Jack Valenti's Dead

As evidenced by the title of this post, I refuse to let death turn me into a hypocrite. Especially not someone else's.

Jack Valenti brought censorship to the mainstream. While the ratings system he pioneered through the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) undoubtedly made it clearer what sort of content one could expect on the way in to the multiplex, it did so in a reductive way, by edict of a committee whose decisions were anything but transparent. As well, the process by which those ratings were assigned was fraught with corruption.

The MPAA's handling of sexual content versus violent content was responsible for two decades of continued homophobia in Hollywood. In that time, any depiction of two men kissing would earn an automatic R, whereas you could shoot the two men and still have a PG.