Most movies are rated R, so let's just blame that for everything wrong with society
According to Variety, the Motion Picture Association Of America is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its film ratings system by releasing some fun information about the history of its ratings, how the ratings are determined, and how useful the general public believes the ratings to be. As it turns out, nearly 30,000 movies have been rated since 1968, fewer than one percent of movies have had their ratings overturned after an appeal, and that nearly everybody thinks that the ratings are at least “somewhat” helpful. (It’s not like the MPAA would tell anybody if its ratings were wildly unpopular.)
As fun as that stuff is, and we’re certainly having a blast here, the more interesting part of the MPAA’s data is that 17,202 of the 30,000 movies have been rated R. That means more than half of all movies that come out with an MPAA rating are rated R, which is probably why our modern society is so violent and sexy. We’d all probably be saintly puritans if not for the corrupting influence of the adult situations in these 17,202 movies, and maybe we’d even be able to hold ourselves to a single use of the word “fuck”—as is allowed in a PG-13 movie—instead of the rampant “fuck” use we picked up from these fucking R-rated movies.
At least we can take solace in the fact that there have only been 524 movies rated X and NC-17 in the history of the MPAA’s rating system, so we’re not totally fucked up just yet.