You don’t have to get very far into Dirty Dancing to figure out that the movie is about sex. Unlike the symbolic nature of dancing in a movie like Footloose, the dance-floor moves here are much more literal, and the movie wouldn’t work if Johnny Castle’s dance lessons didn’t teach Baby Houseman about more than choreography. But the movie was almost Dirtier Dancing: according to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the film went through three rounds of edits with the MPAA, the film-ratings agency, before the raters would agree to knock Dirty Dancing from an R to a PG-13, thus allowing teenagers—an audience of people who, at the movie’s 1987 release, would not have remembered 1963—to flock to theaters.
Not everything controversial got cut (the abortion plot cost the film a major advertising sponsor but stayed in) and those scenes that were edited out didn’t disappear. If that PG-13-necessitating audience of teenagers, now grown, is still curious, recent DVD extras have included at least some of the explicit material. A little dance of love, partially clothed but still NSFW, can be seen here.