No naked man today.

Many fervent and loyal blog readers will know Robert Benton.
He is the film director who made in 1979 the famous film “Kramer vs. Kramer”.
It won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Now, Robert Benton has made a new film called “Feast of Love”.
An adaptation of the novel by author Charles Baxter.

Recently Robert Benton had an interview on National Public Radio with Bob Edwards because of the release of his new film.

Benton explained how he was limited in his artistic expression by a system existing in the USA called the film rating.
Every film maker who wants to present his film in American movie theatres need to have his film rated by the rating board of the Classification and Rating Administration (“CARA”).
CARA attempts to select a diverse group of raters who represent the diversity of American parents such as parents from different parts of the country, including small towns and big cities.
Each member of the rating board is a parent and has no affiliation with the entertainment industry outside their employment with CARA.
There are 10-13 members of the Board who serve for periods of varying length.
They work for this Classification and Rating Administration, which is funded by fees charged to producers/distributors for the rating of their films.

There are 5 ratings possible: G, PG, PG-13, R, and, NC-17.
Issues like violence and nudity play an important role in deciding the rating.

For filmmakers the rating they get for their film is very important.
It decides to how large an audience they can present their film.
And hence have it commercially successful.

The complain of Robert Benton is that female frontal nudity is not a big issue for the Rating Board.
A film with frontal female nudity could get a PG-13 rating, reach a wide audience and therefore get a chance to make money.
But as soon as there is male frontal nudity in a film, the Rating Board will give the film an R or even the feared NC-17 and condemn the film to a marginal marketing and distribution and hence little chance to make money.

Jim McBride who runs a website called www.mr.skin.com that chronicles nude scenes in films, notes that full-frontal male nude scenes pop up only every few years.
And most of those films are rated R or NC-17 and are limited to art-house releases.

This is why no film director in his right mind will have frontal male nudity in his or her film in case that director wants to reach a large audience and be commercially successful.
Frontal female nudity yes, but male frontal nudity a big no.

By itself it is a scaring situation that a film maker’s creative liberty and freedom of expression is decided by opinions about nudity of 13 average Americans all of them parents.

We may wonder why there is such a discrepancy between accepting female frontal nudity and banning male frontal nudity.

Mark Kingwell, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, says:
“As a society, North America has more hang-ups about male nudity than female, and censorship and/or regulatory strictures tend to reflect that.”
“In other words, a film is much more likely to get a severe rating in the U.S. if male frontal nudity is depicted.
This explains why big-budget mainstream films tend to shy away from male frontal nudity”.

Originally it was planned to illustrate this posting with a picture showing frontal male nudity.
To demonstrate a lack of hang-up concerning frontal male nudity.
And to enforce equality between men and women.
Right here, on this posting, because in the end, Blogger informs us that:

“Blogger is a free service for communication, self-expression and freedom of speech.
We believe Blogger increases the availability of information, encourages healthy debate, and makes possible new connections between people.
We respect our users' ownership of and responsibility for the content they choose to share.
It is our belief that censoring this content is contrary to a service that bases itself on freedom of expression”.

But how re-assuring this may sound, Blogger also says:

“Pornography and Obscenity: Image and video content that contains nudity, sexually graphic material, or material that is otherwise deemed explicit by Google should be made private. Otherwise, we may put such content behind an interstitial.”

This puts every blogger in the same situation as Robert Benton.
One picture of a naked man and probably the fervent and blog reader has here no more postings to enjoy.








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