Little Darlings is also unusual in its focus on the female experience of sexual awakening. Most loss-of-innocence movies are all about the boys, the ill-timed and indiscriminate hard-ons, the premature ejaculations and locker room ribbing played for snickery comedy. But the experience of allowing another human being to enter your body is an especially vulnerable one, and Little Darlings is the only movie I had seen, to date — or perhaps have ever seen — that is willing to treat that with the respect it deserves. (While still being hilariously funny — food fight! Stealing a condom dispenser from a gas station bathroom! Cynthia Nixon as a flower child!) The movie is not antisex — it simply asks that we appreciate the power and potential of sex.
And it is hugely impactful on me. A summer later, at sixteen, I find myself with my first real boyfriend, my own beautiful and sensitive boy I feel I could gaze upon forever. He is more man than boy, actually, he has hit six feet and shaves every day, has a torso that widens to a glorious peach-skin capital V; he is the one in our group we all — boys and girls, gay and straight alike — turn to for erotic leadership in our pack-wolf craving for a whiff of actual grown-up Sex. My friends and I have begun obsessing over who will lose her virginity first, replicating discussions from a few years earlier about who would be the first to get her period, and, in doing so, have created a de facto contest of our own, an unofficial Virginity Sweepstakes. And here this sexy, delicious boy has turned his gaze upon me. I cannot believe my good fortune. Surely he is the one, right? The guy I will lose it to? (A phrase I dislike — I don’t want to lose anything; I want to find something, a transcendently new thing to value, about boys, about bodies, about life, about myself.)
The first time he kisses me — sitting alone on the floor together at one of those rumpus-room parties, but with higher stakes, now, with beer replacing fruit punch and no one’s parents even bothering to be home to watch over us anymore, and Bread singing “I want to make it with you” on the stereo — I feel my first jolt of desire at another person’s touch, my first startling crotch-throb, the first time I ever feel myself go swollen and heated and wet. And that begins a long summer, at the beach, in our cars, in our own homes undisturbed by absent or distracted parents (or any busybody Nurse), in ongoing battle over jean zippers and shirt buttons and hormonal irreconcilability. I spend the summer panting and moaning with lust, but also squirming away at the last second from his curious hands and mouth, his eager hips. I am terrified, and I do not know why, or of what. What am I waiting for, I wonder, someone sweeter, cuter, sexier, more popular? I have grabbed the brass-ring boyfriend, and this is a good guy who will, I’m pretty sure, tell me afterward I am beautiful, that he thinks he might love me, even if only out of good manners. But. . does he care about me, a little. .? Do I even care about him? I can’t really know, and he probably doesn’t know, either. We are sixteen, and our emotions are obscured by that swollen wet heat.
But I can’t do it. Some instinct — or the memory of Angel’s stricken face, her bewildered loneliness in the aftermath of sex — says, Wait: This is an important something, and you do not have to make this important something happen right now. There is no contest, no race to a finish line. And as sweet and tender as this man-boy of mine is, he only tussles and pleads so respectfully so far—a kid your age! — and by September he gives up, and it is over.
I am torn between relief and devastation (Virgins are weird, right?); I dramatically take to my bed for several days, an abandoned, rejected Juliet, pretending I have the flu. I feel so very alone, and yet — thank you, Angel! — I know it is better to feel lonesome without him than feel lonesome with him. I am ready for the longing, yes, but not the consummation; I am not ready to be possessed — or to possess — because I am not yet in possession of myself. I am not ready to be seen-through; I need my invulnerable opacity, the embroidered nightgown, just a little while longer.
LINDA
Stacy, what are you waiting for? You’re fifteen years old! I did it when I was thirteen. It’s no huge thing, it’s just sex,
counsels so-mature Linda (Phoebe Cates), The Worst Best Friend in the World, to baby-faced Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.26 Stacy has just started high school (filmed in the unnamed San Fernando Valley, where I live), she and her friends work at the Mall (the unnamed Sherman Oaks Galleria, where I have spent my teenage years eating corn dogs and buying tank tops while waiting for life to flicker on), and everyone is singularly obsessed with sex: Getting it, talking about it, puzzling through the shifting boundaries of physical and emotional intimacy while trying to pretend it is, of course, no huge thing: It’s just sex.
Stacy worries whether or not she will be any good in bed, and Linda assures her there is no such silly question of “good” or “bad”: “You either do it, or you don’t.” The actual experience is meaningless — it’s all about getting to list it on your résumé. She is appalled Stacy has never given a blow job, and, with patient-teacher voice (“It’s so easy, there’s nothing to it, relax your throat muscles. .”), gives her an impromptu lesson using a carrot in the school cafeteria — it’s free advertising for the boys leering nearby. There is so much pressure to do it already, get it over with, what are you waiting for, what’s the big deal, what’s wrong with you? It is a culture of disdain for and diminishing of any aspect of sexuality beyond the genital, a celebration of cool-chick emotional indifference. It is, in a way, sex reduced once again to a cartoony, two-dimensional paper cutout. Insert Penis A in Vagina B; it’s so easy, a child could do it, and you’re already fifteen!
And then the loss-of-virginity moment: Stacy has found her Romeo/Gary/Randy, a twenty-six-year-old Guy she served pizza to at the Mall and told she is nineteen. After being tucked into her stuffed-animal-festooned twin bed by her mom (“Good night, Stacy!” mom chirps), she sneaks out the window and waits at the corner for his chariot to arrive, while Jackson Browne croons on the diegetic soundtrack how that girl’s just got to be somebody’s baby, she’s so fine. . The Guy tells her she looks beautiful — smooth, this guy, I can almost smell the Aramis — and suggests they go to The Point, the local baseball dugout/sex lair. And here, as in Little Darlings, director Heckerling focuses on the female experience rather than the male; the Guy kisses her, teases whether or not he’ll get to first base — an oblique request for permission to proceed, the Guy’s not an asshole — unbuttons her shirt and crawls on top of her. But we barely even see his face; it is Stacy we focus on, her wincing in pain and unease, her dissociative stare at the graffiti over his shoulder. The scene’s final visual is a long shot; we are suddenly watching them from a distance in the dark, reflecting the emotional detachment of the moment, watching the Guy’s white naked body pumping away.