R-Rated Movies Have Nothing Teens Haven’t Seen Before

Mon., March 2, 1998

Tammy Scholz Colfax

How many times while watching an R-rated movie have you thought to yourself “Jeez, this is kind of inappropriate for me?” Probably not very many.

Now, how many times have you stepped up to the window to buy a ticket for an R-rated movie, and they asked you for identification? Well, if it has never happened to you, you are lucky.

I like to go to the movies with my friends and it is extremely embarrassing when the ticket salesperson looks at your ID and announces, “Your friends can go to the movie, but you are too young.” The salesperson further embarasses you in an attempt to comfort you by saying, “You can go see another movie, let’s see, ‘Air Bud’ and ‘Spawn’ are rated for you.”

They are rated for me? What makes my friends any more mature than me, except for a number on their driver’s license? The people placing these restrictions don’t know me, so how do they know what I am mature enough to handle? How can they make such general assumptions about society and teenagers?

What is in these R-rated movies that makes them appropriate for a 17-year-old but not a 15- or 16-year-old?

If it is the language, you have probably heard it all before - on the playground in grade school. If it’s the sex, we are given sex education in sixth grade, and hopefully we know enough to not let the movies influence us. Nudity shouldn’t be a problem because most everyone has seen a naked body, or at least pictures of one by the time they are 15. If it is violence, it is time for the rating people to come to grips with the fact that we live in a violent world. All of the things that they don’t want us to see or hear in movies, we see on TV, on the Internet and in real life.

The problem lies not only in the system but within the movies themselves. The plot of any good movie shouldn’t depend on sex, violence and profanity to get an audience. But Hollywood certainly isn’t going to stop making movies this way. So if I want to see these movies, who is to say I can’t? I always thought that we had the freedom of choice.

Do they honestly think that until we are 17, we think that the movies are real? Are we not smart enough to to understand the difference between right and wrong?

Sadly, society may never realize that allowing a 15- or 16-year-old into an R-rated movie isn’t going to destroy the world. So, I guess until they change the rules to fit the people of this century, teenagers will just have to watch some mediocre PG-13 movie until the good movies come out on video.

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