How to Have Sex (2023)
Directed by Molly Manning Walker
Yes — How to Have Sex is woke, scoring 60 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
How to Have Sex arrives with a title that promises instruction and delivers, instead, a slow bruise.
Consciousness Markers
A female-directed, female-authored story centered on teenage girls' sexual agency, peer pressure, and the aftermath of assault, explicitly framed as a post-#MeToo reckoning with consent culture.
A female-driven ensemble led by three teenage girls, with a Black supporting lead (Enva Lewis as Em) and a lesbian character (Paige) woven into the group dynamic, all under a female director.
The film carries a clear consent-and-assault message, but critics note its deliberate ambiguity and restraint; it dramatizes rather than preaches, keeping the didacticism muted.
Paige is a lesbian character and Em openly intends to hook up with her, giving the film a casual, unremarked queer thread, though it remains a minor subplot rather than a central concern.
Em is played by a Black actress, but the film never engages race as a theme or comments on it; her casting is incidental to the story's concerns.
No environmental or climate themes appear anywhere in the film.
The party-resort setting is a backdrop for adolescent experience, not a critique of wealth, class, or capitalism.
Body image and body-positivity are not themes the film engages with.
No neurodivergent characters or themes are present.
The film is a contemporary fictional narrative with no historical revisionism.
Why it received this score
How to Have Sex arrives with a title that promises instruction and delivers, instead, a slow bruise. Molly Manning Walker's debut follows three sixteen-year-old girls to a Cretan party resort, where the drinking is relentless, the balconies sit close enough for conversation, and the summer is meant to be the best of their lives. The camera stays low and near. We live inside the noise, the hangovers, the small humiliations that accumulate into something worse. This is a female-authored, female-directed account of adolescent sexual agency, and it carries its post-#MeToo concerns without much fuss. Consent is the organizing subject from the first frame to the last, though the film prefers to dramatize the ambiguity. Tara's assault is handled with a restraint that makes it more upsetting, not less, and the airport exchange lands as a quiet reckoning.
The ensemble is led by three girls, with a Black supporting lead and a lesbian thread folded in without ceremony. Em's queerness and her intended hookup with Paige pass unremarked, which is its own kind of progress, and the script never stops to explain them. Race is not a subject here. Em's casting is incidental, and the film declines to comment on it. Nor does it care about money, climate, bodies, or brains. The resort is a backdrop, not a thesis. Nobody lectures about capital. Nobody worries about the planet. There is no neurodivergent arc, no body-image detour, no historical revision. What remains is narrow and sharp: sex, pressure, and the failure of adults to appear.
Walker's restraint is the film's best argument. It shows instead of sermonizes, and the sermonizing it does permit arrives in a single line from a friend. That line is enough. The film took the top prize in Cannes's Un Certain Regard, which tells us the festival circuit recognizes a well-mannered reckoning when it sees one. It is serious, sad, occasionally funny, and its politics are of the specific contemporary sort now unavoidable in British coming-of-age cinema. We classify it accordingly.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Three British teenage girls go on a rites-of-passage holiday—drinking, clubbing and hooking up, in what should be the best summer of their lives.
Questions about How to Have Sex
Is How to Have Sex woke?
Yes — How to Have Sex is woke, scoring 60 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Woke.
What makes How to Have Sex woke?
4 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by Feminist Agenda (85), Representation Casting (60) and Lecture Energy (40). On Feminist Agenda: A female-directed, female-authored story centered on teenage girls' sexual agency, peer pressure, and the aftermath of assault, explicitly framed as a post-#MeToo reckoning with consent culture.
How does How to Have Sex compare to other 2023 movies?
It ranks #14 of the 200 films from 2023 we've scored; their average is 24. The wokest is Origin (84).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.