It’s the 15-year anniversary of Save the Last Dance, that interracial rom-dram dancing movie starring Julia Stiles and Sean Patrick Thomas (in his tragically brief moment at the turn of the 21st century). Remember how that movie made you feel? That tingling deep in your nether-regions that your 10-year-old self didn’t fully recognize for what it was? This movie was all sex. Here are seven times Save the Last Dance sexually awakened all of us.
1. The sex scene
Somehow, this movie managed to have a teenage sex scene without flipping all of its shit about teenagers having sex. Ridiculously and perfectly set to Fredro Starr’s “True Colors,” this scene was short but hot as all hell.
2. The warehouse dance scene
Set to Pink’s “You Make Me Sick” this featured Stiles and Thomas grinding and groping in the name of “practice.” They can practice all day long, as far as we’re concerned.
Recall feeling the inexplicable urge to insert yourself in the middle of that situation? We do.
3. “Practicing” in the club
Ah yes, when they’re sexy dancing in a crowd. When 10-year-old you could not figure out why you suddenly wanted to jump into a crowd of strangers and get sexy right along with them. This scene awakened all the exhibitionists of the new millennium.
4. Capote classroom argument
I personally did not experience any sort of primal urges as a result of this scene, but a fellow BUSTie did, and we live in America so I’m including it. They argue about Capote in English class, and it’s reminiscent of the first time you had an argument with someone you later realize was a deeply sexual argument, because them telling you all the reasons you’re wrong – with big words and everything – made you want to grab their junk and do filthy things with it (consensually, of course!).
5. Train make-out scene for the racist
That scene when they’re minding their own business, being an interracial couple, when a deeply disapprovingly racist woman takes it upon herself to spy through the handrail at the sinful couple, so said interracial couple takes it in turn to make out extra hard. And the racist just can’t stop looking. Again with the exhibitionism. It just won’t stop with this movie, and we never wanted it to.
She can just keep on lookin’
6. Professional teen Bianca Lawson
Just existing in this movie. She played Nikki, the evil and hot ex-girlfriend of Julia Stiles’s main man. Everything she did was sex. Her hair, her arm bands, her slutty makeup (and I use that word in the most sex-positive sense), everything about her was perfect. She was hot, she was evil, she was smoking inside, she was everything your prepubescent-self wanted and couldn’t explain why.
7. Young Kerry Washington!
Long before her ‘Scandal’ days, Washington played the sister of the main man and she was just as hot as she is now. This entire movie, really, was an experience in little 10-year-old girls hyper-focusing on hot women in movies, whether or not they themselves harbored amorous same-sex feelings generally.
Images via ‘Save the Last Dance’ (screenshots) andTumblr
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