heartedly consenting to sex! Is that really a message we should be sending to kids, of either gender? That it's okay as long as you make her do it/someone makes you do it?

Still, it's the system that a lot of people have grown used to, and I can say, it's hard to get used to something else. I like the system that [personal profile] thene suggests in its place, though the one change I'd make is to separate the SFW tags as well. SFW covers a lot of ground, and it would be good to at least have a way to differentiate between, say, angst and happy fluff. Although a separate "Genre" tag might work better for those purposes.

(On another note, people can still read outside internet stuff at work? I know my workplace has never allowed it. Everything's blocked.)

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