What led to PG13 movies being allowed to say the F-word once?

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What led to PG13 movies being allowed to say the F-word once?

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18 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s a partly a myth.

>Profanity may be present in PG rated films, and use of one of the harsher “sexually-derived words” as an expletive will initially incur at least a PG-13 rating. **Multiple occurrences will usually incur an R rating as will the usage of such an expletive in a sexual context. Nevertheless, the ratings board may still award a PG-13 rating passed by a two-thirds majority if they believe the language is justified by the context or by the manner in which the words are used.**

>**There are several exceptional cases in which PG-13-rated films contain multiple occurrences of the word fuck:** Adventures in Babysitting, where the word is used twice in the same scene;The Hip Hop Project, which has seventeen uses; and Gunner Palace, a documentary of soldiers in the Second Gulf War, which has 42 uses of the word with two used sexually. Both Bully, a 2011 documentary about bullying, and Philomena—which has two instances of the word—released in 2013, were originally given R ratings on grounds of the language but the ratings were dropped to PG-13 after successful appeals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Association_film_rating_system

Anonymous 0 Comments

Its a fairly arbitrarty system with the “rules” being loosely interpreted things the mpaa can interpret at will.

Watch the documentary “this film is not yet rated” to get a great understanding of how it works

Edit thanks u/lennybird

Anonymous 0 Comments

Won’t anyone think of the children????! It makes no sense so don’t think too deeply into the rules. It’s just Karen’s bugging people and the industry doesn’t want more regulation so they made shit up to appease the bob cuts.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Do you know how the PG13 rating came about??? Gremlins and Indians Jones; neither one should have been a PG movie.

“Offensive” language is only offensive to adults, but gore, violence, murder is HARMFUL to children.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s not just one F word though. The F word can’t be referring to actual sex and it can’t be calling someone fucker or something. It has to be an abstract use of the word. Like fuck that or I just stubbed my fucking toe. And there are no hardline rules or guidelines. It’s a really stupid system with loose guidelines open for interpretation. And the MPAA is pretty secretive about the whole process. They get a random group of anonymous people to screen a movie and give it a rating. It’s part of the reason, but not the only reason, that I don’t consider a movies rating when I watch movies with my kids.

Anonymous 0 Comments

On the flip side, why are there movies where it seems that it’s required to have an f-bomb written in every other sentence in the script? Looking at you, The Suicide Squad?

Anonymous 0 Comments

One of the interviews with Samuel L. Jackson for 1408 was pretty great. They asked him what it was like being in a PG-13 movie where he can’t swear like he does in his other movies.

He said, “You only get one”fuck” in a PG-13 movie, and I got that motherfucker!”

Anonymous 0 Comments

PG-13 being invented in the first place is what led to this. They tried to find a middle between R (which before usually meant that there was cursing and nudity) and PG where it was just “hey parents, this movie doesn’t show boobs but can be scary so know what you’re taking your kids to see” (Jaws and Poltergeist are rated PG, for example).

Then they decided to say there should be a happy medium when Temple of Doom and Gremlins came out in the 80s. And when they did that, suddenly a LOT of movies were motivated to be rated PG-13 so they could appeal to a more general audience. Since the “rules” were/are still being figured out, the MPAA has just arbitrarily decided on the one F-word rule.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Titanic.

The scene where Bill Paxton’s friend with the beard elaborates how the ship broke in half and says something along the lines of “it’s whole fucking ass is sticking up.”