Baby Houseman's Inner Conflict About Femininity -- Part 7

This article is Part 5 in a series, following Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 , Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6.

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Early in the movie Dirty Dancing, Baby Houseman and Neil Kellerman are dancing in the ballroom. Their appearances differ by sex -- she looks like a woman and he looks like a man -- but only in an ordinary aspect.

* He is taller than her, but only slightly.

* He is wearing a conventional suit jacket with a tie. She is wearing a simple dress without flourishes or accessories. Her dress's color is mostly white with thin, pastel stripes.

* His suit jacket hangs loosely around his torso. Her dress is fits her figure but is not tight. Her dress's top edge is just below her neck. Her dress's hem is just below her knees.

* Both he and she are wearing flat shoes.

* Their dancing moves are similar. When he steps forward, she steps backward. When he steps to his right, she steps to her left. And so forth.

* His dance movements do not display masculine power. Her dance movements do not display feminine suppleness.

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Into the ballroom come Penny Johnson and Johnny Castle. He walks ahead, holding her hand and leading her. The sexual contrast between him and her is striking and in some aspects is unusual.

* He is clearly taller than her.

* He is wearing a fitted tuxedo. She is wearing a flimsy, widely flared dress. Most of her back is bare.

* His tuxedo is black. Her dress is peach.

* His tuxedo fits closely around his torso. Her dress swirls widely and flounces high.

* He is wearing flat shoes. He is wearing high heels.

* Her hair is blonde and long and elaborately styled.

* His dancing movements are uniquely male, such as lifting his partner high into the air. Her dancing movements are uniquely female, such as standing on her toes and such as kicking a foot high above her head.

As usually happens when a couple performs so professionally, the audience's attention is focused mostly on the woman. Her hair, face, clothing and shoes are more elaborate, colorful and decorative. Her limbs extend farther, bend more supply and sweep more gracefully. Her entire body sometimes leaves the ground and flies through the air.

The ballroom scene compares two couples -- 1) Baby and Neil and 2) Penny and Johnny. Each couple comprises a man and a woman, but the second couple displays much more sexual contrast.

The mere perception of sexual contrast arouses females (and males) after puberty. Intellectual Baby reacts reflexively to her inborn instincts and to her years of learning to distinguish female and male characteristics. Her mental preoccupation with the economics of underdeveloped countries suddenly is overwhelmed by a new preoccupation with female-male contrasts and with a compulsion to participate in such an animalistic relationship.

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Later, the "dirty dancing" scene in the employees' bunkhouse does not include Neil. There the comparison is between the two women. Johnny dances first with Penny and then with Baby. Both women are feminine, but Penny is much more feminine than Baby.

Penny dances confidently in her femininity. Her movements are natural and supple. She displays her female body, even flipping her dress up to reveal her panties.

Baby dances in an embarrassed, deliberate, inhibited manner. Her movements are awkward and clumsy. She does not flaunt her female body and sexuality. She does not flirt with Johnny. When the music stops, she dances away in a goofy manner by herself instead of enticing him to dance with her longer.

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In both those dance scenes, Baby watches and admires both Penny and Johnny. Like the movie audience, Baby is impressed not only by Penny and Johnny individually but also by the extraordinary sexual contrast between Penny and Johnny.

In the following scenes, Baby displays a special interest in Penny.

* When Baby sees that Penny is demonstrating wigs, Baby goes to try on wigs.

* There, Baby engages Penny in conversation and expresses her curiosity and admiration.

* When Baby sees Penny crying in the kitchen, she takes action to help her.

* Baby goes to talk with Penny's recent lover Robbie Gould.

* When Baby learns that Penny is pregnant, she asks questions to clarify the situation.

* Baby obtains $250 and presents it to Penny for an abortion.

Up to this point in the story, Baby has demonstrated much less interest in Johnny. After Baby saw Johnny kissing a woman in the woods, Baby did follow Johnny to the employees' bunkhouse, where the "dirty dancing" party was taking place. However, Baby is not shown conversing with Johnny until she is leading him to the kitchen where Penny is crying.

I am not implying that Baby is attracted to Penny sexually. I am saying rather that Baby is fascinated by Penny's femininity so much that she involves herself personally with Penny. Baby informs herself about Penny's personal history and relationships. Baby engages herself in Penny's sexual problems.

Later in the story, Baby becomes involved with Johnny, but only after advancing across the stepping stone of her initial involvement with Penny. Baby's active fascination with Penny's femininity leads -- by mere happenstance -- to her experience of Johnny's masculinity.

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Baby is a young woman who admires Johnny sexually. She sees him dancing and admires his handsome appearance and his masculine dance movements. She sees him kissing a woman in the woods, and she follows him to the bunkhouse to watch him some more. However, she does not know how to use her femininity to engage herself with him. She can only watch and admire him from afar.

Baby sees that Penny does have some rather intimate relationship with Johnny. Penny is not Johnny's boyfriend, but Penny knows Johnny intimately and spends much time playing and embracing with Johnny in dance. In the story's first part, Baby is inhibited from trying to experience Johnny's masculinity, but she does have the confidence to involve herself -- and to learn from -- Penny's femininity.

