Rating system expansion

Ratings on the content of movies, TV programs and video games are generally a useful thing: they give parents a little bit of information about whether the content is appropriate for their children. Notification about the violence content of a movie is useful to parents. Knowing ahead of time that a movie contains graphic depictions of sex with donkeys, likewise.

If we see a movie labeled "PG-13", that means there is some content which some person on a "ratings board" somewhere thinks would be unsuitable for children under 13. Most of the time, that means the people in the movie say "shit" once or twice, there's a brief flash of breasts, or lots of people are violently assaulted and/or die gruesomely. Similarly, if a TV show is labeled "TV-Y", you know you can skip it while looking for whacking material.

However, there's one problem. The ratings only give information about a very narrow range of subject matters, namely "sex", "violence", and "language".

What if, as a parent, I'm more concerned about other things? What if I don't care if my child sees naked breasts, but instead feel there's more damaging content which should be on the warning label?

I'm sure there's plenty of other parents who feel the same; therefore, I propose the following list of extended content ratings: