Revisiting 'This Film is Not Yet Rated" and MPAA ratings board

The topic of the MPAA is one that seems to draw controversial responses no matter who you are asking. No one seems satisfied. No one seems to trust the decisions of these mysterious judges of the morality of film. Through out the articles we read, watching This Film is Not Yet Rated, and our class discussion, it seems like there will never be an answer that every single person will agree on when it comes to the way films are rated.
The good thing about the MPAA is that it keeps the government out of the film industry. This is a great thing in my opinion. I, for one, do not want the government controlling the films I see, or if I ever make a film, passing judgment on it. Perhaps this is due to my personal distrust of the government, but I think that feeling transcends to a lot of people in this generation. The flip side of this argument however is, who does this leave in charge? It would appear, through Kirby Dick's film, that it leaves this decision making up to prominent studio heads, religious affiliates and a few random people off of the street, and they are anonymous (well, they are supposed to be anyway). To me, this system seems to be just as -if not more scary than government control because this way, no one really has any say. Only some mysterious elite has any ability to say who is judging our films. At least in a government run rating board, there would potentially be the ability for citizens to vote for who they wanted to be judging films. In a perfect world anyway, democracy would be a fairer alternative to what is happening now. Personally, I don't want a government-affiliated board to replace the MPAA, but there definitely needs to be a more honest, open and possibly democratic way of deciding who is going to be in charge of making these important decisions.
The next topic that comes to my mind immediately when thinking about the movie ratings system, is television. T.V. is probably the form of media most accessible to children, who are supposedly the audience that the MPAA is trying to protect. No one is making you show your I.D. to watch rated R movie on your T.V. at home. I guess the rational is that a parent should be around somewhere when their kids are watching the old tube at home, and would be able to flip off an inappropriate program as soon as it started. But, obviously, this is not really the case. In today's society, everyone's parents work. When someone says they had a stay at home parent that is mostly an exception, not common. Kids are left at home with the T.V. the internet, etc, and they can watch almost anything they want. They could just Google an NC-17 movie and watch in some cases. My point is, why hasn't there been a huge uprising to censor T.V. and the internet, and all of the other media outlets in the world from corrupting the innocent minds of our nation's children? Parents aren't crying out for help to know what television shows are suitable for their kids. They aren't begging for a guide to explain what websites are appropriate. That is because these media outlets are much harder to control. Film is controllable. Filmmakers depend on the MPAA so that they can get distribution- to get a suitable rating so that people can see their film. And who controls the MPAA? Well, it would appear that it is motion picture studio heads, who are entirely more willing to help out a movie that they are distributing than some indie film by a director they've never heard of that has some homosexual sex scenes and a few cuss words. It just seems idiotic to me that there is this mysterious process that judges whether a film is suitable for different audiences, when there are ridiculously explicit T.V. shows available to all audiences at the click of a button in your own living room. It makes no logical sense.
The final topic that is still bouncing around in my head after all of our reading, watching, and discussing, is that of sexuality shown in movies. I may be beating a dead horse here, but it is just so ridiculous that homosexual movies are rated so much more harshly than heterosexual movies (not that they have to be one or the other). It's just so stupid, can't we get over it already? I feel like, if you don't want to watch a movie that has homosexual sex scenes in it, fine. You shouldn't. But they should be rated the exact same way that a heterosexual sex scene would. Also the infuriating fact that films showing a woman's sexual experience are almost always rated worse than ones with a man's. It just shows a major flaw in the judging process of the MPAA. There is no logical reason why these films are rated worse, other than it made that particular MPAA rater feel a little funny. There should be some sort of guideline in rating a film for its sexual content rather than how it made that random viewer feel. We don't know that person's background and prejudices, and it's not fair that opinion alone is what determines what rating, and ultimately what sort of distribution a film will get.
Although there is no clear answer about what should be done about the MPAA, or how it should be run, I think there is a general consensus that the system needs to be changed. There needs to be no secrecy, and a fair way of judging a film for its content. Because yes, parents do use the guides to help determine what's appropriate for their kids, and no, some people do not want to watch people get it on or do hardcore drugs, so ratings are important. Ratings are helpful, and necessary, there just needs to be a new way of going about it.