Movie review
November 2, 2023 · 91 min · NR
Woke Score
Lower is better
Review
Three 16-year-old British girls go on a party holiday to a Greek island full of drinking, clubbing, and hooking up. Tara feels strong pressure from her friends to lose her virginity and has a bad sexual experience with a guy who crosses her boundaries, while her lesbian friend Em pursues a girl from another group. The film looks at peer pressure, consent problems, and rough male behavior in youth party culture through the eyes of the girls and their friendships.
Breakdown
These are the editorial factors and ratings behind our score for How to Have Sex.
Woke representation / casting
The film centers three young female leads, with one (Em) explicitly lesbian and shown pursuing a girl (Paige) in a visible subplot. The main cast is predominantly white British actors that fit the story of UK teenagers on a Greek holiday, with no marketing or reviews highlighting racial diversity, quotas, or mismatches with the setting. The queer element in a prominent friend role adds identity visibility, but the overall casting follows the world of the story without strong signaling or unearned competence framing.
Woke political dialogue
Most dialogue feels like natural teen talk about virginity, hooking up, drinking, jealousy, and group dynamics rather than scripted lectures on politics, identity, or systemic issues. Situations and character choices illustrate pressure and consent problems. The director has expressed educational hopes for sparking consent talks, but the script itself stays observational and character-driven.
Identity-driven story themes
The core narrative follows female friendship under strain, the social pressure on girls to have sex as a rite of passage, and the emotional fallout from coercive experiences, alongside a lesbian character's parallel pursuit. Director statements and reviews repeatedly tie it to toxic masculinity, how young people learn about sex, and gendered expectations. The visible queer element in the friend group reinforces the gender and sexuality focus.
Production
Western institutional / cultural critique
The film and director's framing directly critique toxic masculinity, male entitlement and pressuring behavior, and a party subculture that normalizes or ignores misconduct. It portrays unchecked gender dynamics, virginity pressures, and social norms around sex and respect as harmful, especially to girls, in modern Western youth culture. Explicit "casually misogynist" descriptions from the director, post-#MeToo context, and school screenings for consent education make this a clear, audience-visible institutional and cultural critique of patriarchal patterns in relationships and social settings.
Woke character or canon changes
Not relevant. This is an original contemporary story with no established characters, source material, canon, or real historical figures being reinterpreted through identity or DEI lenses.
Anti-woke backlash and complaints
There are no notable or widely reported anti-woke, conservative, or right-leaning complaints accusing the film of pushing woke, DEI, identity politics, or activist messaging. Critical and audience coverage has focused on authenticity, performances, and consent themes rather than agenda. Minor online debate exists about specific scenes and what counts as assault, but this has not become backlash framing the title as propaganda or identity-driven. Evidence for this category is absent or negligible.
Creator track record context
Writer-director Molly Manning Walker has built her visible work around her teenage sexual assault experience, a short film on resulting trauma and institutional failures, and this feature's focus on consent failures, toxic masculinity, and gendered social pressures. Her public comments emphasize starting conversations and reframing sexual experiences. Other key producers and crew largely have standard film finance, development, or sales backgrounds with little documented personal activist, identity, or left-political creative patterns, though some are linked to public UK funders that support socially themed projects. The director's focused thematic history is the main driver.
