Are party holidays ever that fun?

Forget GCSEs or landing your first part-time job. Nothing screamed growing up in Britain like embarking on your first European party holiday, armed with an alarming lack of SPF or common sense but a suitcase packed full of skimpy outfits and condoms.

Every summer, thousands of young Britons would jet off to Greece, Cyprus or Spain, having signed up for a week of raucous hedonism provided by travel companies like Club 18-30. They’re getting steadily less popular – Gen Z don’t really drink, after all – but the themes explored in Molly Manning-Walker’s new film, How to Have Sex, remain universal. Set in the Greek resort of Malia, Crete, Manning-Walker’s debut feature won the Un Certain Regard prize at this year’s Cannes. 

It follows three 16-year-olds – beautiful but inexperienced Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), loud-mouth Skye (Lara Peake) and clever Em (Enva Lewis) – having a blast on their ‘Best holiday ever!’ But it soon gives way to a nightmarish conveyor belt of leering men, scarring sexual experiences and the lingering feeling that, maybe, the three of them are not such good friends after all.

I spent most of my teens and early twenties going on similar holidays, and Manning-Walker’s films hit close to home. In Kavos, Corfu, aged 19, I became acquainted with the island’s following specialities: the ‘headf—er’, a jug of vodka, rum and gin combined with Haribo sweets and no mixer; the ‘dentist’s chair’, which involved lying on your back on the bar while a barman pours liquor down your throat; free entry and drinks all night if you were a girl (and willing to overlook the constant catcalls).

In Ayia Napa, a few years later, my friends and I decided to forget everything we wrote about feminism in university essays and committed to living like extras from Girls Gone Wild. Clothes were lost in the midst of a beachfront foam party. Poles and bar tops became dance floors. My friend rode around the strip, in her underwear, on a quad bike. We all boarded the flight home as pale as when we set off, having spent the majority of our time hungover, safe in the shade of the bar, eating chips. And the sheer amount of alcohol, god. It would have left Lucius Verus shaking and sickly.

Watching the film’s trio crowd around a cheap plastic table with the lairy Northern lads from the apartment next door, knocking back shot after shot, playing drinking games like ‘Never Have I Ever’ – a truly evil invention that serves only to humiliate – I was struck by just how realistic it was. 

After Tara takes a sip of her drink when asked if she’s had sex before (to indicate she has), Skye takes her into the bathroom and chides her for lying about not being a virgin. Teenage girls can be excessively cruel and competitive, and never more so than when it comes to sex. As a teenager, my friends and I would make tally charts to keep track of how many boys we’d snogged; the first schoolfriend to lose her virginity became a playground celebrity, the rest of us clustering around her like vultures. That’s why, later in the film, when Tara actually does it for the first time – cold, half-naked, on a public beach – I could recognise Skye’s fury, masked as excitement. Here is somebody only masquerading at friendship. 

At the time, these holidays felt like the ultimate source of freedom. There were no parents and seemingly no morals. Imagine Freshers Week without the plethora of self-obsessed posh boys whose bedroom walls are covered in posters of Che Guevara and Jeremy Corbyn. But the constant flirting and partying mask a darker underbelly: one where, at any point, the hot boys you met turn out to be uninterested in anything other than sex; where too many drinks render you helpless, and dodgy figures lurk in the corners of every club.

In the film, Tara has sex for the first time with a boy who doesn’t care about her (and later assaults her) and she feels awful afterwards. But she doesn’t want to seem boring, so she keeps quiet; I don’t know many young women who haven’t done the same – woken up after a night out with the niggling feeling that something, or someone, was off, but not wanting to kick up a fuss.

As the three girls roam around the airport, ready to return home, the camera lingers on Tara: her make-up-free face giving away just how young she is, how much the encounter wasn’t what she wanted. Then she wipes her eyes and smiles, runs through the departure lounge yelling the same old refrain: ‘Best holiday ever!’. Was it really?