When I was little, my Mum wouldn’t let me have Barbies, or Sindys (Barbie’s British equivalent). She told me they would give me a warped idea of femininity. I was allowed to play with My Little Ponies though, so apparently warped ideas of horses were totally fine. And yet I don’t ever remember thinking for even a moment that real-life horses were supposed to be pastel colours with drawings on their bottoms, and somehow I was only seeing the crappy brown plain-bottomed ones.

Nevertheless, I suppose my Mum had noble reasons for banning Barbie. She didn’t want to expose me to unrealistic feminine body ideals, however futile a pursuit that was when I just went and played with my friends’ Barbies instead. She didn’t want me to think that the best things in life to aspire to were a mansion, a pink car, and a cute guy named Ken, because this was the 80s, before all those Career!Barbies came along with their cute little work accessories and positive role-modelling. And I am grateful to her, at least, for the sentiment.

Some of my Mum’s other parental bans though, I have always struggled to see in quite so noble a light. The one that still rankles, many years later, is her arbitrary banning of the movie Dirty Dancing, on the grounds that ‘it’s pornographic’. Let me just point out, please, that Mum had never actually seen Dirty Dancing. She was going purely off the title.

At the time the movie was first released on home video, I was spending my weekday evenings after school at a childminder’s named Pam, because both my parents worked. Pam was the mother of one of my school friends, and she took in several kids after school in the same situation I was in. Pam owned two videos – Grease, and Dirty Dancing. And every evening she would make us all cheese-on-toast and park us in front of one of these movies (creative child care it was not). Except when I was there, we had to watch Grease, EVERY SINGLE DAY, because my Mum had banned Dirty Dancing. So naturally all the other kids hated me, and talked openly about how much they liked the days when I wasn’t there because they didn’t have to watch stupid Grease again. This was all 20 years ago, by the way, and the injustice still burns. Also, I will always and forever loathe Grease.

When I finally did get to see Dirty Dancing, it was my first year of university, and after all those years of it existing in my imagination as celluloid forbidden fruit, I fully expected a full-on feature-length orgy. You can’t imagine how disappointed I was.