Sex and the City No Match for Dirty Dancing

 There’s a lot going on in the world of chick flicks. It is opening weekend for “Sex and the City 2” and I am looking forward to seeing it even though I found the first movie to be a disappointment. Even with a sub par story line, I love those ladies — their clothes, their glamour, their friendship and their shoes. Oh, their shoes.

And Lionsgate has released the DVD/Blu-ray version of “Dirty Dancing” Limited Keepsake Edition. So many of my Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte-loving friends have equally strong feelings for Baby, the heroine of that 80s classic. With all due respect to writer and co-producer Eleanor Bergstein, and she’s due plenty of respect, I didn’t connect with Baby in that way.  Maybe I was just too much of an Irish Catholic, blue collar, Cape Cod cottage kind of girl to relate to a gutsy, privileged Jewish girl who spends her summers at a resort. But with age comes wisdom, perspective and the opportunity to speak directly with Ms. Bergstein about her hit film, which, by the way, is also a long-running stage production.

Bergstein says so many people want to know if the movie is the story of her seventeenth summer.  But it is so much more than that. Sure it’s about dancing. “I have always been crazy about dancing and 60s music.” But for Bergstein, the movie is about, “The last summer of liberalism; the summer everything changed. It is a feminist movie,” she says. “It is about integrity and politics and the class structure.”

The story takes place in 1963, the year Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech” and ten years before Roe V. Wade prohibited many state and federal restrictions on abortion.  “I was concerned that Roe V. Wade was going to be overturned,” says Bergstein and so she wrote a back alley abortion into her plot. Bergstein’s fears were not unfounded. Congress passed the Hyde amendment in 1976 banning Medicaid funding for abortion unless a woman’s life was threatened by her pregnancy. Then in 1980 the Supreme Court upheld the Hyde Amendment in Harris v. McRae thereby helping to erode a woman’s right and access to full reproductive health services.

I may not have clicked with Baby, but I certainly clicked with Bergstein. She recalls that at first the studio execs barely noticed the abortion storyline. They just wanted her to make the dancing scenes sexier. “They thought (the movie) was a terrible piece of junk that was going right to video,” she says. But then the film got attention from a potential sponsor- an acne cream. Sponsorship would have meant a picture of the cream on the movie’s posters. “Please don’t do it,” Bergstein begged the studio. But in the end, it was the sponsor who pulled out because of the illegal abortion and Bergstein held her ground against a studio pressuring her for a major rewrite. “It was part of the story, making it impossible to remove,” she says

Bergstein finds it “very troubling” that so few movies address abortion in the same way “Dirty Dancing” did. More recent films like “Juno” and “Knocked Up” have their characters give birth and then resume or start a normal, happy life. Even SATC’s baby-averse Miranda ends up living the New York fairy tale as a mom in Brooklyn with  her prince Steve after her unplanned pregnancy. Hooray for these middle class heroines with the means to make choices. But life isn’t that easy for all women. And for many, a lack of access to the full spectrum of reproductive services, can be downright dangerous.

Reproductive rights are under attack here in the United States where nearly one-third of  American women have an abortion by the age of 45.  Groups like NARAL and Planned Parenthood are doing what they can to protect these rights but they are challenged by the fact that many young women today don’t remember the days of back alleys and coat hangers and therefore don’t fully appreciate what is at stake. These young women will be hard-pressed to find references in popular culture. “My biggest fear,” says Bergstein, “is women won’t know how hard it is until it’s too late.”

“Dirty Dancing” stands out as a brave film with a strong message. Brava to Eleanor Bergstein for writing this film. May other women follow her lead.

Click here to listen to “She’s Like the Wind.” (Don’t you just love this song?)

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Tags: abortion, dirty dancing, eleanor bergstein, Feminists, pro-choice, sex and the city, women's equality