Letter to John McCain

Dear Senator McCain:

Although I currently do not reside in the state of Arizona, my family lives in Green Valley, I went to high school at Sahuarita High School and I will be moving to Phoenix upon my graduation from Brigham Young University this summer.  I am currently student in the School of Family Life at BYU.  My emphasis is Human Development.  This semester I participated in a class on Media and the Family.  Through the course of the class, many issues were presented raging from violent video games to sexualized advertisements to the miss representation of women in the media .  One of the issues that I believe is of extreme importance for the families of Arizona are the current rating systems.  I am writing this letter to express my concern for the current rating systems and to encourage you, as a United States Senator, to help modify the system.

The purpose of movie, video game and television ratings is to provide information on media content to parents that will allow them to make informed decisions about the media that their children use.  A rating system should also help parents protect their children from inappropriate content.  I am concerned that the current rating systems do not accomplish these goals. 

Currently movies, video games and television shows are rated differently.  In addition, the  people giving the ratings to different forms of media are not consistent.   Television programs are rated by the networks, movies are rated by the MPAA and video games are rated by the ESRB.  The lack of continuity is concerning.    It is difficult to understand what the different rating systems mean.  The parents of Arizona and the US as a whole are busy and many (more than 50%) do not use the rating system at all.  I believe that the rating system would be more widely used by parents if there was one uniform rating system, instead of our multiple confusing systems. 

Our current rating systems are age based.  For example, PG-13 ratings should indicate to parents that they should be cautious in allowing their children to view the movie, especially pre-teen children.   Unfortunately, these age based ratings have several problems.  First, they provide a forbidden fruit of sort for children.  Second, many parents do not agree with the ratings that movies are given.  Third, the rating system creeps, when I was a child the F-word was not allowed in a PG-13 movie, now a movie can have up to four uses of the F-word and still be given a PG-13 rating!  Finally, the current rating system does not account for what science has discovered about harmful media.  For example, there is a multiplicity of research indicating that violent media causes increased aggression.  But, the current rating system does not reflect that.

I have presented two problems with the current rating system, first that they are not consistent between different forms of media and second that the aged based system does not work.  I believe that a uniform, content-based rating system would better serve the parents of Arizona and the United States in general.   Instead of PG-13 movies and  T for teen games and TV-Y7 television shows parents need and want to know, if the move, game or TV show has violence, sexuality,  or swearing.  Having a uniform system will decrease the complexity of monitoring media.  Having a content based system will help parents evaluate media more intelligently to make informed decisions about the media use of their children.

As a future Arizona parent, I want our nation to have a rating system that will help me protect my children from content that is inappropriate and be able to help my children select media that is age appropriate.  With a new rating system, that is uniform across media types and content based, Arizona parents will be able to evaluate the movies, video games and television programs that their children watch and make informed decisions about what to allow.  This will only improve the lives of American children and thus improve the future of our country.   

Sincerely,

Bethany A. N. Cline

Brigham Young University Student

Captain America... didn't love it

Last night my husband and I went to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier at the Scera Theater (which is my favorite movie theater in town).  I was expecting the movie to have violence, I mean isn't that what super hero's do... use violence to stop bad guys?  But I was not expecting the magnitude of violence!  There was just so much!

When we got home I asked my husband if I was being over sensitive or if he also thought there was more violence than in any of the other Marvel Avengers movies.  He agreed that there was more, a lot more.  I was especially disturbed/disappointed that there was so much violence in addition to blatant disregard for innocent human life.  But what saddened me the most was how many children there were in the theater who were well below the age of 13, and who were having their minds filled with 2 hours of incredibly violent content.

This trailer does not even come close to depicting the amount of violence that was actually in the film.  I am a HUGE movie lover, and I like almost every movie that I see, but I am not sure that I could profess to liking the new Captain America movie.

Nothing to Post About...

This week has been crazy with the research paper we had due in Media class and I had another one due in Dr. Coyne's socialization class.  Since I have been so busy I feel like I have not used media as much as I normally do.  I thought it would be fun to go back through my week and see how much media I use, even in a busy and seemingly media free week.

1. I read my scriptures on my kindle... so reading a book and using an electronic device
2. I listened to music on Pandora both on my TV and on my computer
3. I watched about 20 minutes of TV each day as a break from homework.

After I finished by big papers, my media habits returned to a more normal routine.

1. I read scriptures on my kindle.
2. I listened to music on Pandora, both on the TV and computer.
3. I watched about an hour or two of TV each day as a break or background noise.
4. I started a new book, well an old new book (I am reading the 3rd Hunger Games, Mocking Jay, for the 2nd time).
5. I used Pinterest twice so far.
6. And of course I get on Facebook at least 3 times a day
7. I used google images for a projects for research with Dr. Yorgason.
8. I graded papers using the independent study website and the learning suite web site
9. I reviewed research papers that were emailed to me for the class I TA for.

