Action4Canada - October 13, 2025


Self-Classifications & ‘R’ Ratings in Video Games

Puberty Blockers： What’s Happening to Kids？ Marxism Masquerading as Education

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

140.42

Word count

466

Sentence count

32

People

Also mentioned:
Netflix

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we are joined by the wonderful Ms. Kelly, who is a classifier for film and games and has been fighting for years to have sex instruction books classified as R-rated. We discuss the difference between pornography and sex education in schools across the country, and how we need to push back.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
00:00:00.000 For the past few years I've been challenging the sexually explicit books as a mum
00:00:03.980 and then the window of opportunity came where I got to become a classifier
00:00:08.920 for film and games.
00:00:10.400 So I've been trying to challenge these books from a classification point of view
00:00:15.200 because books do not get classified like film and games.
00:00:20.040 And after going through the training process, you think of video games.
00:00:25.000 Video games are cartoony.
00:00:26.420 They're not real life.
00:00:28.800 Okay, so when you see these pornographic books or these sexually explicit books,
00:00:34.820 even if they have educational merit or they think they have educational merit,
00:00:40.000 many of them would never be allowed unrestricted.
00:00:44.740 So that means they would be MA, 15 plus or R rated if they appeared in video games.
00:00:52.340 That's the equivalent in some of these books,
00:00:54.300 especially on those real sex instruction books under nudity.
00:00:58.380 So, you know, there's and then there's other themes that would normally get classified.
00:01:04.280 So I know that we just need to push back on the books and those teacher resources.
00:01:12.260 Yeah, definitely.
00:01:13.280 Well, you were telling me earlier as well, because we brought awareness that in Alberta,
00:01:18.520 we had a massive campaign, we gave a binder about this thick to the Minister of Education.
00:01:24.220 And one of the topics we went over in the book was, in the binder was the pornographic books. 0.95
00:01:30.640 You know, they're teaching children masturbation.
00:01:32.840 And you had noted that it would be completely flagged as in games, 0.90
00:01:38.500 if masturbation ever came up in any style whatsoever.
00:01:43.780 So under film and game classification, most Western countries have similar classification laws.
00:01:52.360 There's slight variations.
00:01:54.200 But under nudity, when there's genitalia detail and sexual arousal is depicted,
00:02:00.980 it doesn't matter if it's cartoony.
00:02:02.680 If the sexual arousal is depicted, it is R-rated.
00:02:07.840 Mitigation factors, factors that would normally lower the impact,
00:02:12.540 like educational merit, stylisation or scientific merit, they don't apply normally.
00:02:18.580 And I would say most Western countries hold similar classification because what's happening now is
00:02:26.700 there's this new thing called classifying in publishing or classifying in production.
00:02:34.440 So Netflix or whoever, they can have their own classifiers and they do their own in-house classification.
00:02:43.060 And that's happening across the country.
00:02:44.280 How can you move the bar easily, right?
00:02:46.120 Exactly, if they're classifying themselves.
00:02:48.940 That's right.
00:02:49.440 It's like a self-checkout.
00:02:51.020 That's how they've referred it to.
00:02:52.540 So it's like, you know, you walk into your own supermarket and you're self-checkout
00:02:58.100 and you just have to make sure that I'm going to be an honest customer
00:03:03.100 and I'm going to make sure I'm going to scan every single thing.
00:03:07.200 And, you know, that's what it is.
00:03:09.360 So there's a level of bureaucracy that should be overlooking everything,
00:03:13.200 and I don't think they are.
00:03:16.120 So…
00:03:16.960 Okay.
00:03:17.120 You