When Paramount handed Mean Girls over to the MPAA for the ratings board to decide how the film should be rated, they tried to slap the teen comedy with an R rating, if you can believe it. And the studio had to fight back to ensure that the intended audience for the movie could actually go out and see it. “Even in the PG-13 movie, we had to take a lot of things out. We had a tough time with the MPAA,” Fey told Variety in 2018. “I remember thinking, If this was a movie about a boys’ school, ‘Is your cherry popped?’ wouldn’t have to come out.” That line was replaced with the much tamer “Is your muffin buttered?” Not everything was a concession on the filmmakers’ end, however.
“The line in the sand that I drew was the joke about the wide-set vagina. The ratings board said, ‘We can’t give you a PG-13 unless you cut that line.’ We ended up playing the card that the ratings board was sexist, because Anchorman had just come out, and Ron Burgundy had an erection in one scene, and that was PG-13,” Waters told Vulture. “We told them, ‘You’re only saying this because it’s a girl, and she’s talking about a part of her anatomy. There’s no sexual context whatsoever, and to say this is restrictive to an audience of girls is demeaning to all women.’ And they eventually had to back down.”