Dear friends,
The ubiquity of porn in our culture has made explicit sex onscreen anodyne: pop, jizz, fizz. The explicit is so overexposed as to become boring. Porn becomes the ChatGPT generator of sex. All this cheap porn makes me wishful and wistful for onscreen sex that is actually sexy: generating this kind of cinematic heat is so difficult to achieve that it’s become rare. It requires chemistry between actors. It requires directorial creativity and sensitivity; it requires purposeful writing. It requires lighting. Soundtrack. Wardrobe. It requires story, stakes, and argument about what a narrative sexual connection represents. It can be tawdry; it can be taboo; it can be sensationalized, improbable, or overwrought; but a truly iconic cinematic sex scene has to move a story or character forward in a way that nothing else can.
Recently, my friend Angelica Jade Bastién did a brilliant deep dive on Movies That Fuck: you can find her Notes on Cinematic Sensuality on Substack here and and a list of her favorite Movies That Fuck on Letterboxd here. “It has become clear that the main problem in American cinema,” Angelica rightly notes, “wasn’t a lack of sex scenes so much as a stunning lack of sensuality.”
The way Angelica identifies sensuality as the missing element in so many pornified sex scenes feels unsettlingly accurate to me, and also reminds me of Audre Lorde’s commentary on porn in her essay “The Uses of The Erotic": “But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.”
The Sexual Awakening film, I think, occupies a special perch upon this matrix of sexuality and sensuality: it must combine sensation and feeling to produce a previously untouched sensuality. If any great sex scene has to move a story or character forward in a unique, irreplaceable way, then a great sexual awakening scene heightens those stakes with novelty, surprise, and transformation. And what are movies for, if not to depict these moments of raw desire, after which a person is never quite the same?
So. I’ve been close-reading what I see as the most Actually Sexy cinematic depictions of sexual awakenings: film sex that proffers this sensuality, argument, and transformation. I am purposefully excluding films that involved consent violations, like Last Tango in Paris, Blue Is The Warmest Color, and the 1968 Romeo and Juliet, or depicted them, like Pretty in Pink and Saturday Night Fever. Because TV is the definitive American medium of the 21st century, I’ll probably include some TV stories as well as film ones.
I’m kicking off this list with a classic, below, and I would love to hear what other films you would add!
Dirty Dancing (1987)
Once I heard a rumor that a feminist scholar interpreted this film as one big metaphor for female orgasm—the lift—and I have spent my entire adult life hunting for that paper, so if you’ve read this particular piece of scholarship, please send it to me as soon as possible.
Even absent the citation, it’s not hard to make this interpretation run: Frances “Baby” Houseman (Jennifer Grey), age 18, goes to Jewish family summer camp in the Borscht Belt, encounters the leonine, humidly sexy dance instructor Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze, in his prime), and spends the summer’s rainy days and late nights letting him teach her how to…..partner dance. Over the course of the film, her outfits get smaller, her hair gets bigger, and for the first time in her nerd life, she centers the desires of her body in how she spends her time. With Johnny, she tries and tries to let him lift her during a climactic moment in the dance he’s teaching her: she tries on land, she tries in water, and in the final scene, they achieve the lift almost effortlessly, before a crowded room of Poconos-goers including Baby’s whole family. Surrounding all this is a high-stakes dance gig, a fuckload of class and ethno-religious tension, a watermelon, a banger of a soundtrack, and an illegal abortion. The whole thing is basically Edith Wharton Bangs The Borscht Belt.
Frankly, there is nothing about Dirty Dancing that should have worked: the setup is hackneyed, the lead actors famously hated each other, the water was freezing. It’s still remarkable to me that a major studio film in 1987 addressed underage sex, Jewish cultural identity, and, most of all, abortion. Dirty Dancing’s feminist agenda is costumed in high femme drama, and it’s also enduringly powerful. The film’s screenwriter, Eleanor Bergstein, noted:
“I think you can make a brilliant black and white documentary [on] abortion and everyone who sees it probably agrees with you before the first frame. But if you make a movie in color with pretty people and music and sensual dancing and a beautiful blonde young girl with a face like a delicate princess having no choices and screaming in a hallway under a dirty knife — maybe you’ll change somebody’s mind about what they assumed before.”
In a sense, Baby’s is the mind that changes: she begins the film as an obedient daughter, and ends it as a sexual agent. This film remains a classic, and its core sex scene Sexual Awakening canon, because its awakening scene represents Baby’s new passage into a land where her desire matters. Where her desire is worth risking everything. Shortly before they fuck, Johnny and Baby successfully cover for Penny by performing their dance to “De Todo Un Poco”, foreshadowing Baby’s own desire to try a little bit of everything: she wants to know, to have, to enjoy, to dance, to live, to feel.
