A 30something gets a job teaching sex ed to high schoolers despite the fact that she’s still a virgin in this film co-written by Singh directed by Sarah Zandieh.

Doin’ It revolves around surely the most literal interpretation imaginable of the old saying “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” Lilly Singh stars as Maya, who stumbles almost by accident into a job teaching sex ed, despite still being a virgin. As she schools her kids on everything from consent to gender identity to orgasms, Maya sets out to unlearn the shame that she herself internalized at that age — and maybe even to get laid for the first time.

Doin’ It‘s NSFW sensibility is front and center from the very first scene, in which a 15-year-old Maya has semen squirted in her face twice in five minutes by a friend who cannot control his excitement at getting to see her boobs. Her curiosity turns to humiliation, however, when a mishap involving a stage curtain reveals the moment to an entire auditorium of students and parents. Horrified, Maya’s mother (Sonia Dhillon Tully’s Veena) sends her packing to India, where her urges are further disciplined out of her: When she’s caught playing MASH in class, she’s made to stand outside in the heat “until all your dirty thoughts melt away.” By the time Maya returns to the States as a 30something software engineer shilling for a teen-oriented app, she’s hardly more experienced than she was as a teen. But in an effort to research her target demo, she picks up the teaching job and simultaneously tries to catch up on all the adolescent experiences she missed way back then.

Meanwhile, the film extends sincere empathy toward Maya’s struggle to internalize in private the sex-positive values she espouses in public. “I’m confident with everything else but when it comes to this stuff, it’s like I’m broken,” she cries after a date with a cute fellow teacher (Trevor Salter) ends with her cruelly projecting her own fears about being “weak” and “prudish” onto him.

Her arc is neatly complemented by her mother’s. When Veena insists she couldn’t possibly date because she’s not that kind of woman — even while she laps up storylines about middle-aged romance on Never Have I Ever — we see how repression gets handed down the generations. In that light, Maya’s determination to break the cycle with her own students feels all the more noble.

The problem is that Doin’ It‘s idea of Maya’s work is so underbaked, it’s practically raw. “Maybe I have an opportunity here,” she muses when Jess mentions that half the schools in the state don’t even have sex ed, and that’s all it takes for Maya to decide to throw out the abstinence-only curriculum mandated by the district. On her first day, she’s so green she doesn’t know the difference between an IUD and a UTI. Seemingly overnight, she’s playing Betty Dodson videos and breaking down the best woman-on-top sex positions without so much as batting an eye. In doing so, she’s framed as an inspirational teacher in the Dead Poets Society mold, meeting her students at their own level in defiance of the oppressive standards that define the world around them. But the script, by Singh, director Sara Zandieh and Neel Patel, is never very clear about the challenges or the stakes she faces.

“We need a sexual revolution, and it starts in this place, today,” Maya declares in a dramatic speech, and she’s not wrong — her own storyline in Doin’ It serves as a warning of how the damage wrought by shame can take years or decades or entire lifetimes to move past. But if today’s youth indeed deserve honesty, the film might start by being a bit more candid about what the sex-positivity movement is really up against.