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.

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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.

Does this reduce the stigma of being a non-virgin? No doubt. But I’m not persuaded that it’s actually helping anyone figure out, per the movie title, How to Have Sex. Whatever the shortcomings of the pre-digital era in terms of its sexual double standards, teenagers at the time at least tended to learn by doing — by building intimacy through the mutually awkward process of figuring out the alien landscape of another person’s body while they fumbled their way around yours. And alongside the Raunch Renaissance, there was another model for what first-time sex looked like, something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer: a story which, however otherwise unrealistic, still depicted sex as something people did after they were certain that they really, really liked each other.

Today’s teenagers don’t even have that. They have porn — and hook-up culture, which means your first sexual experience could be with a partner who doesn’t love you, or barely know you. And the weirdest part is, this is supposed to be fun, a paradox that How To Have Sex highlights exceptionally well. The immense uncertainty surrounding a young woman’s sexual debut is painstakingly, and painfully, shown here, and the pressure to be unburdened of the albatross of virginity is only one piece of it. Another is the expectation — for everyone, not just women — that one must be not only as skilled between the sheets as a porn star but also as emotionally detached. In some senses, the Nineties model has been fully flipped: physical intimacy is now par for the course, while emotional intimacy is coded as cringe. That a person could view sex as the physical act of love, which is ironically the one thing that would actually make the whole process less fraught and more fun, is barely nodded at. Tara may not know how to have sex, but she knows enough to know that having feelings for the person you’re doing it with is super embarrassing.

Perhaps needless to say, this does not end well — for the characters in the movie, and often for young women in real life. I want to say that Tara has a uniquely bad experience on this front, but what really strikes me is how not-unique it must be, how common. The whole scene, these dark and pulsing landscapes full of beautiful young people dancing, drinking, sweating, screaming: it makes for great cinema, but how are you supposed to connect with anyone under these circumstances? Even the friendship Tara strikes up with another girl, after getting separated from her friends at a club, is like the platonic equivalent of a one-night stand: the emptiness of the connection stands in stark contrast to her relationships with her friends, even the bad friend who keeps trying to embarrass and undermine her. There’s a moment in the film where one of the girls notes that they need to be more social. “We’re never getting laid if we only hang out with each other,” she says. It’s true, but also: when you see what getting laid entails, hanging out with the girls and eating cheesy chips is clearly the better option.

That is, unless you’re a virgin so desperate to shed the mantle of sexual inexperience that you don’t even care anymore how it happens or with whom. Tara is on a mission — though it’s unclear if it’s a mission she volunteered for or one her friends have assigned to her — and there’s a giddy energy to her early exploits in Crete that’s not unlike the American Pies and Can’t Hardly Waits of the world. For the first half of the movie, her virginity is a burden, yes, but also a source of excitement, anticipation. Every time a boy touches her, you can see the wheels in her head turning: is this how it will happen? Or this? Or this?

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And then it does happen. What’s possible becomes what’s inevitable, and what’s left is all the uncertainty, and none of the sparkle. And while it’s understood that Tara’s choice of partner has something to do with this, that things would have played out differently if she’d held out for a better and more respectful guy, it’s hard to say how differently, when even the best-case scenario is still a one-night stand with a virtual stranger.

This seems to be the biggest problem with the discourse around virginity, which focuses on sex as the end of something — one’s embarrassing virginal status — as opposed to the beginning that it is. Becoming sexually active is like learning to drive: the first time you do may feel significant in the moment, but it’s not going to be your best time, or your most memorable. Tara, like any teenager, would benefit from looking beyond the milestone and asking herself what comes after: once sex stops being about losing your virginity, what is it actually for? And absent the desire to be rid of her V-card, what does she actually want?

In the end, Tara has had sex. But she still doesn’t really know how to.

While the combination of drugs and sex is nothing new, chemsex as an underground cultural phenomenon became popularised in conjunction with the mainstreaming of online dating apps and HIV antiretroviral drugs in the late Eighties and Nineties. “Stigma towards methamphetamine from those who did not use it kept us united as a group… we called ourselves ‘chemsex club’,” wrote David Stuart, an HIV activist who claims to be one of the first to use the word. “We were united less by commonalities or friendship, but more so by our shared preference for chems.”

Most of the current discourse around chemsex comes from the public-health sector, which tends to frame it in a paradigm of risk and harm reduction. But a field of academic study sometimes called critical chemsex studies has recently emerged that aims to centre the practice instead within the realms of pleasure, intimacy and identity. One seminal text in this growing field is Pleasure Consuming Drugs by the writer Kane Race, which tackles the question of how drugs have come to mediate sex in the gay discourse.

In the book’s final chapter, “Exceptional Sex”, Race opens with a personal experience: one night in Sydney, he was approached in a video lounge by a guy who was rolling hard on ecstasy. The swooning stranger was too impaired to carry through the sexual encounter, and eventually staggered out of the place as they parted ways. Kane remained haunted by the encounter, returning to it over the years as he attempted to untangle the ethico-political tensions between autonomy and care. “What is my duty to this stranger? How do I enact it?” Kane writes. “Why does this guy put himself in this situation? Why does he feel he has to knock himself out to be here?”