Almost exactly halfway through the film, Baby arrives at Johnny’s cabin alone, late at night, already having permanently impacted her relationship with her parents by serially lying to them about her dirty-dancing whereabouts, then asking her father to doctor Penny after her gruesome backroom abortion. As such, Baby arrives at Johnny’s doorstep already having proven her willingness to transgress the social codes of the resort, and her family embedded within it, and she is prepared to prove it some more.
Crucially, iconically, Otis Redding’s “These Arms of Mine” plays in the background as Baby enters the cabin of life-changing lust. The lighting is low, indirect, shadowy, orange-red. Baby and Johnny immediately start arguing in the way that only people hot for these new glimpses of each other’s dimensionality can. Baby makes her plaintive assertion: “And most of all, I’m scared of walking out of this room and never feeling the rest of my whole life the way I’m feel when I’m with you.” Baby makes her first command: “Dance with me.” Baby’s hand grazes Johnny’s ass. Baby and Johnny start rocking, grinding, yearning. Baby learns what her body can do.
Even if Baby Houseman Is Horny would never have been a studio-viable title, it’s baldly the film’s tacit subtitle. And this is, I think, why Dirty Dancing has been called Star Wars for girls: it’s a heroine’s journey with female sexual desire at its molten core. Baby’s is the chief narrative desire, but the film is studded with other starbursts of female lust: Cynthia Rhodes as Johnny’s accidentally pregnant dance partner Penny is probably the hottest person to have ever lived, rich and sultry adulterer Vivian Pressman oozes with rhinestone desire (fun fact: the actress who played her, Miranda Garrison, assistant-choreographed the whole production), and even Baby’s less interesting sister Lisa gets in a few swipes on the golf course.
All of this sexuality, in a way that I find both confusing and fascinating, is heavily racialized: from Baby’s first watermelon (!)-toting entrance into the throbbing crew cathedral that animates the film’s title, the subtext is made clear that the titular humping and grinding is the provenance of the black and brown below-deck crew members of the resort, that it is distinct from the educated white Jewish foxtrotting ensuing above, that white Johnny and Penny are, through marketable talent, the only globetrotters permitted to traverse both worlds, and that Baby’s initiation into these rites will definitionally ostracize her from the Jewish doctors and lawyers her parents would rather she crave. (Carrying a watermelon, indeed.) It is catastrophic to the future Baby’s parents intend for her, into which this resort summer is meant to inculcate her, for her to traffic with the help. And here we reach the racial confusion: as a dirty dancer, Johnny Castle represents a proxy for nonwhiteness, and yet as he exists within the stratification of the film’s layers of power, he represents an unacceptable goy, white by definition.
In one of my favorite meditations on this film, “In The Dark All Katz Are Grey,” Samuel Ashworth writes:
“With the benefit of hindsight we can see Dirty Dancing for what it is: a Jewish horror movie. In the summer of 1963, a nice family goes to a Jewish resort in the Catskills for a week of bonding and relaxation, only to have their Mount Holyoke-bound seventeen-year-old daughter repudiate them completely in favor of an uneducated blond Adonis in leather pants named Johnny fucking Castle, who has rhumba’d his way into her heart. At the end, while near-anarchy has broken out and all the staff are dancing with the guests, Kellerman, the resort’s owner, laments to his bandleader that there won’t be many more summers like this—the new generation just isn’t coming. Resorts like Kellerman’s have relied on the Jewish need for a third space, and now that need is dying. Just look, the movie seems to say, even the gawky, big-nosed Jewish girl is getting the beautiful sheygetz now.”
All of this racial confusion highlights, if not a clear argument about race and sexuality, an intimation that the most transformative sex is also necessarily transgressive. However, the film’s famous final scene pivots that transgression into an awkward kind of integration when Baby’s parents applaud her lift, acknowledge that Johnny wasn’t the one who got Penny pregnant, and ultimately share in the dance floor grinding introduced by the previously feared lower class of the resort. Confusing! Not as sexy as Baby banging Johnny alone in his cabin! No ass-grazing allowed!
The time of Baby’s life is not the public lift, I contend, but the private transgression: what moves Dirty Dancing’s story forward most potently is Baby’s willingness to walk alone into the dark and learn what it has to teach her. Maybe she still goes to Mount Holyoke after the party dies down, but she still carries with her a new knowledge of what she is willing to do, risk, and achieve on behalf of her own desire. Baby Houseman wasn’t just horny: she got hers.
COMING NEXT:
Y Tú Mama También
Analysis is sexy! Love this