I think the list could go on for a long time... but making this list has showed me that even when I think I have had a "media-free" week, I still really use a lot of media!

Pregnancy Body and Good Luck Charlie

In the third season of Good Luck Charlie, Mrs. Duncan is pregnant and has baby boy Toby.  I believe that the actress was also pregnant in real life.

 

I was interested to see how Mrs. Duncan would be portrayed the weeks following the delivery of baby Toby.  I was surprised and pleased that Mrs. Duncan looked like a normal woman who recently had a baby. 

Even if it was only for one episode I was grateful for the bit of reality.  The last thing women need to be worried about right after they have a baby is looking like a super model! 

Grading Papers

I am a TA, and as part of my job I have to grade homework assignments.  A few students turn in a hard copy but most of the papers I have to grade are on-line.

Today as I was grading I was starting to feel irritable and I started thinking about why I might be feeling that way.  I decided that I was annoyed with my computer screen.  I am tired of that kind of media.  I want to stop typing and start writing on a piece of paper.  I want to stop staring at the screen and start looking at a piece of paper.  But that is just not how the world is today... it seems that there are more and more screens and less and less paper.

What do you prefer, a screen or a paper?

Female Friends in the Media

I am taking Socialization Across Childhood from Dr. Coyne and we are doing presentations at an elementary school. My group is presenting on friendship.  Last night I was making a poster for our presentation for the kids to write how to be a good friend.  I wanted to put pictures of movie and TV characters that are examples of friends to make the poster more exciting.  Things were going great I had a lot of pictures, Mickey and Friends, Winnie the Pooh and Friends, Arthur and Friends, Phineas and Ferb, Mike and Sulley, and Lightning McQueen and Mater.  That is a great list, right?

 

Then I realized, none of those pictures were girls!  What the heck?  So I started trying to think of female friend characters that I could put on my poster.  It was so hard!  I found Rapunzel and Pascal, although does a lizard that doesn't talk really count as a friend?  I found Mulan and Mushu, but again, does a person and a animal count?  Then I found Wreck it Ralph and Vanellope Von Schweetz which seems like a solid option, but are there no girl friends with another girl pairs in the media?  I also thought of Teddy and Ivy from Good Luck Charlie.

The fact that it was so hard for me to think of good female friendships in the media made me really sad.  There are all kinds of male friendships, but so few female ones.  Other than the list I just made the only other ones I can think of the three girls from Friends.

 

I know my last two posts have been about females and males in the media.  And I do not mean to be beating a dead horse (which is a horrible saying by the way)... but it is what I have noticed lately.  I can see the under representation of females in the media, and I think it needs to change!

Can you think of any female friendships that are portrayed well in the media?

Tim Allen, the ageless father?

This week I have spent more time in bed and cuddled in a blanket on the couch than I care to admit.  I have been home sick and feeling pretty crappy :-(  So when you are sick, cannot leave the house, your brain feels all foggy and weird what can you do?  Watch TV and movies of course.  So I have done a lot of that.

In the past two days I have watched almost an entire season of Last Man Standing, almost an entire season of Good Luck Charlie and a (semi-weird) ABC Family movie called Princess.  So I decided to blog about what I have taken away from this media overload experience.  The thought I found most interesting is about Tim Allen.  Now, please do not take this as Tim Allen hate...  I love The Santa Clause movies, Jungle 2 Jungle,  the Toy Story movies.  I think I could even be a Tim Allen fan, but that being said there was an episode in Last Man Standing that reminded me of Miss Representation.

      

Towards the end of the season there was an appearance by Jonathan Taylor Thomas.  There was a comical exchange between his character and Tim Allen's character about Tim Allen recognizing Jonathan Taylor Thomas from somewhere... well that somewhere was Home Improvement where more than a decade ago Tim Allen was playing the father of a family of boys.  This made me think of the Miss Representation movie we watched in class because now more than a decade later Tim Allen is still playing the father of a family of teenagers.  The only difference is now it is a family of teenage girls.

Would a female actress in our society today be able to play a mother of teenage boys and then more than a decade later play a mother of teenage girls?  Maybe their grandma or something, but I really doubt that she would be able to play the mother.

What is the difference then?  Tim Allen looks a decade older now than he did on Home Improvement, but we just accept it.  He looks more distinguished now, maybe it is more realistic now.  But what would we say about a woman in his shoes, she looks too old to play the mother again.  Or if you want this part you need to get your face lifted or something.

So am I going to boycott Last Man Standing.  No way, it is funny, I like Tim Allen and as TV shows go it is pretty clean. But what I am going to do is be a little kinder to women on TV. I am going to try to change my perception of aging women.  And  I am going to work on my perception of my self.