I don't know the particulars of your sitch, so I can't comment on that directly. I'm just going to share some observations.
One, lots of little kids watch R-rated movies. Some of them seem to find them boring and less disturbing than I, as an adult, do (though I snuck into a few R-rated movies in my own youth, I believe taken to and snuck into my first one at age 11). I've seen things in the video rental store like some little kid wanting to see, say, "Sorority Sex Cannibals" (just inventing a ridiculous name, but some of the titles I've heard made me marvel that such movie titles existed) and hear the mother say things like, "We've already seen that 10 times." (I don't know what these kids are like, generally speaking. But I expect they know it's "not real" and "it's not appropriate to do these things" just as they are with their cartoons.)
I can also point out that while I didn't normally see R-rated movies with impunity (and I could be surprisingly sensitive at times, I mean to the scary and traumatic stuff), we kids shared a lot of very age inappropriate materials, from songs to jokes. While we didn't know as much as we thought, we weren't likely to be shocked by anything we saw outside of porn either (and double true for me who spent years on a farm as well as in homes with thin walls). I think I was 10-11 when I, with a friend of the same age, saw a
Simpsons cartoon that showed Smithers having a gay sex fantasy over Burns, and we both understood it, though I'm not sure how and why we did.
I helped raise 2 kids from age 11 and 6. Both were heavily into Harry Potter, and the 11-year-old was already reading Twilight (which is how I got to read it, because she wanted me to), and she knew many other girls who had (though there apparently was some tiff at her school between some Potter and Twilight fans), though she was also into the Disney shows like Hanna and Wizards of Waverly Place (btw, if you think Disney sneaks
crap past the radar, you should see what gets aired on Nick!). The boy was mostly into Transformers and GI Joe (the movies anyway). 'Course when me and their mother get a place together, they quickly came to realize that it wasn't always a man and woman who were attracted to each other as well, assuming they didn't already realize this.
So they're 12 and 7 when their mother shows me
It's A Wonderful Life, and I get a bit tipsy with the spiked nog. The movie made me think of the Buffy ep The Wish, so I decided to show her that, and then I (not entirely sober) asked the girl if she wanted to see it with us given that she was into Twilight (and figured she could use a better role model than Bella anyway), but she said no. I said it was probably for the best as it was a bit on the scary side, and then told the boy, though also telling him it was a bit on the scary side and might give him nightmares (which he had a lot of back then). Both ended up watching it with us (apparently saying it was scary made it an easy sale), and after which, both wanted to see Doppelgangland...and it was in this show I started to wonder if this was a bit too much for them, but they handled it fine and didn't ask any uncomfortable questions over it.
It was 2 years later, so the boy was 9, when both took to watching the series as a whole (both Buffy and Angel) and both loved it. I was worried more worried about the boy getting bored with the soap opera aspects, but he didn't, and found them compelling (btw, I've found many boys can love the stuff for girls, and vice versa, back when I did a lot of babysitting, and plenty of little boys even seemed to get into the love story between the knight & unicorn turned into a human in
The Last Unicorn...and no kid seemed eeked out or confused by the
tree scene either).
Though it made me reckless, and I let him see some movies that I wouldn't have if I'd vetted them first. One of them wasn't too bad (and it was a dvd of mine, so I'd seen it before), but it had a major focus on a sex scene that I'd completely forgotten about that raised some uncomfortable questions...though his questions were respectful and intelligent enough that I ultimately didn't regret it, I was just caught off guard by it (and mad at myself for forgetting about that scene). But letting him see R-rated movies also made him feel a bit entitled, and when I refused to let him (at age 10) to see
The Evil Dead at the cinema he blew a gasket, and I think he felt I was calling him immature (though his tantrum surely was immature, and I suspect he snuck in to see it with friends). Yet had I just let him view Buffy and Angel without then becoming more permissive with a few R-rated movies then I think that could've been averted.
