The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
The girls’ holiday is a vital rite of passage – and it’s not just for teenagers
As new film ‘How to Have Sex’ shows the darker side of this defining experience, Sarah Rodrigues recalls her own (mis)adventures
Last weekend saw the release of How to Have Sex, the directorial debut from Molly Manning Walker. It follows three 16-year-old girls on their post-GCSE hurrah in Crete, charting their bonds, their misdemeanours, their highs, their lows and – inevitably – their sexual encounters.
The film raises questions around peer pressure and consent which, looked at through a modern lens, may be troubling – yet so many of us lived through and even celebrated these experiences with scarcely a thought about their appropriateness. And still we go on girls’ holidays – and allow our daughters to go on them – because they’re a rite of passage and one that becomes woven into the fabric of our friendships.
They persist beyond exam results and into birthdays, hen dos, and escaping the responsibilities of family life. I’ve even been on all-girl holidays where we’ve taken our kids and left the partners at home, because it just all works so seamlessly – indeed, we’ve fantasised about how fabulous it would be to live in an all-female commune.
Growing up in Australia, hopping on a flight to a clubby European town wasn’t an option – but out-of-town partying certainly was. Many of my friends’ families owned beach houses north of Sydney and weekends away – where the parents were supposedly “going to be there” – were an easy sell to our parents, especially in the absence of iPhones and constant connection.
Fake IDs, mixing drinks, midnight skinny-dipping, half-conscious encounters, projectile vomiting and next-day bleurgh were not only the norm: they were celebrated.
Our favourite club was called er, Fanny’s. Boys paid $10 to get in and drinks were full price; girls paid $5 on the door and received a stamp and a plastic cup, which could be refilled endlessly at the bar. Did we care that we were being groomed to be taken advantage of? Did we heck. We congratulated one another on our “conquests” when they were with someone “hot” and chortled with delighted horror when they weren’t.
“Oh my god, I was so out of it,” was said, not with shame, but as a matter of fact that everyone would get a kick out of. Countless virginities were lost on those idyllic beaches; countless regrets were, even if secretly, amassed.
So was I anxious when my 17-year-old daughter took off on her own teen odyssey to Majorca earlier this year? Hell, yes. I don’t think I’ve ever slept as little or spent as much time anxiously checking “Find my iPhone”. Yet I’d been far more involved in the planning of her holiday than my parents ever were with mine, not only booking her flights and securing her accommodation, but also talking to the parents of her travel companions.
She messaged several times a day, often showing me photos of her outfit for the night – outfits that made my heart jump into my throat – and yet to which I replied: “You look gorgeous sweetheart. Have fun, be safe, look after each other.”
I know I’m lucky to have this closeness and openness with my daughter: two of her friends skulked away for a week in Barcelona at the age of 15, creating a fake website and email address to convince their parents that they were travelling to the city with school as part of their Spanish studies. Many cervezas and chicos later, they returned to London, their Spanish speaking still well below par, but their sense of achievement sky-high.
In Australia, the holiday that follows the end of secondary school is known as Schoolies Week. I was a few weeks shy of 18 when I tackled the 16-hour coach ride from Sydney to Surfers Paradise with my friends – not that being underage mattered. Suffice to say I’ve never, since that week, done a tequila slammer.
Inevitably, my own all-girls’ getaways have changed over time, but they are still among my most uplifting experiences, even when things have gone awry. On a long weekend in Philadelphia, my friend and I delightedly hit the thrift stores when our baggage went missing, and played (very innocently) on the fact that our hotel was next to a convention centre (for anyone who says they struggle to meet men – seriously; stay at a hotel near a convention centre).
On a trip to Cork, my friends and I stocked up at the English market, ate and drank ourselves silly in our Airbnb, dissected our marriages and danced wildly on the sofa to Icona Pop’s I Love It. Last summer, a group of us travelled to Ibiza for five hedonistic days of celebrating 50th birthdays – complete with luxury villa, pool, boat, VIP entry to all the clubs and a driver.
None of this is written to diminish the fact that horrible, reprehensible things do sometimes happen, whether on holiday or at home. But do I look back on any of my own girls’ trips with regret? Perhaps I would if I could remember any of them clearly – but no. Perhaps I was lucky. Sure, they were frequently cringeworthy and, with hindsight, a tad unsavoury, but – at the time at least – we thought we were living the dream. And that, plus cementing those incredible female bonds, is what it will always be about.