Mature content

[Nachimir]

In relation to n0wak's comment in this thread:

(let's face it, even though they're rated M, a lot of them are quite immature)

How come "mature" content is often the most purile?

Whereas content that's actually mature (i.e. in the non-MurderDeathKillFuck sense) seems to be really, really good for kids to read/watch etc. as long as they can understand it.

[vimes]

Any teenagers likes to think he/she is mature while most adults don't care about it or shift representation by saying they are 'serious'.

So, 'mature' labels the mental representation of the world of adulthood by teenagers not the reality of mature contents.

[elmuerte]

It's a fucked up rating system. You should watch the documentary This film is not rated. Mature content doesn't mean subjects are mature or whatever, it's just that it contains gore, sex, drug, rock 'n ... er... well you know...

It's not about intelectual difficulty

[Tanukitsune]

When they say mature games, they usually mean games with objectionable content for kids, which is why the kids want them....

If they made a game full of philosophy and politics, they'd probably rate it PG, if it had no swearing of violence in it...

[brkl]

All good philosophy has swearing

[Tanukitsune]

"I think therefore I @#$%&"?

[n0wak]

How come "mature" content is often the most purile?

Whereas content that's actually mature (i.e. in the non-MurderDeathKillFuck sense) seems to be really, really good for kids to read/watch etc. as long as they can understand it.

I was mostly talking more about the "M" for "Mature" label, which is as big a misnomer as anything when you take into account the content of most M rated games.

Obviously, with the film industry it isn't such an issue. You can have an R rated movie, with sex and drugs and violence, that tackles the issues in a very adult, mature way. In such a way that despite the sex and violence, it would really have no appeal to 14 year olds anyway (thinks of the scene where Bart and friends sneak into a screening of "Naked Lunch").

But the game industry doesn't really have any such M rated content at all. It's all gun fantasies and ridiculous cleavage and, in the end, it stays puerile and immature.

[brkl]

It's more of a "You have to be mature in order to be able to watch this" than "This content is mature" label.

[Nachimir]

(Edit: Sorry, this is going to be long and full of questions. Rattling off hundreds of words about this is helping me to figure out a lot, but I'm really interested to read more of anyone's thoughts on the subject. And hey, if you read this you get to learn weird former secrets about me ).

It's more of a "You have to be mature in order to be able to watch this" than "This content is mature" label.

Thanks for putting it so succinctly. I understand it, but I'm really interested as to why it's the case.

Sometimes, the depiction of a disturbing event is grotesque and gratuitous, sometimes it's incredibly thought provoking.

Nowadays I have a mind that can easily deal with just about anything, such as cuuuunt, in the sense that it's almost impossible to make me squeamish or repelled.

I have quite a few friends who are similar. Absolutely nothing is off limits in conversation, we're all incredibly open about sex, bodily functions, and so on, and a black sense of humour is something common to us all. Many of these people have either suffered a lot, experienced massive culture shock, or been party to both.

I don't take joy in suffering, and deal with things philosophically unless they're actually happening around me.

A big part of this is recognising the boundary between reality and fiction, and "not being able to distinguish between the two" is something I've heard a lot in discussions of why children need to be protected from certain content. However, I'm not sure I buy it for any kid over the age of 10. I and a lot of kids I knew never had any trouble with this, though one, whose parents let him watch whatever films he wanted from the age of 5, gravitated toward violence and gore and had become very obsessed with them by the time he was around 12. He never confused the films he watched with real events or possibilities, but the content of them certainly had a major effect on his interests and motivations, to such an extent that he could watch Terminator 2, pick up on none of the plot, and focus entirely on a connection in his own head between "violence" and "COOL!".

So is it to do with the formation of personality?

A whole load of people I know at all adult ages are still unable to deal with a lot of stuff. They can't watch or play it in media (Girl grown woman in the legal sense, sitting on sofa at a friend's house while I played Manhunt for the first time a few weeks ago and made a kill: "Oh fucking hell!" *leaves room*), and if anything similar happens around them they edit it out of their reality (Case in point: An 8 year old boy raped a 5 year old girl in a housing estate less than 30 miles from where I grew up. It never went to the police. A lot of people in the area couldn't believe it happened and ignored it. Another: Things that were absolutely bad (in the sense that wider culture universally reviles them), and subjectively bad (breaking of specific community principles that are no biggie to the world at large) happened in the community I grew up in, and in either case a whole lot of people would just pretend it wasn't happening).

It's experience and observation of consequence that tells me what is okay and what is not okay, which equals a lot of contextual knowledge. I suspect having a context wide enough to absorb and understand certain fictitous events is crucial in being able to deal with them, but I'm curious: Has anyone actually documented the effects that disturbing media has on people not mature enough to deal with it? How much of censorship is pragmatic, and how much of it is a sacred cow?

Also, I find that I absorb disturbing media not because it is entertainment (films like Saw and Hostel disgust me), but because it's thought provoking, at first beyond me, and the act of consuming it expands me. Is there a clear line that's crossed beyond which this becomes possible? If so, I have little idea when I crossed it, because I was raised in a cult and until my late teens reflexively turned away from anything like that under the belief that it would cause demons to infest my mind (Luckily, a great big dose of humanist science fiction and sincere friendship brought me back from jesus lala land in my late teens).

Looking back, the way members of that cult deal with media is incredibly immature in itself, in that they won't watch 15 and 18 rated films. As a result, it's a culture of people who are completely unequipped to deal with any kind of disturbing events and much else besides. Their sexuality is so locked down that many of them have incredibly unhappy marriages, lived out wearing super-fortified, commandment infested pants. The first porn film I saw in my early teens (would've got me booted out if they'd ever found out), coupled with their utter prudishness, led me to believe male sexuality was inherently dominant and abusive for a few years. That really messed with me, but a decade or so later with wider experience, I could watch that kind of thing and just know that it was rubbish porno. Many men the same age still in the cult would probably be unable to make that distinction.

Where's the tipping point? How does a piece of media flip from enabling people to understand a type of event to fomenting it?

It might be said that I was "too young" to watch that porn when I first did, but I disagree. I was old enough to understand the mechanics of sex, was pubescent, and curious enough to seek something out about it. What I lacked was a family and culture that adequately enabled me to understand what I saw.

I suspect that genuinely mature content has a lot of context built in to it, whereas "You have to be mature in order to be able to watch this" type content does not. Is that immoral in any way, or just amoral?