It’s 30 years since Dirty Dancing was first released. It’s one of my all-time favourite movies, but the older I get the more amazed I am that a film like this ever got green-lit. Middle-class Jewish teenager gets her parents’ blessing after hooking up with a Catholic, working-class, possible statutory rapist at a summer resort? Only in the 1980s could you get away with a storyline like that. And only in the 80s do the lovebirds go on to shatter class divisions by flash-mobbing hotel guests at dinner time.

It’s a plot more improbable than sci-fi, and yet Dirty Dancing still manages to highlight two important truths – first, that youthful indulgence can help solve society’s ills, and second, daddy’s girl privileges can be harnessed to foster social unity (Ivanka Trump take note).

The main character, Baby (played by Jennifer Grey), is a naive teenager on vacation with her parents at a summer resort, who ends up dating the hotel’s principal dancer, Johnny (Patrick Swayze), after he invites her to grind against his crotch.

How old is Baby? Is she even legal? In any case it’s clear that she’s the one who wears the trousers in this relationship. Johnny is diffident and chippy, a man so passive he is practically ravished against his will by a cougar hotel guest. And that’s not the only adult theme in the movie – snobbery, robbery and abortion are all touched upon too. They are the kind of issues that today’s Hollywood would handle with Christopher Nolan-esque gravity or sidestep altogether for fear of criticism. In the 20th century, however, life’s sourness was smothered beneath sugary idealism. Batman was a camp clown in tights with a boyish ward clad in lycra, not a solipsistic Dark Knight, and Gigi could Thank Heaven for Little Girls without triggering a police investigation.

When Baby dates Johnny, then gets her physician dad to tend to someone’s botched abortion, she cuts a swath through class and religion. But the girl is no heroine – she takes action not so much because social justice is consciously on her agenda, but because she can’t imagine her parents not letting her have her way.

This becomes clear when Johnny is wrongly blamed for a string of thefts. His alibi is that he was in bed with Baby on the night of the crime. The girl causes outrage by confirming this to the hotel manager. In front of her parents. At the dinner table. Put in the same position, most of us wouldn’t live long enough to examine the dessert menu, but Baby survives largely because she is daughter to a pair of pushovers. Mum is more or less mute, while doe-eyed Dad can only stare at the lake and sob over his daughter’s defilement.

Baby proves that a sense of entitlement can breed a fearlessness that delivers results. If only Ivanka Trump would do the same. That, however, would depend on her ability to command the same influence over her dad, which is doubtful: we’re talking about a man who said he would date his little princess in a parallel universe, after all. Anyone given the name “Baby” in the Trump household would probably need to tighten her chastity belt.

Baby’s is the ultimate liberal story in which adolescent rebellion takes the moral lead and drives society forward. It dovetails nicely with my belief that indulgence, when pursued responsibly, makes the world go round. Nothing unites us as a species quicker than food, love, music and dance.

Baby’s is the ultimate liberal story in which adolescent rebellion takes the moral lead and drives society forward

In the final scene of Dirty Dancing, Johnny and Baby unite society in one big dance that’s pure Hollywood magic: guests, staff, gentiles, Jews and even a blink-and-you’ll-miss them black couple who break out on to the dance floor to the I’ve Had The Time of My Life. It’s beautiful, life-affirming stuff, culminating in an epic, aerial-parting shot. I won’t lie – that scene has choked me up at times.

Over the years I and countless others have tried copying that foot-shuffle thing that Johnny and his colleagues perform down the aisle. But much like the ability to ride roughshod over our parents’ wishes, very little of the movie’s dancing is replicable in real life. Never have so many moves been imitated so often with such shambolic results. Most of us can’t do the pachanga or salsa properly, either. As for the eponymous crotch-grinding, this is an absolute no-no. Dirty dancing is filthier than twerking and demands 100% synchronicity – anything less and you’ve got a shocker of a hump fest.

“Nobody puts Baby in the corner,” Johnny famously says. I agree. The rest of us, on the other hand, should stay put in that corner and just watch.

• Noo Saro-Wiwa, daughter of the Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, is the author of Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria