It's called ratings creep apparently

Since responding to Miranda Devine's recent article Censors fail to give the true picture, there has been some fantastic other blog responses and commentaries on her sweeping generalisations about censorship and The History Boys rating in Australia.

Central to my response is the belief that there is a real danger in "the push of mass media commentators like Devine using examples like those of her friends to inflict us all with a nanny like commentary on who should make judgements on what literature we wish to engage with."

To go back to the origins, The History Boys was rated M - recommended for mature audiences over the age of 15. A couple of Devine's friends ignored the rating and took their pre-teen children to see the movie and outrage ensued.

Marcellous at Stumbling on Melons does a beautiful deconstruction of the film in light of Devine's generalisations, saying "it is clear that Miranda does object to the film, even if only at second-hand. And a pre-requisite to objecting to the film would be to understand the film, which nobody could do on Miranda's account of it." Same Same gives some nice insights, and the comments section has a small but interesting debate.

Nevertheless, Devine has the Office of Film & Literature in her sights, and like a bull to a red flag is going hard-core in attempting to get more censorship and tighter restrictions on what we see. And what she wants is a review for the Office and a review of the current ratings system.

Her first follow-up piece was last Sunday, with Parents, victims join call for film rating review, and then again in today's Herald is the opinion piece Ratings burn on bonfire of profanities.

I am not going to be the first to do so, but be warned of this woman. She is on a war path to introduce greater controls and more censorship into our community. In Sunday's recent piece she has advocated an age based ratings system similar to New Zealand's - R13, R15, R16, R18. Marcellous has a great follow up piece which deals excellently with her proposal, saying, "Do we want such a censorship system to meet the desires of parents who want the state to ensure that their children, and other people's children, are prohibited from seeing things which they don't like?"

Central to this entire issue is the importance of individual responsibility in filtering what we want to watch as opposed to the danger of applying someone else's judgements on what we can and can't. And from what I know of her, I really don't want Devine's standards of sensationalism placed on what I or what my children may or may not consume. It appears that the only censorship we should be advocating for is a healthy dose of self-censorship, don't you reckon?


Image: Dan Kozen at financialcryptography.com