Macy’s R-rated philosophy

William H. Macy doesn’t understand why sex is considered more offensive than violence, said Catherine Shoard in The Guardian (U.K.). The actor finds it absurd that movies filled with gunshots, gore, and murder can be classified as PG, while films featuring sex and nudity are quarantined behind R ratings. “We’re so accepting of violence—ugly, ugly, ugly violence—and we let our children watch it,” Macy says. “And yet we’re allergic to sex. I don’t know much but I know this: Violence is bad and sex is good. Even the bad sex I’ve had was pretty good. Violence is always bad—there are no exceptions.” Yet, he says, violence is accepted or even celebrated, while sex is still often treated as something shameful. “They say that young kids, especially boys, are thinking about it every four seconds. They think about sex more than they think about food.” The consequences of these distorted values, he says, are everywhere. “Our normal way of suppressing it does not work. You have priests molesting children. You’ve got husbands and wives torturing each other because we can’t talk about anything [to do with sex] and we can’t be honest about anything. I mean, with the amount of crap we’ve all had laid on our shoulders about our sexuality, it’s a wonder we can function at all.”

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