The film didn't predate the ratings. It was rated an M.

The release of Barbarella predated the M rating by a few weeks (the film was released in Oct 1968, the M rating started in Nov 1968).

And IMDB.com has this entry ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062711/alternateversions ) about it:

I saw the movie ad in the local newspaper at the time the film rolled into our city. I recall it having an "M" rating on it and as a kid who wanted to see the very sexy Jane Fonda in a sci-fi movie I made sure to not mention the rating to my parents because it would have been a deal breaker. Seems pretty clear in my mind and is one of those memories I think back on often with a laugh. I remember the M but I suppose it may just have stated "for mature audiences only" but I recall worrying about the M.

There's also full frontal nudity in Kramer vs Kramer. When Hoffman's son accidently see's Hoffman's lady friend naked, she tries covering up but you can see nipple and a bit of 70's bush. Rated PG

Good ole 70's bush. The good stuff.

The PG-rated '67 version of Romeo and Juliet has a scene of a topless Juliet (a well-endowed Olivia Hussey), and a lingering shot of Romeo's bare ass.

In comparison, Baz Luhrmann's R+J w/DiCaprio which has zero nudity or profanity and only mild violence is PG-13.

In our town theaters would put their own rating on some movies. Local theaters ramped both Dracula Has Risen From The Grave and Matt Helm-The Wrecking Crew to R in the newspaper ads.

Barbarella is one of my all-time favorites. I have the original one sheet and the rating is "suggested for mature audiences".

Those dolls are fucking creepy!

I haven't seen it but in the end two teens commit suicide, right? There's your PG-13. That's not needed for the under 13 set.

And there was no PG-13 rating in 1968. There's a few R-rated movies before 1984 that would probably have been PG-13 had that rating existed earlier.

I'd love to see a study of how the MPAA's attitude toward certain things changes over the years. I remember at some point in the mid-80s they began really cracking down on horror-movie gore (Fangoria frequently had articles on the subject at the time) to the point where something like Friday the 13th Part VII had to have its death scenes cut down to almost nothing to get an R, where just a few years earlier they had been getting away with a lot more. But at some point in the 2000s this changed with all the movies like Saw and Hostel showing some fairly gruesome stuff for an R-rating.

I'm kind of curious as to what happened between the early days of the rating and now. As others have mentioned, I remember Beastmaster and Airplane having nudity and getting PGs. I remember watching Clash of the Titans a LOT when I was a kid and not really thinking much when I saw Andromeda's (rather large) back side (pre-puberty, obviously). Then with PG-13 you still saw some bare breasts in movies, now it seems any nudity whatsoever (especially female) automatically lands you an R. What kind of reverse standard ratings system do we have?

That must be what I saw and read then. They added that tag later to m-rated movies at some point. I may look up some old local papers on micro-film to settle it in my mind and memory. I remember my mom double checking the rating in the paper the next day and exclaiming it was for mature audiences.

It was sort of a free for all back then. Remember double X and XXX? They didn't copyright the X rating because they figured no one wanted that stamp. Boy, were they wrong!

Baby-boomer parents, in the over-protective zeal with which they regard their hellspawn, have become bigger fascists than their parents were!

There is more truth in your statement than I think you intended. As both mothers and fathers had to work away from the home, American society became increasingly obsessed with controlling every aspect of children's lives and sheltering them from the world. It's not a coincidence that it arose as females entered the workforce.

I believe Maryland rated the movies different as well. John Waters always had fights with Mary Avara.

Wasn't it Nicholson who said lopping off a head is PG and lopping off a tit gets you an R?

I think the last PG-13 movie to have visible female nudity was The Divine Bell and the Butterfly from 2008?

^ I was going to say Across the Universe but that was 2007. Evan Rachel Wood showed one booby, so I guess both gets you that R nowadays.

No, he said fondling a breast gets you an R, while chopping it off gets you a PG, the point being that the MPAA thinks that violence is safe for a young audience, but lovemaking isn't. He said this some decades ago.

The Reagan era, and the rise of the Christian Right.

Yeah, Jack Valenti that hardcore Reagan-era conservative Christian.

Like it or not the MPAA and the ratings board are the best system in the world and revolutionized filmmaking in America. Is it a perfect system? No, but it's better than all the others.

People lament that the MPAA often dwells on sexual content and is more permissive about violence. They often point to Europe because they are less “scissor happy” with the sex and nudity. But have you ever read anything about the UK and Germany's censor boards? The UK doesn't just censor extreme violence they cut out head-butts from Disney films and censor horse-falls from 80 year old films. Germany cuts virtually every R rated American action film down to its PG-15 rating.

And making all of it worse is that it is government implemented censorship.

At least here in America it's a self governed industry group with the best interests of the free market and the studio’s profits in mind. Under it all the MPAA has a responsibility to maintain good report between one of America's biggest industries and its biggest audience (the American people). Despite its flaws people generally feel like they understand and can trust the MPAA (compared to the utterly failed TV ratings system). I don't always agree with their criteria and I'm aware of their hypocrisy, but it could be so much worse.

Just be proud of yourself that you are savvy enough to be onto their bullshit and overlook their sometimes arbitrary, sometimes biased decisions. It isn't always fair. But the alternative is that your tax dollars go to pay a governing censor board that decides arbitrarily what you can see and rather than working with the studios and filmmakers by making suggestions of cuts, they just take the final cut, chop out what they don't want you to see and release it without any formal statement that anything has been done.