Summer is just about here, and I’m starting to feel pangs of nostalgia for a favorite pastime of adolescence.

On hot nights in the 1980s, my friends and I would head to air-conditioned movie theaters. But I wasn’t all that interested in seeing the latest boy-adventure blockbuster from George Lucas or Steven Spielberg. I wanted to see movies that told stories that resonated with my life: adventures of a more down-to-earth, female-centric variety.

At that age, my girlfriends and I were trying to navigate the difficult terrain that comes with falling in love; becoming sexual; dealing with friends, family and school, but most of all, growing up and trying to be our own person.

Fortunately, the multiplex came through with another emerging force in American cinema and culture in the 1980s: the teen movie.

Many people have their favorite teen movies from that decade. The ones I still adore offered up smart, curious female protagonists grappling with the same issues I was, including “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” “Valley Girl” and “Heathers.” All three offer relatable, three-dimensional characters, including as Stacy Hamilton (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh), Julie Richman (Deborah Foreman) and Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder in a star-making turn).

One film I somehow missed at the time was “Dirty Dancing,” with its idealistic 17-year-old protagonist Frances “Baby” Houseman (Jennifer Grey), which a number of female writers later hailed a “feminist masterpiece.” Of course, it’s also a great summer flick, given its idyllic setting in a Catskills resort where Baby goes on summer vacation and ends up meeting the hunky, working-class dancer Johnny Castle, played by Patrick Swayze in all his hip-grinding glory.

In fact, it was ahead of its time in a lot of ways, which might make it the ultimate girl-coming-of-age movie. For its 30th anniversary this year, “Dirty Dancing” was just remade into an unnecessary TV live broadcast, which I decided to avoid and, based on reviews, that was a good idea.

The age of Brat Pack America

What finally prompted me to instead sit down and watch the original film, as well as revisit my own old favorites, was reading San Francisco author Kevin Smokler’s fun new look at ’80s teen movies: “Brat Pack America.”

Smokler’s book looks at how social and historical trends of that decade fostered the rise of the genre, which was in part fueled by the box office power of mall-browsing suburban teens with disposable incomes. This clout spawned unexpected blockbusters like the “Back to the Future,” and helped launch the careers of major male stars including Sean Penn, Nicolas Cage, Tom Cruise, Michael J. Fox, Matthew Broderick and members of the so-called Brat Pack.

Hollywood had made movies about teenagers before, Smokler said, but the 1980s films marked a notable shift, with movies consistently portraying teens as real “human beings” with stories told from their point of view.

Like many of the best ’80s teen movies, the female-centric ones I’m fond of were originally marketed as lightweight high school comedies or rom-coms. But even back then it was clear they had insightful things to say about girls’ lives, especially about what it was like to be a girl coming of age in the 1980s.

Women coming of age

Yes, it was a weird decade: Reagan was in office, America was locked in a Cold War and Donald Trump and other moguls were becoming celebrity symbols of ’80s prosperity taken to excess. The feminist movement of the previous decade had won women a sexual freedom as well as a path to college and careers. But these opportunities didn’t necessarily make things any easier, especially for girls still hampered by the usual of trials of adolescence: painful insecurity, a focus on physical attractiveness and the contradictory impulses to fit in but also be independent.

In “Fast Times,” set at a fictional Los Angeles-area high school, Stacy fumbles through figuring out what sex is all about. And in a way that I have to confess is familiar to my early fumbling experiences, Stacy loses her virginity in the most unglamorous way possible, or as director Amy Heckerling once said: “Bare light bulb, harsh shadow … It’s the Valley, it’s your virginity, there it goes.”

In “Valley Girl,” Julie bristles at having to live up to the prom-queen expectations of her bad-jock boyfriend and popular friends; she’d rather be with her soul mate, smoldering Hollywood punk Nicolas Cage. Then there’s brainy and resourceful Veronica Sawyer of “Heathers” who rebels against the “mean girl” culture of her suburban high school.

“Dirty Dancing” may be set in 1963, but it’s a rom-com dressed up as a period dance flick that smartly deals with class, feminism and the loss of innocence — both Baby’s and America’s — just before the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Though sometimes mushy and a bit campy, “Dirty Dancing” is heartfelt and electric as Baby pursues love with Johnny. She also stands up to her father and does something heroic for the sisterhood: in the pre-Roe v. Wade era, she helps a female friend get money for an abortion, then medical help when the back-alley procedure goes wrong.

You can’t write about ’80s teen movies featuring female protagonists without addressing the issue of John Hughes, who built three of his movies as director or writer around the singular screen presence of Molly Ringwald. It’s Smokler’s view that Hughes deserves massive credit for creating the template for teen movies that we still see today, and I agree.

“Sixteen Candles,” “The Breakfast Club” and “Pretty in Pink” certainly were part of my 1980s movie-going diet, and I enjoyed them at the time. But 30 years later, they don’t have the same charm for me as “Dirty Dancing” and the others still do. One reason, as Smokler explains, is that they are rife with the casual racism and sexism that still passed as acceptable in the ’80s. In addition to the slapstick Asian character in “Sixteen Candles,” other cringe-worthy moments come from rape jokes tossed off by male protagonists in “Sixteen Candles” and “The Breakfast Club.”

Another reason these movies never entirely resonated for me is that Hughes has Ringwald play out situations that feel like they were created by a male auteur with a sentimental but limited vision of real girls’ inner lives. Most problematic are his fairy-tale endings that reduce Ringwald’s otherwise intelligent, sensitive characters to Disney princesses. Her sole purpose becomes wanting to become the girlfriend of a guy whose only remarkable qualities are that he’s good-looking and rich.

The ‘Backlash’ decade

Then again, Hughes’ handling of sexual politics reflects some of the contradictory attitudes women faced in the 1980s. Writer Susan Faludi famously identified the 1980s “backlash” against feminism, which included a new obsession with sexual danger, either from the scourge of AIDS or from career-women sociopaths like Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction.”

“Dirty Dancing” and my other favorite films didn’t give into the backlash, maybe because, with the exception of “Heathers,” they were the vision of female directors like Heckerling and Martha Coolidge, who helmed “Valley Girl,” or writer Eleanor Bergstein who based “Dirty Dancing” on her own teenage experiences.

While these movies didn’t trumpet a feminist agenda, they wove pro-girl and pro-women viewpoints into their narratives and gave us determined, principled heroines who weren’t content with being “put in a corner.”

Consider Baby again: She’s sometimes gawky and unsure, but she also knows what she wants and makes no apologies for being smart and ambitious. What’s most radical is that she’s a 17-year-old girl who wants sex. When it comes to her big love scene with Johnny, Baby is the one who does the seducing. Most films, even today, don’t have a problem showing teen boys scheming all sorts of ways to have sex, but they are queasy about giving young females the same desire and agency.

But Baby wants it. And guess what? Nothing bad happens to her when she gets it. And after winning the heart and respect of a guy who treats her like an equal, we’re left to imagine that she carries on with her plans to go to college and change the world. I can’t think of a better message for a girl who’s struggling with the big challenge of growing up and becoming her own person.