Baby wants to learn from Penny how to develop an intimate relationship with a masculine man like Johnny. Such a masterful man like Johnny is very different from an inexperienced, inhibited young woman like Baby. Because Johnny is so masculinely different from Baby, she just does not know how to go about engaging and seducing him. Baby will learn from Penny the paradoxical technique of attracting a man by enhancing the contrast between her own femininity and his masculinity.

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Much insight into Baby's mentality is provided by a brilliant article published by The Atlantic and written by Ethel S. Person and titled Some Differences Between Men and Women. The article includes the following passages.

... For women the passionate quest has usually been interpersonal, and has generally involved romantic love; for men it has more often been heroic, the pursuit of achievement or power. One might say that men tend to favor power over love and that women tend to achieve power through love. Socialization seems to be one of the factors that create the different dreams through which each sex shapes its narrative life.

A second, equally powerful source for these different modes of achieving self-realization resides in a child's earliest psychological development. The members of both sexes must struggle to organize a gender identity — by which I mean that each of us constructs a way of being in the world that is either feminine or masculine. Every person seeks to consolidate an inner psychological identity — one based by and large on an identification with the same-sex parent. ....

Life's central romance for many women appears to be the quest for an ideal love relationship. The rewards of this feminine quest are elegantly stated by Rachel Brownstein in her book Becoming a Heroine:

The marriage plot most novels depend on is about finding validation of one's uniqueness by being singled out among all other women by a man. The man's love is proof of the girl's value, and payment for it. Her search for perfect love through an incoherent, hostile wilderness of days is the plot that endows the aimless (life) with aim.

Brownstein, like many others, emphasizes the crucial distinction between the female search for feminine identity through intimacy and the male search for masculine identity through achievement.

It is in the problems a woman encounters in her amorous 'quest that the history of her psychological development is most clearly reflected. These problems can be seen in their purest form in romance novels — that enormously popular genre whose enduring appeal reveals the female appetite for romantic love.

As shown in Janice A. Radway's study of the romance novel, the central plot generally revolves around the ability of a beautiful young woman to alter the cold and indifferent stance of the slightly menacing, withdrawn hero. The plots of these books, like those of fairy tales, recapitulate both the cultural directive that women seek romance and the major psychological barriers they must faced before bringing that quest to a successful conclusion.

Radway describes the typical heroine as feisty, independent, and spirited — this, paradoxically, despite her ultimate goal of surrendering her autonomy to the powerful hero, of losing herself in a romantic union. The man who is sought is distinguished by his extremely masculine characteristics; this preference is striking because it seems almost to preclude fulfillment of those desires for tender nurturance that are part of the central longings in love.

In fact the natures of these two archetypes —- fiery, independent heroine and powerful, aloof, even frightening hero -- point to the same need: to separate the conscious experience of romantic love from its infantile origins. Apparently, for any of us, female or male, to identify with a romantic story, we must be reassured that the nurturance sought is of a different order from that offered by maternal love. ...

Although the two sexes experience first love at about the same time, in adolescence or young adulthood, the subsequent pattern is often different.

* Men may be more vulnerable to the sorrows of first love, an experience that can be such a blow that it causes some men to withdraw from any subsequent emotional exposure, to avoid being hurt.

* In young adulthood women feel a great readiness and urgency to fall in love. ...

I strongly recommend reading the entire article, because it illuminates brilliantly Baby's mentality. Before the Dirty Dancing story begins, Baby already has transferred her intimacy fixation from  her mother to her father. Then during the story she transfers her intimacy fixation from her father to another adult male, Johnny.

Baby navigates the latter intimacy transfer from her father to Johnny via a fellow woman, Penny. In that regard, Baby involves herself in an intimacy-triangle. When Baby declares to Penny, I envy you, she envies not only Penny's dancing skill, but also Penny's platonic but fun intimacy with Johnny. Baby is fascinated by Penny's use of her own natural and confident femininity to partner herself with mysteriously masculine Johnny.

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As Baby becomes more involved with Johnny, she becomes also more involved more with Penny.

Penny helping Baby learn to dance
as a triangle relationship develops.

A triangle relationship develops. Although Baby knows consciously that Penny has not been her rival in relation to Johnny, Baby surely worries subconsciously that Penny is her potential rival. After all, Penny is a much better match for Johnny than Baby is. Whenever Penny decided to do so, she would be able to capture Johnny right out of Baby's grasp. In Baby's conscious mind, Penny is her femininity mentor, but in her subconscious mind, Penny is her most dangerous rival as Baby's intimate relationship with Johnny develops.

Penny helping Baby dress for the Sheldrake peformance
and telling Baby that she herself does not sleep around.

In another article, titled Love Triangles, Ethel Person illuminates subconscious aspects of Baby's envy of feminine Penny's intimacy with masculine Johnny.

