6 Content Warnings We'd Actually Pay Attention To

For many years, television content ratings have tried to help consumers make informed decisions. It hasn't really worked. For one thing, no one really cares about a barrage of meaningless letters. If I had the cryptology background to decipher content ratings and the Puritan background to give a shit about them, I'd shoot myself just to see if someone can kill what couldn't possibly exist.

Consumer advice is valuable to parents, but not good ones. Anyone making parenting decisions based on a couple of letters typed by some Quaker with the world's most depressing job should probably leave their kid outside and hope its new wolf parents are less stupid and lazy.

What's truly tragic is that even if you can interpret them, the ratings codes have none of the information you really want. That's why I've come up with the only six content ratings consumers will ever need.

#6. DON'T EAT IN FRONT OF THIS

Right from the start, TV shows should let us know if we can have dinner in front of them. They warn us when they're about to use harsh language, but we've all been cursing since we were six. We each know our own daily fuck intake and if your show goes over it, we can change the channel and move on with our lives. However, if someone on your show suddenly decides to dig into the butthole of a corpse or hilariously puke blood, that's going to have an actual physiological effect on us. It's hard enough to eat Chef Boyardee ravioli without bloody colons on the TV.

Did you know the movie Trainspotting is rated R for drug use, strong language, sex, nudity and violence? When those idiots were listing the depravity our fragile minds needed to prepare for, no one thought to mention that Ewan McGregor might dig his way into a diarrhea-blasted public toilet. How did that get left out? Is this some kind of conspiracy funded by the Pudding and Chili Practical Joke Council? I swear, if you showed up at the MPAA silently eating a piece of human shit, they'd say, "You seem like a decent guy. You have any tips on how to get my teenage daughter to use 'darn' instead of 'damn'?"

#5. DON'T TRY MASTURBATING IN FRONT OF THIS

There are a lot of codes regarding sexual content and anyone who grew up without the Internet knows exactly what they mean. The rating BN could mean side boob or a man changing his pants, and you have to pay very, very close attention to catch either. Trying to masturbate to BN can be medically unsafe, as you have to be locked and loaded for the duration of the movie, ready at a moment's notice. The rating AC could mean anything from casual flirting to the full unsealing of plastic breasts. The sex scenes are hazy closeups of body parts, so you run the risk of masturbating to an elbow or a spine. There's also SSC, SV, AS ... my point is, the system is useless. The codes aren't reliable indicators of pornography so they're useless to lonely people. It might help people genuinely trying to avoid sexual material, but since anyone watching a Shannon Tweed movie for the parts where she's not fucking deserves every misfortune life throws at them.

Think of all the time you've wasted in your life watching the 88 minutes of erotic thrillers that weren't nipples. What the new D rating would indicate is that there is either not enough masturbatable content to bother with, or that elements of the plot would make masturbation dangerous. Let me explain. If a movie or show wasn't specifically designed for use with dolphin flogging, you run the risk of seeing some psychologically damaging things at the point of climax. Horses, clowns, Danny Trejo -- it's how unspeakable fetishes get started. There are people dressed up like cartoon lobsters and making love right now because when they were children and jerking off to the The Little Mermaid, one of their dolls turned to them and hissed, "WE SEE YOU. ALWAYS." It's too late for them, but this new D rating saves future consumers from similar fates.

#4. ONLY TRY MASTURBATING IN FRONT OF THIS

Have you ever been 10 minutes into an aerobics show before you realized the show was useless as a workout and only made for unemployed masturbators? Oh, you were already doing that? Well, the E rating will prevent misunderstandings for the people less clever than you.

Coy producers are constantly disguising pornography as actual entertainment, but if you see this E rating, you can feel comfortable ignoring the plot or fast forwarding to the part without bras. The steamy murder or vampire fruitloopery are only there to give context to the boning, and nobody needs that. That's like forcing yourself to wait until the fourth date before you sleep with yourself.