Vulva and vagina references are becoming obligatory in US comedies. But for fearless, witty depictions of women’s bodies, audiences have always had to look elsewhere

These days, it seems no raunchy femme-centric Hollywood comedy or TV sitcom is without its obligatory vagina reference. “I was just washing my vagina,” they say; or, “I’m gonna punch her in the vagina.” The word “vagina” is bandied about as though we are expected to fall about laughing at the very idea of it. And maybe I would laugh, if only I weren’t more bemused than amused by the perplexing way “vagina” appears to have expanded to embrace not just the vagina itself, but the vulva and the female pubic area in general.

But Hollywood, as ever, is all talk. In an industry run by overgrown schoolboys, breasts remain the primary female erogenous zone. Despite the pioneering work of Sharon Stone crossing her legs in Basic Instinct (1992), visible vulva is, unsurprisingly, a rarity in mainstream cinema, possibly because it’s not considered as titillating as big bazoomas.

The Eisenstein of the arty obstetric shot is Gaspar Noé, who inserts trippy imagery, shot from the vaginal perspective

Perhaps this is for the best, though, since the last thing we need are gross-out comedies in which women’s nether regions get the same treatment as testicles: Ben Stiller’s caught in his zip in There’s Something About Mary (1998) or Will Poulter’s grotesquely inflamed by a spider bite in We’re the Millers (2013). “Closeups make us anxious about things,” Jean-Luc Godard once said, and he had a point.

Lad-com producer and director Judd Apatow, having already discovered the comic potential of gratuitous todger in Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) and the criminally underrated Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007), inserted a closeup of a baby being squeezed out of a real vagina in Knocked Up (2007), but one suspects this was more in a quest for male adolescent yucks than an attempt to even things up.

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For the real money shots, as usual, we must look to the Europeans, whose fearlessness in the gynaecological sector rivals men’s top-shelf magazines in their pre-Pornhub heyday. The French film-maker Catherine Breillat, for example, out-Apatows Apatow with an explicit cervical examination and birth sequence in Romance (1999). Then, in Anatomy of Hell (2004), she got porn actor-director Rocco Siffredi (AKA “the Italian Stallion”) to apply lipstick to the labia and anus of his leading lady’s vulva double, though in both films the characters’ tendency to earnestly debate gender politics undercuts potential shock value, let alone any hint of eroticism (which is presumably the intention). Meanwhile, her compatriot François Ozon’s preposterous but delicious thriller L’Amant Double (2017), kicks off its daft plot with a speculum’s-eye view of the female protagonist’s internal couloir: about as sexy as a smear test, but a witty invitation into its heroine’s psyche.

The Eisenstein of the arty obstetric shot is Gaspar Noé, who in Enter the Void (2009) and Love (2015) inserts trippy, semi-abstract imagery of penises penetrating vaginas, shot from the vaginal perspective in glorious red and orange with sporadic strobe effectx. Typically, Lars von Trier is more mean-spirited with his full-on frontal scenes in Antichrist (2009), where Charlotte Gainsbourg no sooner exposes her lady parts than she’s snipping away at them with scissors.

More lyrically, The Invader (2011) by Belgian director Nicolas Provost, begins with a medium closeup of a pudendum posed like Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting L’Origine du Monde, followed by a two-minute Steadicam shot of its serene white owner getting to her feet and strolling across a nudist beach towards the sea – where half-drowned African migrants are being washed up on the shore.

Presenting the case for more playful vaginal action, albeit in a film that elsewhere features stalking and rape, Pedro Almodóvar’s adorable pastiche of a silent-movie dream sequence in Talk to Her (2002) shows a tiny man shedding his vest and pants to crawl inside a gigantic simulacrum of his lover’s vagina, which looms over him like a dirigible fringed in AstroTurf. More bonkers still is Ken Russell’s Lisztomania (1975) in which Roger Daltrey, dressed in a purple crinoline, gets sucked into an outsize replica of Sara Kestleman’s gusset before re-emerging with an eight-foot erection. But this is merely a prelude to a Busby Berkeley-esque musical number in which his former mistresses commandeer his phallus for a maypole dance before chopping off the glans with a guillotine. Vagina for the win! And to think Russell was never offered a knighthood.

L’Amant Double is in UK cinemas now