There are so many quiet horrors to being a woman. More specifically, a girl on the brink of womanhood. That phase in life where one still wants to be as pleasing and attractive to men as possible, without realizing it so often leads to one’s emotional undoing. As is the case for the drunken heroine of How to Have Sex, Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce, known for her roles in Tracy Breaker Returns and The Dumping Ground). Touching down in Malia, a town in Crete known for its nightlife and Minoan ruins (though more the former), it’s yet another British party playground (in the style of Sant Antoni de Portmany) that Tara and her friends, Skye (Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis), decide to descend upon after taking their GCSEs and waiting for the results that will dictate their post-secondary school existence.
Although Tara is already well-aware she biffed the exam, her primary concern at this moment isn’t her future, but her present state of virginity. At sixteen, it’s an embarrassing label for her that she’s desperate to be rid of. And what better place to assure such a “ridding” than Malia? With its nonstop partying and general aura of horniness, Tara’s friends promise that if she can’t lose it here, then she can’t lose it anywhere. With this type of “harmless goading” in mind, writer-director Molly Manning Walker (marking her first feature-length film) exposes the ways in which “friendship,” particularly friendship between teen girls, can so often be a source for pain rather than comfort. Indeed, there’s no denying that a large part of the reason Tara feels so much pressure to lose her virginity is because she doesn’t want to feel like the odd woman out amongst her more experienced friends. Doesn’t want to come across as some sort of freak. Something that Skye is sure to help make her feel when, during a game of “Never Have I Ever” with the boys staying in the apartment next to them, she claims, “Never have I ever had sex.” Everyone gives her a weird look, with Paddy (Samuel Bottomley) confirming what Skye wanted Tara to believe—that she’s an oddity—by responding, “Fucking hell, come off it. We’re not twelve.”
Before that, Manning Walker lays the groundwork for a cruel full-circle moment when she shows us a scene of Tara on the beach with her friends at the beginning of the film, during which she goes toward the water and says, “It’s kinda cold.” Skye is the one to then bulldoze her reluctance with the exclamation, “I’m going in!” Having been led in against her better judgment, Tara tells Skye, “I don’t think we should do this. I don’t think it’s supposed to be this cold!” Skye insists, “You’ll get used to it.” Not only does this foreshadow her subsequent sexual encounter on the same beach, but it also establishes the overt, forceful sense of peer pressure that Tara is up against throughout the trip. And it is a moment that transitions us easily back to the beach when she finally does lose her virginity to the loutish Paddy. He being the friend of the lad she’s really interested in, Badger (Shaun Thomas). In fact, it is Badger who first clocks Tara on the balcony next to his as she primps in a small vanity mirror. Calling out, “Yo! Sexy! Oi smoke show!” Tara initially tries to ignore him, but he’s persistent in his approach, adding, “I know you can hear me, I can see you smiling.” And it’s true, his attention and flattery is something she’s been looking for in a potential suitor, not wanting to be merely another notch in someone’s bedpost despite Malia being the location for such a thing to happen. And, for a time, Badger does seem like the only sweet guy for miles…until he can’t help partaking in a little stage show put on by the type of British “organizers” that remind one of particularly trashy VJs from back in the glory days of MTV Spring Break. As such, they call up two male volunteers to the stage to compete in a challenge that consists of “whoever gets hard first, wins.” Of course, to help get them hard, they’ll need a few female volunteers as well. Although Tara is encouraged to go up, she decides not to after her last public humiliation in a competition, wherein she had to try to drink the most beer out of a can that Badger was holding like a dick over her mouth. Needless to say, the holiday is rooted in the inherent misogyny of “hookup culture.”
Tara’s reactions to these “harmless” moments that all add up to one big chauvinist clusterfuck start to become increasingly apparent after the time of Badger’s onstage erection. After which she becomes too upset to stay, having naively believed that their “sweet connection” was more profound than warranting this type of public betrayal. Alas, as she’s on her way out, she runs into Paddy, who convinces her to join him on the beach rather than go home. While the viewer might keep waiting for the “inevitable” tense moment of rape, the point of How to Have Sex is to show us that the blurred lines (not to make one think of the atrocious Robin Thicke song of the same name) that occur in situations such as these don’t “make it okay” or any less traumatizing for the woman involved. What’s more, the amount of pressure, once again, put on Tara by Paddy to “perform” makes it all but impossible for her to say “no” when he “asks her consent.” Because honestly, would he have actually stopped if she’d said no instead of reluctantly nodding her head? Finally just wanting to “please” and to be done with the entire ghastly business of trying to lose her virginity.
