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.

The relief that comes with realising these are father-daughter pairings is short-lived, however, once the girls start to pledge their sexual purity to their fathers, and the men vow before God to shield their daughters from a fallen world. The feeling grows as the men place rings — cheap knock-offs with cubic zirconia and metal that will eventually turn their skin green — on the girls’ fingers.

They are called purity balls, and they emerged from Midwestern Evangelical culture just in time for the George W. Bush administration and the consolidation of Christian political power. If seeing Donald Trump groping at his daughter Ivanka made you gag, a purity ball is bound to make you heave. Grown men slow dancing with teenage girls, their arms wrapped around their waists protectively, promising to remain sexually pure for one another, taking portraits together that could easily be mistaken for prom photos.

The fathers receive rings, too, “symbolising my commitment to protect and shield you from the enemy”, as it’s put in a common version of the pledge. The “enemy” is a vague reference to secular culture, Satan, and boys, a mishmash of influences seeking to sully the virtue of good Christian girls. And it isn’t just an annual dance — it is an industry. True Love Waits was trademarked in 1993, and Evangelicals had made a lot of money from selling purity starter packs, from rings to books to workshops teaching girls how to be saintly young women.

When they emerged in the Nineties, purity balls were a reaction to what the Christians saw as an overly permissive, sexually charged culture. Premarital sex was not only seen as acceptable — it was the norm. Pornography was finding its way into the mainstream with widespread usage of the internet; girls were wearing pants with “juicy” written across the ass; MTV was a nonstop parade of scantily clad women in suggestive poses. (This sexually permissive culture was itself a reaction to the decades of sexual repression and conservative shaming, a time when sodomy was still technically illegal and teens were taught about sex through lectures about abstinence and doom-laden stories of how it will inevitably end in disease, pregnancy, and death. Aged 15, I was given a pamphlet that gave 101 alternatives to having sex: “bake a cake”, “hold hands”, “go on a walk”.)

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Since their peak in the 2000s, spreading to almost every state in America, purity balls have largely died down. But while there might be fewer father/daughter dances and cringe-inducing photo shoots, virginity pledges are back, albeit in a different form and for different reasons. It’s not surprising that the deeply patriarchal ritual of the purity pledge — swearing an oath to your father to obey; he in turn praying to a heavenly father for guidance — didn’t survive waves of vigorous social justice movements over the past few decades. Celibacy culture has instead fused with a secular self-care culture that prizes autonomy and comfort above all. While a decent percentage of the TikTok videos making declarations of virginity are from Christian and Islamic influencers and creators, most are not.

One particular trend on TikTok has involved dancing to The Weeknd’s satirical song “I’m a Virgin”. It was originally created for the animated show American Dad as a way of poking fun of the singer’s playboy image, but for many members of the platform it was taken sincerely. (The lyrics in the videos include “I’m a virgin / never got close enough / cell phone blowin’ up, but I’m waiting / for the right person”, but cut off before getting to things like “inside I’m a 12-year-old boy” or “the power of God in my loins”.) There are still videos being made of men and women of various ages lip syncing to the camera, professing their desire to find the right one.

TikTok is not a great way to get information about anything, in general. The viral videos found under hashtags involving virginity include both diatribes about why the idea of virginity is a myth and the word should be replaced in the lexicon with “sexual debut” and people proclaiming that losing your virginity is so painful for women it is common to develop PTSD from your first sexual act. But TikTok has a well-documented contagion factor, with followers mimicking not just dances but behaviors, politics, language, and even mental disorders that they watch being performed on the platform. While not too long ago someone remaining a virgin past a certain age, say 20 or so, was seen as strange or pathetic, now virginity until marriage is roundly celebrated and normalised on social media.

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Much has been made about the younger generation’s tendency toward prudery. Generation Z, or the Zoomers, have some of the lowest rates of sexual activity in generations. They wait longer to initiate sexual relationships, are more likely to have long stretches of celibacy, and, so far at least, have low rates of partnership. They’ve turned the stereotype of youths being the most transgressive and sexually active demographic on its head.

While they don’t share the justification for the celibacy — whether it’s patriarchal desires to control the female body or God’s commandments about morality — they do overlap with the religious Right in their desire to counter, and sometimes control, the oversexualised mainstream, which many view as harmful rather than liberatory. There is a worrying tendency when it comes to matters of sex to find these strange alliances between the far-Left and the far-Right, such as in the Eighties when several prominent feminists found themselves working alongside Evangelicals in their bid to outlaw pornography. Their reasons were different — the dehumanisation and objectification of women versus an unholy industry built on temptation and sins of the flesh — but their objective was the same.

With the new puritans, the concern tends not to focus on sexual deviancy but instead focuses on the ethics. They came of age when the culture had a libertine surface, awash in the sometimes violent imagery of online pornography, the legitimisation of sex work, and the proliferation of new and very specific sexual identities. But roiling alongside this were noisy and painful conversations about rape culture, sexual predators, and abusive romantic relationships.

So much of the online sexual puritans’ discourse can be understood as thinking out loud as they try to figure out how to be sexually active in a less harmful way. That they don’t seem to understand just how many previous generations have tied themselves up in similar knots to figure this out is just a problem of youth, not ignorance. The strange directions that online consent discourse take can certainly be off-putting. There is a popular idea on social media that movies should not have sex scenes, with people creating various justifications for why this is: from “it is potentially uncomfortable for asexual viewers”, to “asking actors to simulate sex is unethical” and even “we as viewers do not have the consent of the fiction characters to watch them engaging in sexual activity”. The logic was confusing to all who witnessed.

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Philosophical musings about the meaning and value of human sexuality is one thing, and designing hard and fast rules that you expect everyone else to follow is another. Discussions about whether “age gap” relationships are harmful have turned into online harassment of celebrities and public figures who have significantly younger romantic partners. The perennial “should there be kink at Pride parades” conversation can lead to threats against queers from older generations for whom being public and open about their sexuality after decades of repression and shame is still freeing.

As long as these declarations of right and wrong come with condemnation and control, it’s going to be hard to differentiate their notion of “consent” from the Christian idea of “purity”. But this is just another chapter of the long struggle humankind has had with their own sexuality, controlling it, understanding it, sublimating it. For all the handwringing and panic, it’s good to remember that today’s repression will inevitably fuel tomorrow’s liberation.