Diary of a Teenage Virgin

‘Do I go on top or bottom?’ ‘What if I bleed over him?’ ‘I hate foreplay. I hate those straps… they make you look like a rapist’. In a country where more than a quarter of young girls have already had sex by the time they reach 16, such are the things they and their male counterparts fret about, as shared with Emma Young in her enjoyably revealing film.

While it might shock older viewers with its frank comments, it carefully steers clear of sensationalising the subject, roving across the different aspects of sex faced by virgins. And what do you know; it’s really not that different to what teenagers have faced for decades – pressure to lose virginity, to perform, to do things they’re uncomfortable with, worries about the pain, potential awkwardness and doing it properly, all the stuff associated with no real-life experience set against an increasingly distorted view of sex through the use of porn.

It’s this aspect of the teenagers’ sexual ‘knowledge’ that’s the most worrying, but even here there are moments of heartening level-headedness, as 17-year-old Connor contemplates the need to put his 979Gb porn collection behind him; it all combines to offer some warm-hearted wisdom to a much wider audience than curious virgins.