Of Letters and Lists: How the MPAA Puts Films Recommended for LGBTQ Adolescents Out of Reach

ABSTRACT

The film ratings system employed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been criticized by LGBTQ critics who claim the system discriminates by holding queer content to a higher ratings standard than content in other films. The MPAA argues the constituency for its ratings system is parents in traditional families who may find queer themes inappropriate for their children. Paradoxically, a number of organizations serving adolescents identifying as LGBTQ or as questioning their sexualities have created lists of recommended films, many of whose MPAA ratings make them virtually off-limits to teens unless their parents approve. Cyberspace is also populated with lists of films recommended for teens regardless of their sexuality and gender identity. This article compares ratings distributions for lists of films recommended for queer teens and those recommended for mainstream teens and finds evidence of negative impact on access by queer teens to potentially helpful film content.

KEYWORDS:

• Hollywood
• movie studios
• MPAA
• CARA
• teen
• adolescent
• film
• ratings

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. There is some controversy in the application of the chi-squared statistic as a measure of independence when cell frequencies are less than 5. The issue was one of nine raised by Lewis and Burke (1949), and led to much discussion in the scholarly literature that included endorsements of their limit, proposals for other limits, and other options. But in his reassessment of Lewis and Burke some 34 years later, Delucchi (1983) concluded, “as a general rule, the chi-square statistic may be properly used in cases where the expected values are much lower than previously considered permissible. In the presence of small expected values, the statistic is quite robust with respect to controlling Type I error rate, especially under the following conditions: (a) the total N is at least five times the number of cells, (b) the average expected value is five or more, (c) the expected values tend toward homogeneity, and (d) the distribution of the margins is not skewed” (p. 168).