Molly Manning Walker’s debut film How to Have Sex follows Tara and her friends on their first hormone-fuelled girls’ holiday to Malia, and won the Un Certain Regard prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. British Vogue’s dating columnist Annie Lord reflects on the all too familiar scenes of binge drinking and uncertain sexual encounters – and her own rite of passage package holiday to Zante as a teen.
Tara, the 16-year-old protagonist of Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex, is on an 18-30s holiday in Malia and she is desperate to lose her virginity. The blonde teenager, played by Mia McKenna-Bruce, dresses up in green mesh minidresses, she slicks gloss over her lips, downs Sambuca shots and drinks from sugary blue fishbowls for liquid confidence. Her friends Skye and Em are trying too, they push her on stage at a pool party to play this game where a guy puts a can of beer in his shorts and pours it into the girl’s mouth. The three of them are disappointed when the first night is mostly them doing karaoke and lolling around on the pavement with cheesy chips, heads on each others’ shoulders.
I remember this pressure to have sex well. Growing up, me and my best friend Vicky had a pact that we would ignore the lie when the other drank while playing “never have I ever” for something they actually hadn’t done. The two of us making up long and complex back stories about guys we’d supposedly met on family holidays. There was slut shaming at school, but mostly the shame was directed at the people who hadn’t done anything – to be inexperienced was to be undesirable or boring.
In class people played the “frigid” game where a guy would run a ruler up your leg and you had to say stop where it made you feel uncomfortable and if you did it too early it meant you were uptight. Every time a friend lost their virginity a panic would close in around my throat – I didn’t want to be left behind. I heard once that the guy I was seeing said to my friend Aaron that he wanted to have sex with me but knew that I wouldn’t unless he was my boyfriend and I told Aaron to tell him that I didn’t care and I’d sleep with him anyway. And then one day when his parents were away we did on his bunkbed, his Staffies barking downstairs.
I went on a girls’ holiday to Zante later, when I was 18 and was about to head off to Newcastle University. I’d had sex a couple of times by then, with a Fitness First gym manager I’d met at a wedding, with someone I’d really fancied from college at Leeds Festival. I’d done enough that I could go to university and generously swell out my experiences into things that they weren’t, pretend to be someone I wasn’t yet. But I felt that I needed to do more, and an 18-30s holiday was the place. Everything is engineered to make you horny and drunk, you’d hear stories of people having sex in full view of all six of their friends, or in the corner of foam parties.
You see it in How to Have Sex, this guy that Tara likes ends up on stage playing this “game” where he has to get hard while a number of girls jump on stage to help him. It’s disorientating for Tara to exist in such a hyper-sexual culture when she’s clearly not ready to be that person yet, or just isn’t at all. She becomes increasingly alienated, retreating into herself, chewing her lip. So much of the emphasis here is on performance – when Tara does eventually have sex Lara asks whether the guy “threw her around” or if he “knew what he was doing”. I remember being so anxious growing up over random things like where your legs go if you’re on top or whether a blow job meant to blow or to suck. There’s no space for exploration and discovery, it’s like you have to arrive into sex as a fully-formed porn star.
I found someone to have sex with in Zante. People called him Skellis and he went to building college in Doncaster. My group of girls had made friends with his lot, big guys with strawberry-coloured necks and Yorkshire rose tattoos. I don’t remember what I used to talk about with him only that I really liked him, would head down to the pool in my lemon print American Apparel bikini hoping I’d see him there. One night we left everyone else and ended up in this kids’ park, heading down the slide together, him pushing me on the swing. I remember the denim playsuit I was wearing that had palm trees printed on it, how something twisted inside of me when we kissed, squeezed.
Tara shares something similar with Badger, she tells him knock-knock jokes while his head is in the toilet, strokes his bleached ends, jumps in the pool with him in all his clothes. She craves intimacy, connection, but there’s not much space for that on one of those holidays, making out and having fun isn’t enough. Tara feels she must accelerate the encounter, push it into something else, or else find someone else to take it further with. Interactions with people are transactional, they give you time and then you reward them with sex. It’s why I could see Skellis was annoyed when I didn’t come into his room, why it didn’t feel like enough to him that we’d had a good time together.
The next day these girls from Manchester arrived at our hotel and the guys lost interest in us. They were a bit older than us and knew how to draw their eyebrows on properly and wore ponytail extensions and feathered lashes. New girls arrive in Tara’s world too, and she finds herself pushed out of the world she had been the centre of. Women are disposable to men in this sort of sexual economy, you don’t give them what they want and they drop you, or you do and they probably drop you as well.
On the last night none of the girls wanted to go out because they were tired and ill and missed their boyfriends. None of us had eaten anything in days bar a couple of chips because every time we ate we threw up. They stayed in to play Cheat on the balcony, but me and the only other single one in our group went out. I got drunk on watermelon cocktails that came in these plastic yellow buckets, and then when I was too drunk to talk found my way to Skellis’s corridor and sat there kicking the cream plaster wall, not knowing which was his actual room, just sitting there hoping he’d emerge and I could do it, have sex.
There are elements of Tara’s experience that are not – I hope – in any way universal, but most girls will recognise the pressure that How to Have Sex captures so accurately. Watching her, I wanted to tell her everything I wished I could have told myself back then. That you don’t need to grow up so fast, it will happen anyway and then you’ll miss the days you got to act like a kid. That the moments with friends are the ones you’ll remember and cherish, not kissing a random guy who doesn’t respect you. That no one else knows what they’re doing with sex at that age even if they say they do. That everything you’re embarrassed about, like being a virgin, if you told them it with confidence they probably wouldn’t even care. That one day you’ll find someone who you can learn to have sex with and it won’t be embarrassing to work stuff out, it will be really, really fun.
How to Have Sex is in cinemas in the UK and Ireland from 3 November
