Watching Towelhead, directed by Allan Ball in 2007, is a disturbing delight. It is the story of a thirteen year old girl who finds out she is a slut, but the process of becoming the slut that she feels she is proves to be rather problematic. First, because as a thirteen year-old most people think she is much too young to love sex as much as she does. She also happens to be a girl and not a boy and people want to protect her from sexuality not let her embrace it. On top of that she lives with her Lebanese father who believes in decency and chastity. But above all, she struggles to be a slut in the face of America, the land of freedom, where embracing sex and being open about it may ruin your life because of gender norms and social models.

While babysitting her neighbor's son, Zack, Jasira finds out some porn magazines and she has her first orgasm masturbating over them. Later, on a date with the father Mr Vuoso, she tells him: when I grow up, I wanna be in your magazines. Although these porn magazines are for men, and even if both Jasira's divorced parents want her to be prude, she cannot help feeling attracted to the joys of debauchery: in various sequences we find her daydreaming about some soft porn photo shootings.

In spite of her angel face and shy attitude, she ends up losing her virginity with her neighbor, who fingers her feverishly when babysitting is over. Along this clandestine, taboo relationship between them, Jasira dates a charming black guy, Thomas, who is careful not to force any sexual intercourse but has to face Jasira's father's hostility, who claims he is not a racist even if he recognizes that he does not want her daughter to hang out with black man. Last, but not least, another neighbor, Melina, prototype of the anti sex feminist, offers Jasira a manual of sexual education for Christmas in which Jasira finds out that she was actually raped by Mr Vuoso.

The movie is disturbing because every adult thinks he knows what is good for Jasira to do, to be, to look for, and in the end her agency is constantly denied because she is perceived as young and innocent. Melina thinks she is a prey for perverts, her father thinks she should not indulge the joys of becoming a woman, her mother sees her as a rival in terms of seduction and a reminder of her own decay, and her neighbor thinks he has her consent when he has sex with her. The power of the movie is to articulate how this teenager, in spite of growing up in a normative, uniform, oppressive context - the American Dream - finds the way to speak for herself and to recognize the legitimacy of her own agency, including in terms of sex as pleasure. Fragile as she is, under the pressure of racism - she is called towelhead because of her Arabic origins - and caught in the conflicts between adults speaking in her name, Jasira gives us a lesson of bravery in her quest for pleasure and rejection of shame. By the end of the movie, the audience is likely to believe she'll become the fierce, proud slut she is meant to be.

The movie is also disturbing because, instead of solving the questions it raises, especially the question of consent in the context of statutory rape, it gives enough food for thought to address this issue without being dogmatic or explicit in its development: Allan Ball loves to trigger that kind of dialectic, suggesting the American way of life is pretty fucked up but asking us to draw the conclusions by ourselves.