Why Censorship Is Both Stupid And Good

My favourite late night talk show is Jimmy Kimmel Live, probably because Kimmel is the least wholesome of the major late night hosts.  He demonstrates this fact once every week in a segment called “This Week in Unnecessary Censorship.” 

In the segment, which Kimmel mockingly refers to as his “tribute to the FCC,”  the show’s producers splice together innocuous clips from that week’s television shows and they insert strategically timed beeps to create the illusion that the people on screen have said a dirty word.

The bit works because, not only are we all familiar with those forbidden words, but we associate the censor’s beep with vulgarity so that upon hearing the beep, our minds insert swear words even when there aren’t any.  The whole exercise poignantly calls into question the usefulness of the entire censorship project.  As the 2005 documentary Fuck points out, the banning of certain words is usually arbitrary since most banned words have no inherent harmfulness apart from the fact that a cabal of (mostly religious) prudes have decided that these words are unsuitable for public broadcasts.  These include words like “fuck”, “shit” and “cock”.  Meanwhile, many words that are extremely hurtful to historically marginalized groups, words like bitch, retard and coon, are routinely uttered on daytime television.

As it turns out, censorship in the film industry is no better.  The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the creator and purveyor of the most widely recognized film rating system in America (i.e. G, PG, R, etc) uses a secretive and arbitrary system for rating films that is heavily influenced by special interests and large corporations.  While films aren’t required to be submitted for rating by the MPAA, most filmmakers submit to the process in order to gain access to a larger viewing audience.  Films with more restrictive ratings such a R or NC-17 (no children under 17 - the worst rating possible, besides X) lose access to a large market and therefore the objective is to push for the most general rating possible given the content of the film.

The MPAA was created by the major Hollywood studios to serve their own economic interests, and therefore it privileges films that are produced by those corporations over independent films.  This means that an independent film that receives an NC-17 rating may only get an R rating if it were backed by a big studio.  Furthermore, in the case of the big studio films, the members of the MPAA will suggest specific modifications required to get a better rating.  Not only is this de facto censorship of the content of films, but this system unfairly penalizes smaller filmmakers, further proliferating the corporate hegemony and watering down the entire industry.

The 2006 documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated is a no-holds-barred indictment of the MPAA and it provides a stunning exposé on the film rating process.  The revelation that I found most disturbing - although not at all surprising – was the extent to which the socially conservative political agenda dictates the board’s ratings.  It was observed that female sexual pleasure was far more frowned upon than that of males.  This meant that scenes involving male masturbation or male orgasms were more likely to avoid the NC-17 rating than films with comparable depictions of female masturbation and orgasm.  Also, gay sex acts almost automatically earned an NC-17 rating while similar acts performed by male-female pairs only warranted an R rating, even in cases where the portrayal of the straight sex act was much more graphic.  Perhaps this trend is partially explained by another one of the documentary’s revelations...

In addition to the rating boards, the MPAA has a separate board for handling the appeals of filmmakers who wish to challenge their film’s rating.  Although the MPAA tried desparately to keep this fact secret, it was revealed in the documentary that the appeals board has two spots permanently reserved for members of the clergy, one Catholic and one Protestant.  Both get to vote on the appeal.

In addition to the infiltration of discriminatory, religious doctrines, many of the board’s criteria, which are ostensibly designed to protect the minds of innocent children, often have the opposite effect.  For example, safe sex between individuals in loving relationships routinely garners stricter ratings than gratuitous violence.  What’s worse, violence that is treated lightly or cartoonishly gets better ratings than more realistic scenes where viewers are forced to confront the painful consequences of violent acts.

The dogmatic, religious ideologues guiding morality-policing ventures such as film and television censorship are no strangers to turning sound reasoning on its head.  Indeed, the logical inconsistencies of the censoring bodies are obvious to anyone who cares to look.  However this isn’t their biggest blunder.  The true essence of their stupidity lies in the ineffectiveness of their campaign. 

As Jimmy Kimmel has astutely recognized, there isn’t a 10-year-old in the entire English-speaking world who hasn’t heard the word “fuck” or who doesn’t know what it means.  Moreover, with a PC and internet access in most homes and almost every school library, 12-year-old boys can easily access images infinitely more depraved than those left on the film studio’s cutting room floor.

The only thing the conservative sensors have managed to conserve is the power of the language and images they seek to suppress.  The more the censors push back on the use of words like “fuck” the more powerful the word becomes.  The more they try to shield us from images of breasts and genitalia, the more explicit the depictions of these body parts will get, as artists attempt to resist being silenced.  The more they outlaw portrayal of gay sex acts, the greater the political caché these acts will carry and the longer they will retain they’re status as a symbol of resistance.

For all these reasons I’ve come around to the opinion that censorship, while usually quite stupid, is often a good thing.