Last autumn, I co-moderated a discussion in New York City on chemsex where we attempted to answer these very questions. Titled “Appetite, Euphoria, and the Inevitability of Coming Down,” the event was hosted by The Infernal Grove, a study group that meets once a month to pursue “an unsystematic structural analysis of drug use, addiction, and recovery (not necessarily in that order)”. In addition to Infernal Grove founders Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, both professors at Syracuse University, my co-moderators included experimental filmmaker Devon Narine-Singh and multimedia artist Mikiki, whose chemsex-inspired video work was showing at the Whitney Museum that week in honour of World Aids Day.

That evening, about two dozen artists, filmmakers, writers, and other creative-types showed up to a darkened dance studio near Herald Square that doubled as our meeting room. Many more attended virtually through Zoom. A tall man with a blonde ponytail hopped on the piano in the corner, improvising a haunting welcome tune as we took our seats in a circle, smiling shyly as we introduced ourselves by way of unpacking our relationships to drugs. What was remarkable was the diversity of not just age, gender, and racial identities in the room, but the breadth of psychoactive experiences across the sober-using spectrum — from former heroin junkies to professionals who’ve never touched a drug, devout AA members to party-loving recreational ravers, underground psychedelic healers to sober-curious skaters.

This colourful cast of characters reminded me of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings I’ve attended in the past, where folks from all walks of life form unlikely alliances in pursuit of communal healing. In fact, Alcoholics Anonymous seems to be going through a contemporary rebrand; what David Foster Wallace described in Infinite Jest as a “goofy slapdash anarchic system of low-rent gatherings and corny slogans and saccharine grins and hideous coffee” is turning into a veritable hot scene. More sober-curious young people are showing up to meetings who aren’t hardcore alcoholics per se, perhaps sensing that AA can provide something increasingly rare these days: a sense of community, which is to say support without the strings of self-interest.

Yet, AA’s dogma of total drug abstinence does not appeal to everybody, and many are hungry for alternatives. New groups such as The Infernal Grove now cater to those seeking more sustainable relationships to substance use beyond the established orthodoxy of traditional sobriety paradigms. Despite the necessity of these alternative paths, I had been afraid that the chemsex discussion would be seen as problematic or triggering. Conversations about drugs usually play out as a moral drama of extremes: the anti-drug abstinence of AA vs the drug-positive enthusiasm of recreational settings. It is still so rare to enter a thought space where sobriety is discussed as more of a spectrum, where the ambiguous zones of druggie disinhibition can be untangled by people from all over the drug-sober continuum. It felt like the future.

“Honestly? This conversation is extremely triggering to me, but I’m also very excited to be here,” confessed someone who was in AA. Another person explained she had never touched a drug in her life, but was here because of an addict family member. The conversation turned to how recreational sex and drugs are not beyond the realm of care and attention; how even though drug practices often take place in a sub-intentional zone — “zoning out, getting distracted, losing yourself to something, cutting loose, getting carried away,” as Kane put it — they should not be exempt from insight and consideration.  Whenever we began to romanticise drugs too much, extolling the ways they can be used as quick escape routes from normative or oppressive societal demands, the sober people would chime in. “Sure, there is an element of surprise in drug use, but also, there isn’t,” one said quietly. “Maybe you imagine breaking through a barrier, but then you wake up hungover and nothing has changed.”

The conversation that night brought to light intersectional commonalities in the reasons why people of all stripes engage with chemsex — most commonly, it seems, to dissolve the culturally-conditioned sexual anxieties that can be so tricky to shake off while sober. Gay men and straight women alike spoke of letting go of body dysmorphia and shame while in the disinhibited state of chemically-enhanced euphoria, of exploring desires that the cultures of toxic masculinity and transmisogyny have impinged their abilities to see. “It is possible to look at the shadow without the shadow taking over,” said Mikiki, speaking on how the history that people carry often shapes their sexual inclinations. “Of course my desires are related to my trauma, but am I not allowed to explore that?”

Untangling the ways drugs can modulate pleasure, dampen the voices of our inner critics, and foster a kind of dark intimacy is still such a sensitive topic — and the movement to destigmatise chemsex is, in many ways, still in its infancy. As a woman, I am also not the traditional demographic that is typically “allowed” to even discuss this concept, let alone in these expansive terms. In fact, Stuart has accused folks who use this term but do not identify as gay men of cultural appropriation.

But like a growing number of academics in the field, I believe this framework should include a wider population — because as the discussion in New York suggested, many other social groups already engage in these practices for similar reasons as gay or bisexual men, yet are under-represented in current research. Adopting a broader and more intersectional lens to the study of drug use and sex could allow a deeper understanding of how the dense mesh of governing power structures both shape and curtail our desires. It could also help us to understand how this practice reflects the historical and social contexts from which they emerge — including the pharmaceuticalisation of sexuality, contemporary culture of endless self-enhancement, and crisis of intimacy under neoliberal individualism.

As the conversations around chemsex continue to evolve, perhaps our conceptions will also move beyond the current narrative of retreat and resilience. “I want a different conception of corporeal agency, where drugs don’t feature such an obvious and thrilling escape route,” Race wrote. “What would it take to engage more fully with the texture of these escapes? What possibilities of care, what new pleasures, what ethics, what multiplicities emerge?”