Manning Walker often displays this facially-expressed torment on Tara’s part, because language fails to convey the complexity of what a girl goes through during drunken party scenarios such as these. Expected to just “stay home” altogether if she doesn’t want to deal with the “sex bit” of the “fun.” Manning Walker also chooses not to reveal the whole sexual encounter, instead cutting to the aftermath, when Tara is following behind Paddy walking ahead of her on a crowded street, as though he doesn’t know her at all. Is a total stranger. And, of course, he inherently is. That’s what Skye and Em wanted her to do, isn’t it? Fuck the first random guy who showed an interest. Only now, after having done so, Paddy seems less interested than ever, pretty much ignoring her even though everyone eventually finds out what happened between them. At one point, in a peak instance of how much women are brainwashed by patriarchal society to believe that everything is somehow their fault, Tara even finds herself apologizing to Paddy for that night, as though she was in any way culpable.
After separating from him that night (not that he noticed or cared), Tara goes off on her own to attempt dancing the pain away. This, too, proves fruitless as she finds herself perennially alone among the crowd. But rather than returning to her group and facing the firing squad of Paddy’s callousness and the others’ judgment, she stays out with the coterie of strangers she joins up with and goes back to their house. It is in the harsh light and apocalyptic wreckage of the morning—with the streets trashed in a manner that only a throng of Brits can achieve—that Tara is forced to go back to the apartment, engaging in a walk of shame that veers often on a walk of massive depression and emptiness. Wasn’t she supposed to feel something—emotionally, that is—when it happened? Isn’t she supposed to be having the time of her life? That was the theory, but it’s far from the practice. Manning Walker deftly communicates this disconnect between womanhood expectation versus reality, as seen from the perspective of a girl making that transition. Playing at being an adult, but still flummoxed by the cavalier behavior that is supposed to go with it.
To make matters worse, now Tara has been branded as “Paddy’s girl,” despite Paddy paying her no mind (until one final scene that’s even more heartbreaking than their first sexual dalliance) and her continued affection for Badger. Indeed, Badger shows his own continued affection for her by picking up on her mood shift and staying with her when she retreats from the group. But her chance to have a romance with him is as “disappeared” as her virginity.
Amid the underlying sadness of what it means to be, as Britney would say, “not a girl, not yet a woman,” the tonal and aesthetic echoes of Spring Breakers (complete with Tara, Skye and Em often shouting, “Best holiday eva!” in a manner not unlike “Spring break 4eva!”) and Euphoria might fool the viewer into believing How to Have Sex is perhaps reductive. But, in reality, it is so much more powerful than the aforementioned projects in its understatedness. And a key aspect of delivering that level of subtlety is McKenna-Bruce’s performance. Conveying the ways in which young women so often get frozen by a situation, unable to react because 1) they have no precedent for it and 2) they lack both the sense of self and language to communicate their genuine response to an event. Particularly one as life-altering as a first sexual encounter.
This is why, when Tara tells Em the true nature of what the sex was like with Paddy once they’re at the airport, and Em replies, “You could’ve said something, like,” it is indicative of how much women are misunderstood. Conditioned and expected to stifle their real feelings so as to be “nice” and “polite,” yet then told they “should have said something” if they were so uncomfortable. This being one of the ultimate societal catch-22s.
Throughout the film, Tara is shown wearing a statement necklace that reads: ANGEL. The word that all virgins are supposed to embody. By the end, she’s no longer wearing it, a pointed decision on Manning Walker’s part as, with this subtle absence of the moniker, her transition to DEVIL has been made complete. In other words, “whore.” The word society likes to brand all women with once they have sex.
Tara goes along with the idea that she “should have said something” and that “it’s fine,” but Em assures her it’s not. That what happened wasn’t okay. Unfortunately, Tara once again isn’t given enough time and space to properly process her emotions as insensitive Skye returns to the scene and the trio realizes their plane is about to board. So it is that, as is the case with the majority of girls and women alike, Tara will suppress the experience or choose to rework it in her mind in order to go on functioning without falling apart. Or worse still, having unwanted flashbacks to Paddy’s body on top of hers. Women, after all, do what they have to do to quietly survive. As the patriarchy demands of them.
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