We made a list of the best teen movie v-card scenes – good, bad and ugly. Because virginity... who needs it?
The movies get a fair few things wrong – eg: people forgetting to say goodbye before they put the phone down; the implausibility of coolly walking away from a massive explosion; everything that happens in Fast and Furious 9 – but they tend to get scenes of teenagers losing their virginity entirely, awkwardly right. While they pop up in a miscellany of adult-oriented movies, like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Call Me By Your Name, sex scenes are an absolute fixture in teen flicks.
That unique cocktail of nerves, tentative connection and horndog excitement – usually augmented by about a keg’s worth of liquor – is absolute gold for Hollywood screenwriters, many of whom will probably have had their own experiences in mind as they created these 14 memorable moments of first lust.
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A sun-warmed coming-of-age film concerned with popping cherries (and the odd peach), Call Me By Your Name’s abashed-but-sincere virginity scene shows that it’s possible to express and repress your desires at the same time. When 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) hooks up for a roll on the lawn with Marzia (Esther Garrel), its pleasures can’t mask the fact that his stronger urges are for studly American Oliver (Armie Hammer). Bonus points for doing the deed ’80s-style in double denim.
This Wayne’s World sequel affords the dorky but loveable Garth the opportunity to pop his cherry to the not-even-slightly-dorky Honey Hornée and the rest of us the chance to feel marginally less bad about our first times. If Garth had an actual physical shell he would have retreated into it long before Kim Basinger’s Honey is part-way through her purring seduction. The pillow chat is hilariously off-the-mark (‘Can I be frank?’ ‘Can I still be Garth?’), but the morning-after reinvention as a suave, pipe-chewing lotherio with shades of Cary Grant is pure genius.
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