Teen girls crave older male partners - an uncomfortable truth British society ignores

Ever since the Film Classification Board slapped new flick Diary of a Teenage Girl with an ironic 18 rating - prohibiting most teenagers from seeing it in the cinema - critics and viewers have rushed to laud its brutally honest representation of youth sexuality.

I watched the film in utter glee, thinking the whole time how much I hoped that girls across the country would watch badly pirated copies on their laptops. You see they need to be exposed to its glorious message: female teens are painfully, burningly and aggressively horny.

Almost a decade ago, when I was 15 (the same age as the film’s protagonist) there was no Caitlin Moran writing blatantly about learning to masturbate, there were no self help websites telling you that your burgeoning sexuality was normal and there was no Diary of a Teenage Girl. Instead the myth that girls didn’t masturbate was still hanging around. Even in the early 2000s, we came of age believing that teenage boys were the randy ones.

It’s a beautiful film – and not just for proving teen girls have also have a huge sex drive. But it did leave me with someone uncomfortable realisations.

• Bel Powley interview: 'I want loads of girls to see Diary of a Teenage Girl and share my experience'

At the most basic level, Diary of a Teenage Girl is a film about a 15-year-old girl who has a lot of extremely gratifying sex with a man who is 20 years her senior and happens to be going out with her mother. Which, when you think about it sounds rather a lot like an abuse case.

But it’s not. It’s not abusive because the protagonist, Minnie, doesn’t feel abused. The conclusion of the film suggests that she might regard her affair with him as a mistake, but mistakes and abuse are entirely different things.

The story left me wondering if perhaps the way we try to protect young women in 2015 might actually be preventing them from having experiences, making mistakes and really living their lives.

Of course it’s a different story for boys. Male sexuality apparently doesn’t need to be protected. We smile when we hear stories of people such as Lord Byron, or more recently US rapper Chris Brown - who both lost their virginity before the age of 12. Imagine the sympathetic tones that we’d adopt if the genders of these high profile figures were reversed.

So why do we treat early male sexual encounters as so much less shocking than female?

Because despite all the ways in which sex has changed in the last hundred years, we persist in thinking of boys as randy little buggers who want sex, and girls as delicate little flowers who are victims.

The desire to protect young women from abusive or predatory sexual relationships is a noble sentiment, and one that no reasonable person could disparage. But is it possible that this sentiment, whatever its merit, could be depriving young women of their right to have gratifying sexual relationships in their sexual infancy, and keeping them from the essential right of passage of making mistakes?

Age of consent differs throughout Europe

The intangible nature of when a young person is ready to start exploring their sexuality is reflected in the variety of ages of consent across the developed world. Ranging from 14 in countries such as Austria and Portugal, up to 18 in places like Malta and Turkey.

But even in those more liberal countries that set the age of consent in the early or mid teens, there’s a strong precedent for further litigation of the relative ages of the people involved. The Netherlands, often held up as an example because of its low pregnancy and STD rates, allows for sexual activity between the ages of 12 and 16, but in order to have legal sex with someone over 16 you must also be over sixteen.

Again, the motivation behind this legislation is to protect young people from abuse. But it doesn’t take away from the uncomfortable fact that Diary of a Teenage Girl presents unabashedly: sex with someone who is skilled and experienced is a far more gratifying experience than sex with someone who doesn’t know what a clitoris is.

_{The movie's official trailer}

Sexual skill and experience do tend to manifest more often in older people, just the same as skills at snooker or wine tasting. Practice makes perfect, and practice comes with age. So is it any wonder that young women continue to enter into sexual relationships with older men that are at best frowned upon and at worst illegal?

Assuming that any teenage girl who has a sexual relationship with someone who is older than her is automatically a victim denies the uncomfortable truth that Diary of a Teenage Girl strives to present. Young women have sexual agency. They have desires just like young men do, and they have the right to seek gratification for those urges. And sometimes the sex that you want as a teenager turns out to have been a poor choice. But getting things wrong is how we learn to walk, talk, read and eventually how we learn to carry on meaningful sexual and romantic relationships.

We have become increasingly litigious as a society, and that’s echoed in our attitude towards teenage sex. It’s completely right that those people who take advantage sexually of young people should suffer for their actions. But should legal recourse be the first reaction? I’ve written in the past about how it is safe to assume abuse in a wide age-gap relationship – publicly decrying Adam Johnston. But I can’t help but wonder if perhaps I’ve disregarded female agency in my assumption of abuse.

Perhaps a better system than legislating for teenage sex would be to create a better culture of honestly between teenagers and their parents, teachers and role models. If young women felt that they could open a dialogue without fear of recourse, it would be infinitely easier to monitor relationships that were abusive, thus allowing space for those that are not.

When the Netherlands is praised for its low teen pregnancy rates – it’s usually attributed to the country’s decent sex education and readily available contraception. Rarely does anyone mention that Dutch parents actively encourage an open dialogue about sexual relationships with their children.

Not all teenage girls who have sex with older partners end up feeling that they have been abused. There is a difference between a sexual experience that was in retrospect a mistake, and a sexual experience that was abuse. Most young women are capable of telling the difference between the two, if we just allow them the freedom to do so.