#thisfilmisnotyetrated

There's this kind of amazing story about Hannibal, Bryan Fuller's NBC adaptation of Silence of the Lambs.  Hannibal and the other serial killers on the show kill their victims in all sorts of gruesome ways, and one killing involved the victims being flayed and made to look like naked angels.  The story goes that NBC's Standards and Practices, the people who decide what is and is not allowed on network TV*, told Fuller that he wasn't allowed to show what he artfully calls the victims' cracks.  He countered with an offer to cover the cracks with blood.  NBC told him that that was a great solution.  Hannibal would be allowed to "tell a hard R story [as long as it was] without the language or the nudity."

There's another story, which I first heard in Kirby Dick's fun and informative documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated.  Kimberly Peirce, the director of Boys Don't Cry, tells us that the first cut of the movie received an NC-17 not because of the brutally graphic scenes of rape and murder but because of the shot of the person who is later attacked wiping his mouth after he goes down on his girlfriend.  Films that receive NC-17 ratings are almost impossible to market because most major movie theater chains won't play them.  Peirce was asked to recut the film to get the rating down.

Both of these stories indicate that American ratings systems rate sex as more disturbing than violence.  Why do you think the rating systems work this way?