'It is not purity to blame, but sex positivity' (Credit: How to have sex/MUBI)

The Zoomer Generation is notoriously uninterested in the risk-taking behaviours that were once a rite of passage to adulthood. They don’t drink, they don’t smoke, and they’re indifferent to sex — not just to having it, but even, according to a new study, to seeing it depicted in books or films. One wonders how these young prudes will feel about How To Have Sex.
This film about a 16-year-old Brit desperately trying to lose her virginity on a girls’ holiday to Crete strikes me, in some ways, as an heir to America’s Raunch Renaissance of the late Nineties. Back then, movies such as Sex Drive, Can’t Hardly Wait, and American Pie brought us stories of the kinds of sexual obsession that can only be harboured by teenagers who haven’t actually done it yet. As in How to Have Sex, a central theme in these films was the notion of virginity as an albatross, a shameful burden of which you needed to rid yourself at the earliest opportunity. There was one key difference, though: the embarrassed, desperate virgins in those movies were always young men.
A girl was supposed to value her virginity, only allowing herself to be coaxed into bed with promises of love and commitment; if she had sex easily, let alone eagerly, she was invariably punished by the universe, be it with pregnancy, heartbreak, or worse. Watch a slasher film from this era, and note how often the slutty high schooler is the first to die. The message from pop culture was clear: girls were not supposed to have sex. But women, on the other hand, channelling their inner Carrie Bradshaw, were supposed to not just have sex, but have sex like men.
I didn’t notice it at the time, but this seems profoundly weird to me now: that the process whereby you were supposed to go from guarding your virginity with your life as a teen to having sex constantly and casually as a young adult was rarely depicted or discussed. How was a young lady meant to advance from never done it to elite level intercourse, just by moving to the city? How were you supposed to figure out what to do, what you liked, what you and a partner enjoyed doing together? Sex education was no help here — most programmes didn’t even mention the existence of the clitoris — but even the romcom industrial complex conspired to keep us all in the dark: all you would ever see was the couple tumbling into bed at night, and then all aglow the morning after. The sexual learning curve was glossed over, completely.
And, as we see in How To Have Sex, it still is — but now it is not purity to blame, but sex positivity. Pushed upon today’s Zoomers is the notion that sex itself is meaningless, and therefore so is virginity. Once you begin to argue that having multiple partners is no big deal, it’s hard to preserve any significance around having sex for the first time: one progressive sex-ed provider in the UK invites students to think of virginity as “a damaging social construct”. For this, we may thank feminism: women, who risk the most from penetrative sex — often while enjoying it the least — probably benefit from a culture in which it is no longer seen as a special prize to be won. We may also thank the increased visibility of LGBT people, for whom equating the loss of virginity with heterosexual intercourse presents obvious problems.
And yet, the resulting landscape is one rife with profoundly mixed messages about sex. While sex positivity tells us the act is so meaningless that you should feel no compunction about doing it for the first time with a total stranger, consent culture says it’s so dangerous that you’re always a heartbeat away from being violated and traumatised for life. But more importantly, the shrinking significance of virginity as a concept has made casual sex not only an acceptable way to do it for the first time, but the expected way.
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