‘How To Have Sex’ Is A Casual Gut Punch To Schoolies Consent Culture

I wish a movie like How to Have Sex, which carefully confronts our messed up culture around sex and consent, didn’t need to exist. But I’m so glad it does.

It’s a funny feeling to be endlessly grateful that times are changing, yet wishing the change had happened earlier. I tend to feel that way about popular media finally pushing back on pervasive racial stereotypes, or the joyful reclamation of girlhood thanks to films like Barbie and the social camaraderie of the Eras Tour. How I wished I could’ve experienced that while I was growing up.

I get a similar, bittersweet feeling from the coming-of-age drama How to Have Sex, Molly Manning Walker’s directorial debut starring BAFTA Rising Star winner Mia McKenna-Bruce. Real, melancholy, and uncannily light despite the subject matter, How to Have Sex follows three British teenage girls as they head to Greece to celebrate the end of high school.

As you can expect, this means drinking, dancing, and hooking up — as there should be! It’s schoolies, after all. Walker does an incredible job making it feel like a legitimate, messy, chaotic time. She also directly confronts how a trip like this can perpetuate our, frankly, messed up perceptions of sexual consent. Not in a judgemental or overcritical way either — it’s simply the reality. And it simply needs to change.

I asked her about all of this when we sat down for a chat…

Junkee: Who do you imagine to be watching How To Have Sex and how do you imagine they’re feeling?

Molly Manning Walker: I hope young men watch it and start a conversation about sex. Lots of young women have come up to me and said, oh, they feel seen and thanks for telling a story that I recognised myself in, which is amazing. But both would be great.

There are a lot of things that this movie is: raw, fun, but also uncomfortable. What’s something that you didn’t want the movie to be?

I really didn’t want Tara to be like a classic victim. I didn’t want to tell the story of someone who, as we have seen in the media, has something terrible happen to them, so now they’re just going to be sad for the rest of their lives. For me, it was about, like, we’ve all experienced stuff like this and we get up and we’re still, you know, joking around.

In an ideal world, how would Tara handle what she goes through?

If there was an ideal world, Paddy wouldn’t do what he does in the film. I think there’s a real lack of conversation around female pleasure and good sex for women. And I think if there was more conversation around that, then there would maybe be less aggression from men and less misunderstanding of what good sex is for women.

What kind of conversation do you envision that to be?

What we’ve gone through, what we’ve experienced, it doesn’t have to be so heavy. It’s just being open to chat about stuff that other people have experienced.

I’ve always said that so many young women have had an experience like this, but how many men would identify themselves as someone that has done something like this? Not many. There’s obviously a big gap in the conversation somewhere.

The film is not meant to be against men. It’s meant to include them in the conversation. To say, listen, this is not working out for anyone. So let’s have a better time.

This interview has been edited for clarity.