Women: Made of Moonlight, Magic and Macabre

Though Mean Girls was rated PG-13 for “sexual content, language, and some teen partying,” that was a rating Paramount had to fight for, says Waters. “We had lots of battles with the ratings board on the movie. There was the line, ‘Amber D’Lessio gave a blow job to a hot dog,’ which eventually became ‘Amber D’Lessio made out with a hot dog.’ Which is somehow weirder! That’s the thing we found: When you’re trying to make a joke obey the rules and not use any bad words, it can actually become seamier, even.” Still, there were some things that Waters simply refused to change. “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. 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.”