Right, so I was due to get back on the Sex-Horse this week after an extended layoff and a holiday (which I'll tell you about later), but recent events have forced me to ask a question that's been on my mind for ages; what is it about women and Dirty Dancing?
I swear down that whenever two or more women are gathered together in the same room, that film goes on the DVD. You could lock Germaine Greer, Myra Hyndley, Margaret Thatcher and Kali the Hindu Goddess into a living room, and five minutes later they'd be in their pyjamas, ramming enormous slabs of Cadburys Dairy Milk into their maws and bracing theirselves for a goz at Patrick Swayze's arse.
No disrepect to our female readers, and certainly none to Mr Swayze either (apart from saying "You were in Red Dawn, the worst film ever. Ugh!"), but here's the male perspective on Dirty Dancing; it's a bag of old ringpieces. Let us go through the plot; I've never actually seen the film in full, but I've walked past the living room to the fridge enough times whilst tutting loudly to get a decent handle on it;
* Some girl called Baby arrives at a posh Butlins on her holiday with her Mam and Dad. (and before I say anything else, you need to know that I would kill to know someone called 'Baby', as it would give me licence to talk like this all the time)
* Obviously, because this is a film about some bird on holiday, she runs into Patrick Swayze at a party, sees a bit of the old Dirty Dancing, and gets a wide-on for him. But let's stop just just there a moment to make a brief comparison. This is Dirty Dancing;
So are these lads;
And this is outright filthy;
This, on the other hand, is not. Ooh look, he nearly brushed against her tit! My senses is inflamed! I'm sorry, but I find there's far more erotic interplay and sexual tension between Barry and Yvonne in Hi-De-Hi. And how bitterly ironic that, while the females of the world were watching this, their male counterparts were wanking themselves bandy over Debbie Does Dallas and Electric Blue 14. God hates people.
* Anyway, Patrick Swayze has got a cob-on because his dance partner has got pregnant and is going to have a backstreet abortion that goes wrong. Don't know if they do a dance routine in that scene. Wouldn't be surprised.
* Patrick Swayze predictably teaches Baby how to dance, and they start nobbing each other (hm, an older man slapping it about with someone called 'Baby'; I'm not sure this film would be made today, eh readers?)
* Some other stuff happens
* Time Of My Fucking Life comes on, and Patrick Swayze picks Baby up and lifts her into the air. This, apparently, is the scene that the entire film hinges upon - whether a grown man can pick up a slip of a girl and raise her above his shoulders. For fuck's sake. So you've basically spent an entire film waiting for something that would have happened in the first 30 seconds of Britain's Strongest Man.
(And let us never forget, chaps - this film is totally responsible for the fact that we have to go to bleedin' Salsa classes if we want to get our ends away nowadays)
* Then Patrick Swayze comes into Baby's factory in a white Navy suit, lobs her over his shoulders, and walks out while Joe Cocker murders Love Lifts Us Up Where We Belong. Or something.
And yet, despite all the evidence I've laid out here, something about it strikes a ridiculously tremulous chord within the womenfolk of this planet - including huge chunks of the intelligent, alternative, feminist ones. Consider the facts; first video in the world to sell over a million copies. $213m grossed from a film that cost $5m. God knows how many DVDs. Countless millions of pounds pumped into the brewing industry due to males going "Oh, not this shit again, I'm going to the pub".
So, ladies - please - educate not only me, but any other chap who just doesn't get it. I understand there may be some rite-of-passageness going on here, but when there are so many films just like this knocking about, why this one? Why? Why?
