Critically-acclaimed and award-winning film How to Have Sex is due to be screened in UK secondary schools to help initiate conversations about consent. The plan is the result of a partnership between the film, distributor Mubi and the Schools Consent Project, a charity that provides workshops led by volunteers with legal training to give young people information about the law around sex.
How to Have Sex explores complexities around the conditions in which people make choices about sex and relationships, and how they communicate and interpret consent. The film follows 16-year-old Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce) on a post-GCSEs holiday to Malia, Crete, with friends Skye and Em.
The aim is to party hard and for Tara, the only one in the group to not have had sex, to lose her virginity. However, while her experience is not what she hoped for, this is not a straightforward cautionary tale of the dangers of drinking and casual sex.
It is encouraging that the Schools Consent Project is offering workshops on consent in schools to explore the issues raised in the film. And taking a legal approach would meet requirements within current statutory guidance for relationships and sex education on consent in England.
But as academics conducting research with young people about relationships and sex education, we have concerns that focusing on the law is inadequate when it comes to teaching people how to communicate with their partners about sex and ethical relationships.
The Schools Consent Project plans to screen the whole film. We’d advise any schools thinking of planning lessons themselves around the film to do this rather than just showing a standalone clip and then questioning young people on whether or not that constitutes consent under the letter of the law.
How to Have Sex contains important messages on communication and empathy, and focusing on specific scenes risks missing out on the wider and more nuanced conversations on consent watching the film could lead to.
Ethical sex
Boys we’ve spoken to in our research work want to know if and when they would be at risk of getting into trouble legally in the event of an allegation of non-consensual sex. They also want to know how to avoid these outcomes.
But framing sex and consent just as a matter of the law does nothing to address how and why consent may come to be compromised in a given situation, nor what it means to have safe and ethical sex based on mutuality and reciprocity.
How to Have Sex offers no easy answers about these complexities and, we’d suggest, shows the limitations of the law. Tara’s first sexual experience with Paddy – characterised by Paddy asking, “Yeah?” and Tara audibly responding, “Yeah,” – probably constitutes legal consent. It is potentially reasonable on the darkened beach where they have sex to misread her grimaces, tears and discomfort as not undermining her expressed agreement.
Paddy may, therefore, be able to avoid getting into trouble legally, but has not necessarily behaved ethically or responsibly toward Tara. The scene raises vital issues about respect and empathy, but if it is not used to have these conversations, it risks feeding into polarised narratives of blame and responsibility for consent – which we have encountered with the young people we’ve worked with.
Tara may be deemed to be at fault for not communicating her discomfort clearly enough to Paddy, or for not talking to her friends. In the film, even her friend Em tells her: “you should have said something.”
Entrenched perceptions
The young people we work with are often pulled between wanting straightforward answers to the complexities associated with topics like consent and wanting acknowledgement that no such answers exist.
If young people and teachers are given the tools and spaces they need to engage in nuanced conversations, there is scope for the film to be helpful. If not, it risks being taken up by young people in ways that entrench, rather than challenge, the gender norms and inequalities that shape attitudes to consent.
These include the still pervasive ideas that it is up to girls to clearly communicate their consent or non-consent to boys, and that it is boys who initiate sex in a transactional – rather than mutual and reciprocal – dynamic. Instead, we need to emphasise to young people that sex should be a mutual process of exploring and establishing what both parties want and agree to.
Films can be a productive means of creating safe distance for having challenging discussions in schools about rape and sexual assault, but it would be a mistake to think this is where the conversation should focus.
The great thing about How to Have Sex is that we get to see the wider events that led to the encounter. We can dissect and understand the characters’ motivations and choices.
Tara is a complex young woman, who is witty and confident yet clearly feels out of place and left behind by her peers. The film avoids simply framing Tara as a helpless victim. Instead she is actively seeking to share intimacy with some of the guys she encounters and is doing what she can to explore her sexuality. But that does not mean she wants the sex she is exposed to.
And at its heart, How to Have Sex is a film about the complex and contradictory emotions of friendship. It’s about connection and how individuals treat one another.
In response to the issues raised in this article, the Schools Consent Project said there was clear appetite from schools for legal education on consent. “We believe that consent education has to be a nuanced and ongoing conversation, not a tick-box or law lecture – neither of which we provide.”
They added: “Having a lawyer lead this conversation is in our experience highly effective … students feel safe knowing that their questions will be accurately answered which in turn encourages open discussion.”
We argue that looking at consent in the film from a legal perspective risks narrowing in on specific scenes of sexual encounters, but this approach does not engage with all the wider dynamics and processes that shape how consent comes to be compromised. And these dynamics are all there in the film – they just need careful discussion.
To avoid these unintended outcomes, the film should be used as a catalyst for discussing the nuances of sex and relationships with young people rather than as a conduit for reinforcing binary, legalistic views on consent.