'Male Nudity' Scares MPAA

Watch a trailer for Jackass 3D, and you might notice that it’s rated R for, among other things, “male nudity.” This struck Brian Patrick Thornton of Jezebel as odd—why specify that it was men who were naked? He did a quick scan through the past five years of ratings and found that while 768 had been flagged for “nudity,” only three had been flagged for “male nudity,” and all were released this year.

So Thornton asked the MPAA about it, and was told that parents had requested the “male nudity” tag after Brüno. A mere nudity rating there hadn’t been enough—“Moms and dads needed to know that naked, scary men would be scarring their kids forever,” Thornton quips. This is at once sexist and homophobic. Apparently in Hollywood, female nudity is pleasing, but male nudity is somehow predatory. Just how far are we from seeing an outright warning against homosexual content? “In the classifications of slopes, that’s a very slippery one, indeed.” (More homophobia stories.)