Why don't Baptists have sex standing up?

Because that might lead to dancing.

~Oscar Wilde

Leave it to Oscar Wilde to come up with one of the funniest lines ever about dancing and religion. But there's more than a grain of truth in this famous saying. There's a reason that dancing is frowned upon in sexually repressive societies.

There is something about dance that lends itself so well to portraying the metaphorical consummation of love, and to encouraging its actual consummation.

And although there are plenty of great movie musicals where Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly dance up a storm with a dizzying array of beautiful women, and although I love those movies too, what really gets me going are those less obvious dance scenes, where the dancers aren't necessarily professional, or where a dance is used to literally throw together two people who may not realize how much they actually want each other.

In that vein, here are a few of my favorite movie scenes involving dancing as a subtle (or maybe not so subtle) stand-in for love and desire.

This is a scene from Dirty Dancing that I had posted after Patrick Swayze's death. When those doors swing open and you see this group of kids bumping and grinding, it isn't hard to see where the movie got its name. The reaction of the very sheltered Baby is such fun to watch, and when Swayze's Johnny Castle appears, no one, including Baby, can take their eyes off of him. When he seduces Baby onto the dance floor to school her in the proper moves, and then abruptly abandons her at the end of the song, she is left giddy and wanting more. (I apologize that this video has a commercial before it, but it was the only version I could find that included the entire scene. Also, it's dubbed in French, but who needs to understand the words anyway?)

Dirty dancing Rock Dou you love me by clipclap52 

In this scene from Strictly Ballroom, our hero, Scott Hastings, who has been working all his life to win the Pan Pacific Grand Prix Amateur Latin Five Dance Championship, has a choice to make. He can either dance with Tina Sparkle, the young, lovely and be-fruited reigning queen of the dance floor, whose partner has retired from competition, or he can stick with the lonely misfit, Fran, with whom he has been dancing and making up steps on the sly in the evenings at Kendall's Dance Studio.  Amidst all of the intrigue and double-crossing, who will his heart choose?  Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps...

West Side Story is the only "old school" movie musical that I include. The scene where Tony and Maria first meet in the crowded gymnasium feels more natural to me than many musicals, and my heart melts every time. Among hundreds of people, they see only each other - it's as if everyone else disappears. And when they come together and almost imperceptibly sway towards one another, it conveys so much about the characters and the story. It's pure magic. But all too soon the reverie is broken.

This clip from Doc Hollywood  is the kind of quintessential "I didn't know how much I loved you until I got you out on the dance floor and smelled your hair" scene that really gets to me. Michael J. Fox plays an arrogrant doctor on his way out west to do plastic surgery, but he gets stuck in the (incredibly hokey and eye-rollingly stereotypical) little town of Grady, South Carolina. He engages in a battle of wills with the independent Vialula (are you kidding me with that name?), but at a local dance, the two step out to Patsy Cline's Crazy. Who needs a sex scene when you can watch this? (Again, the only one I could find is in a foreign language!)