Stephen Holden, in his review of Heartbreaker, a French movie with Dirty Dancing as a touchstone and plot point, complains that "the disconnect between Juliette’s [the main character, who likes Dirty Dancing] aristocratic airs and her prosaic tastes taints your fantasy that she is something special." To which I say, the hell with all that.
Dirty Dancing has many virtues. It has good class politics. It is pro-choice. It features a number of fine performances. But perhaps most importantly, in contrast to the vast majority, it's not a movie about reconstructing the heroine's damaged self-esteem. Frances actually has a relatively iron-clad sense of right and wrong, and of her own sexuality and worth. She arranges Penny's abortion, insists her father help out when the operation goes wrong, seduces Johnny, learns to dance and doesn't mind looking goofy while she's doing it. At the end of the movie, Johnny's the one whose changed, declaring Frances "taught me that there are people willing to stand up for other people no matter what it costs them; somebody who's taught me about the kind of person I wanna be." When he tells her father, "no one puts Baby in a corner," it isn't a line meant to make Frances feel good about herself, though it certainly has that secondary effect: it's actually a corrective to her father's misconceptions.
I actually don't think liking a romance that's grounded in those principles is prosaic. And I actually don't think that having some prosaic tastes makes someone unspecial. Everyone likes the Beatles, at least to some extent, but that doesn't make you unspecial for liking them. Women are allowed to forge a compromise between being manic pixie dream girls and entirely conventional romcom heroines. You can like Patrick Swayze and the Shins without falling over into one vale or another.