.... Romantic love has been described as a religion of two, but love pairs can be infected by triangles and may even be wholly contaminated by them. Or, more positively, triangles may sometimes help love along: Some pairings first crystallize in the context of a triangle. ... Some triangles are not mere way stations into or out of love, nor are they intended to protect against intimacy or revive intensity, but they are themselves the main event: the lover is fixated on triangles and can achieve some of the gratification of love only within a triangular configuration.

Walking alone, seeing the world go in pairs, one can abruptly feel bereft, lonely, and disconsolate. One may feel afflicted by some unnamed deficiency. "Why not me? Am I the only one alone?" One senses that one's full potential and pleasure can be realized only in love. ... One may feel more than envy. One may feel hopelessness or a bitter rage at having life's possibilities perhaps permanently thwarted.

Envy runs deep in the psyche; it is the twin of desire. Perceiving or imagining that two other people are together sexually or romantically incites us to find a love of our own. Reading or watching a love story, we are imaginatively engaged: we want that story, or one like it, to happen to us. ...

envy and emulation may take another form—literally to want what another has rather than simply to crave something similar. Then our desire erupts as the impulse to cut through an envied couple and to replace one of the protagonists. At such times desire seems almost to have been created (or intensified) by the fact that its object is already spoken for, desired by someone else. The aim may be to capture the beloved, but a competitive element also appears to be at work. In such cases we may say that love's purpose is dual: erotic longing for possession of the beloved is coupled with the wish for triumph over a rival. ...

Depending on a person's position within the triangle, it may be either "rivalrous" or "split-object." The distinction reflects important psychological differences. In the rivalrous perspective, the protagonist is competing for the love of the beloved. In the split-object perspective, the protagonist has split his attention between two objects. ...

In the early stages of romantic liaisons in which the loved one [Johnny] is ... significantly involved with someone else [Penny], the lover's [Baby's] obsessive preoccupation is ... consisting primarily of thoughts about the beloved [Johnny]. But in such rivalrous triangles an obsessive preoccupation with the rival [Penny] may gradually come to compete with the erotic longing for the loved one [Johnny]. Both desire and competition play important roles in this erotic configuration, and the lover's [Baby's] relationship with her rival [Penny] has its own significance. ...

The lover's [Baby's] obsessiveness may also take the form of invidious comparisons between herself and the rival [Penny]. The female lover [Baby] fears that she is not as pretty as the wife [i.e. dance partner, Penny]. ... The lover has a dread of being compared with the rival. The lover may become consumed with self-depreciation and envy of the rival. ...

What generally happens in rivalrous triangles when the lover [Baby] emerges victorious? If the lover [Baby] has plucked the beloved [Johnny] from another pairing [Penny and Johnny], she may feel ... expansiveness and exhilaration ... and often she lives happily ever after. Such a victory may be easier to enjoy when the love has not been evoked by the triangle per se —- that is, when the triangular complication is incidental to the lover's motivation. ...

In relatively stable triangular relationships, the lover [Baby] appears to love the beloved [Johnny] without ambivalence ... Nevertheless, such a balance is tenuous. ...

Rivalrous triangles may serve some secondary purposes. They may afford the lover a safeguard against forbidden impulses. Triangles may protect the lover [Baby] from her fears of falling in love, particularly from a fear of engulfment. They allow the lover [Baby] to yield enough to fall in love, but they simultaneously guard against the loss of the self which is feared, because complete union with (or commitment-to) the beloved [Johnny] is averted by circumstance [plans to attend a women's college and join the Peace Corps].

Occasionally, participants in triangular love relationships discover something shocking within themselves: a deep sexual attraction to their rivals [to Penny]. This may be manifested only in apparently inexplicable dream fragments or flashes of fantasy. .... Some lovers do manage affectionate relationships with their rivals, and treasure ongoing relationships with them. ... Sometimes it is altogether unclear whom the lover regards as the object of desire and whom as the rival. ...

No love pairing is immune from traidic components. Most often, these can be incorporated into the couple's relationship and need not be corrosive. Particularly when they take form only as fleeting fantasies, such triangles may even be enriching to love. ...

Many people who watch Dirty Dancing feel -- although they are happy for Baby -- that Johnny really should go on in his life together with Penny. The story is about a triangle in which the best match is Johnny and Penny but he seems to end up with incompatibly with Baby. If the story continued, Baby eventually would realize that she is the odd one out.

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Baby is scared by feeling so feminine with Johnny but she is even more scared that she might never feel so feminine again with another man.

I'm scared of everything! I'm scared of what I saw. I'm scared of what I did, who I am. I'm scared of walking out of here and never feeling for the rest of my life, the way I feel when I'm with you!

Of course, though, Baby will go on with her life and eventually will resolve her inner conflict and feel comfortable about her femininity. Baby's experiences with Penny and with Johnny have improved her confidence and understanding. Baby will find another man who is a better match, and with him in that compatible and therefore permanent relationship she will play her feminine role naturally for the rest of her life.

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This article completes my series about Baby's inner conflict about femininity.