How to Have Sex Ruminates on Hedonism and the Sexual Marketplace

The term “sexual marketplace” is an obnoxious but apt descriptor of our contemporary dating scene. This is not to say that dating being analyzed through economic terms is a new phenomenon: The term “back on the market,” for instance, has been used for generations. The proliferation of dating apps, though—including but not limited to Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Coffee Meets Bagel, OkCupid and Raya—has rendered our relationships more commercial than ever. A girl you liked ghosts you after three solid dates? Well, there’s always ten more women who’d suffice. It is within this context that How to Have Sex is situated. 

In Molly Manning Walker’s directorial debut, coming of age is socially tied to one’s worth in the sexual marketplace, and a desire to accede to a heteropatriarchal gaze is inseparable from this. The three 16-year-olds at the center of the film—Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Em (Enva Lewis) and Skye (Lara Peake), on holiday together in Greece—are all sketched according to their success in this economy. Skye is the most sexually experienced of the three, whose proclivities are primarily limned by the way she humble-brags (and outright brags) of her attractiveness among her friends. 

Tara is her foil, and the protagonist of How to Have Sex, in that she quietly adopts a Nasty Gal-clad front (her gold, showy “Angel” necklace quite obviously indicates the opposite) but is in fact a virgin—a fact that Skye hardly ever fails to point out. The two joust silently—Skye always maintaining her dominance through covert, snide comments—over the gaze of men. Em exists outside of these confines as a lesbian, but is also acclimated into the predominantly heteronormative partying culture she inhabits with her friends.

As such, Tara is ostensibly at the Malia resort to lose her virginity. Not only do Skye and Em frequently remind her of this, but this also mars Tara’s interiority, and becomes her chief concern over the course of How to Have Sex. Collectively, the potentiality of sex precludes the girls from making any decisions outside of it.

The allure of this is conveyed, in the first half of the film, by a tequila-bathed, Harmony Korine-esque aesthetic that makes hedonism look and feel intoxicating. The warmth of daytime Greece is captured through Nicolas Canniccioni’s camerawork that evades any excess focus on the sweltering heat and exhaustion of summer, thereby rendering these images mundane and picturesque. Canniccioni’s lens instead centers the characters’ faces amid charged, competitive interactions, examining Tara and Em’s minute shifts in emotion as they covertly remain at odds with each other. This is accompanied by simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting scenes of nightlife, each soaked by alternating emphases on vivid lights and desaturated darkness. 

Though the magnetism of this way of life is later destabilized, How to Have Sex isn’t merely a direct moral exercise. The camaraderie between Tara, Skye and Em is palpable, as are the underlying tensions between them. Accompanying a descent into hedonism (and a racking up of sexual partners) is an easy silliness between the girls, the two often concurring in various vignettes.

In one scene, Tara, Skye and Em eat fries together on the beach. Skye opts to deepthroat one and, for a bit, Tara and Skye jostle playfully and experience a moment of full-throated laughter together. The three share cigarettes in their swanky hotel room, shriek in laughter and horror at men’s poor attempts at flirting and sing painfully off-key karaoke under neon blue lights in a grimy bar. There’s no moral reprimand in Walker’s subjectivity. They really are having fun. 

That’s what makes the second half of How to Have Sex all the more trenchant. It’s this pursuit of pleasure that prevents the group from being able to sit still, both literally and metaphorically. The girls are unable to abstain from going out for a night or two without feeling like they’re missing out on social and sexual opportunities—as if the loss of one day will make them lose some larger game. It’s also this constant need to Be Out that renders them unable to reflect on where they stand in a larger economy, not only in comparison to the men they’re after but also among themselves.

Tara, for instance, begins the film attracted to Badger (Shaun Thomas), a bleach-blonde and tattooed quasi-himbo. Skye, secretly attracted to Badger but also deeming him less attractive than Badger’s housemate Paddy (Samuel Bottomley), teases Tara about her lack of sexual experience in front of Badger so as to assert her comparative sexual prowess. Tara and Badger continue to flirt, but Badger continues to flirt with other women, too, to Tara’s dismay. 

Over the course of How to Have Sex, the girls circle the two men while the men operate according to the logic of the so-called sexual marketplace: Sure, there might be one woman of the two that they like more, but there are also six more they could potentially fuck. One night on the beach, after seeing Badger volunteer to have multiple strangers perform sex acts on him in public, Tara, feeling rebuffed, leaves with Paddy, after which he forces her into sex.

And yet, the next morning, all Tara hears from Skye and Em before she can even fully get the words out is how fortunate this was. Tara was chosen by Paddy; she’s one of the lucky ones. For a brief moment, it’s not just Skye and Em who believe this. Tara forces herself to believe it too. There has to be something about the endless pursuit of pleasure that is worth it, and what’s better as a showcase than the classic marker of sexual maturation? The tragedy here is that Going Out culture has anesthetized the girls’ inclination for much else. In this sense, they become unable to truly grasp their position in a sexual marketplace that simultaneously signals their maturity but also renders each of them insignificant and interchangeable. Still, Walker maintains an observational lens here, one more interested in empathy than in admonishing the girls’ hedonistic outlook.

The elliptical nature of How to Have Sex isn’t a bug, but a feature. Most women live through experiences like the one Tara has, and most women don’t do much about them. The great tragedy of the kinds of non-consensual encounters that Tara and many other young women have is that there is hardly ever any closure—any sort of sufficient endpoint to the grief. At a young age when social capital feels like everything, external social pressures often foreclose vulnerability. And so you wait, hoping that just because you have lived past it, you’ll reach some sort of lucidity about the whole situation. Maybe you never do, but there’s always another drink.

Hafsah Abbasi is a film critic who has covered the Sundance Film Festival and the Mill Valley Film Festival in years past. She currently resides in Berkeley, California. Find her latest writing at https://twitter.com/hafs_uh.