Rating

So, I found a website that rates my blog as if it were a movie:

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:
* crap (3x)
* dead (2x)
* gun (1x)

Crap? They rate me PG-13 because I used the word crap a few times? And dead? And the word gun once?

What about the two times I used the word fuck and one use of the word asshat? Doesn't that set off your little censorship flags? (and that's in only the front page. The site doesn't spider the site to find the many other uses of those words.) Clearly, this website is as accurate in rating websites as the MPAA is at rating movies. And the only good thing about it is that this website at least tells you why they are rating your website the way that they are (even though the methodology is flawed). This is unlike the MPAA which is a secret organization that does not allow it's methods to be released and, according to "This Film Is Not Yet Rated", does not actually have any standards. Just a bunch of conservatives who watch a film and arbitrarily decide on a rating.

And if you look at the ratings and the movies attached to them, the MPAA loves violence but hates sex (especially gay sex). Many terribly violent and disturbing movies get themselves an R rating but any movie that dares to even show human genitals is going to get the dreaded NC-17 rating.

Ratings for movies, TV and video games are valuable, if they use standards that are understandable or, at the very least, public. If you know how a decision was made then you can make your own decision about whether your kids should be exposed to it. But, when the process is hidden (or in the case of this website, inherently flawed) then the rating is useless. In fact, it's worse than useless, it's prejudicial and discriminatory.