These Secrets from Mean Girls Are Absolutely Fetch
6. When Paramount submitted Mean Girls to the MPAA for a rating, they attempted to give the teen comedy an R rating, believe it or not. The studio had to push back to ensure that the movie’s target audience could actually see it.
“Even for a PG-13 movie, we had to remove a lot of things,” Fey revealed to Variety in 2018. “I remember thinking, If this was a movie about a boys’ school, ‘Is your cherry popped?’ wouldn’t need to be removed.” That line was replaced with the milder “Is your muffin buttered?” However, not everything was compromised on the filmmakers’ part.
“I took a stand on the wide-set vagina joke,” Waters explained to Vulture. “The ratings board insisted, ‘We can’t give you a PG-13 unless you remove that line.’ We argued that the ratings board was being biased, as Anchorman had recently received a PG-13 rating despite a scene showing Ron Burgundy with an erection. We pointed out the double standard and the fact that deeming the joke inappropriate for girls was disrespectful to women. Eventually, they had to give in.”