These days it seems that there are two elements which any Hollywood blockbuster cannot do without: sex and violence.

You can imagine my surprise when, after witnessing the cinematic abomination that is the Angelina Jolie-Brad Pitt face-off Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I noted that the movie, while being a fantastic vehicle for senseless brutality and aggression, is actually lacking in much sexually explicit material — at least, compared to today’s standards.

As I left the theater, I glanced back at the ticket booth and noticed that Mr. and Mrs. Smith, unlike many of the other films currently featured, carries only a PG-13 rating.

Oh, I get it now.

So if a movie script calls for a ridiculous amount of violence through a never-ending hailstorm of gunfire and basically promotes glorified domestic abuse, then it earns only a PG-13 rating.

Yet only if that movie includes any kind of graphic love scene or perhaps some partial nudity is it then bumped up to the R rating.

Curious to find out what the official word on the matter was, I looked into the ethics the Motion Picture Association of America’s (MPAA) uses to determine its rating system. The MPAA is responsible for which movies get slapped with the brand-of-death R rating and which ones slip through with a lucky PG-13.

According to the Web site, a PG-13 title is one that “leaps beyond the boundaries of the PG rating in theme, violence, nudity, sensuality, language, or other contents, but does not quite fit within the restricted R category.”

While that definition leaves a lot open for interpretation, it also says that a PG-13 rating is issued if a movie is violent, however “if violence is too rough or persistent, the film goes into the R rating.”

I don’t know about everybody else, but generally when I witness non-stop gunfire taking place for intervals of ten minutes or more in a film, I might just consider that to be a pretty “persistent” display of violence.

Watching Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I wondered if I was even old enough to handle its content, let alone the millions of other 13 year olds worldwide which the MPAA has determined ought to be mature enough to see it. I considered calling my mother in the middle of the movie and holding up my cell phone so she could hear the debacle taking place in the background and asking for permission to continue watching it.

And I’m 20 years old.

But according to the MPAA, this type of movie, which, among other things, depicts a husband viciously smacking his wife around, is much more suitable for a young teen than any R rated film.

This is because in terms of sexual content, the ratings system is much stricter. Any film featuring sexually-related nudity automatically receives an R rating.

That also goes for movies which include dialogue using of any “harsher sexually-derived words,” if those words appear more than once during the film.

Honestly, I’m not sure why the concerned parents of America don’t write to the MPAA and ask for a revision of their rating policies. While I realize that parents with younger teens may want to shield their children from seeing too much of both sex and violence simultaneously, I think we have chosen the lesser of the two evils all wrong here.

It simply doesn’t make sense that we are actually more afraid of our children catching a glimpse of exposed flesh than we are of exposing them to bloodshed. This, I think, speaks volumes about our society.

Would we rather allow them to see two people blowing each other up than two people engaging in an act of love? Is that the message I am supposed to receive from this sort of attitude? Where is the logic in this?

While it is true that theaters do not have to enforce the ratings by law, the Opinion Research Corporation found that 76 percent of parents with children under the age of 13 said that they found the ratings system to be instrumental in deciding what movies to allow their children to see. Because people do take the ratings seriously, they ought to be an accurate reflection of what the movies actually contain.

So, when the MPAA decides to give Mr. and Mrs. Smith a PG-13 rating and meanwhile, films which are as diverse from each other as can be, from American Pie to Eyes Wide Shut to Boogie Nights, all pick up the R rating simply due to their so-called “disturbing” erotic content.

I won’t make the mistake that a lot of people do and blame the media, entertainment industry and video games for being the sole cause for outbreaks of violence among America’s youth. I don’t believe that merely seeing something take place on a screen will make a young person run out and mimic it.

It is simply hypocritical that we allow our children easier access to movies in which husbands and wives beat the crap out of each other, yet a movie which includes the tiniest bit of intimacy or discussion of sex is viewed as a threat to their innocence. Please!

Sure, the MPAA needs to re-evaluate its ratings system.

What deserves a closer look, though, is what makes us so uptight about showing our youth the more intimate parts of American culture, yet more than comfortable with presenting the most violent side.

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