*Fuck. Fuck, oh fuck. Fuck-f-f-f-f—*the overlay audio plays, the sitting ducks of the I Want Your Sex audience bracing themselves for a salacious opener. Except, it was just Cooper Hoffman—or Elliot, whimpering forward in his baby-bop silky pink lingerie, his ravelled socks slipping against the patio, nose gushing in new blood. Erika Tracy, played by the sensational Olivia Wilde, is Elliot’s naked and very-dead (supposedly) interdisciplinary arts sex-positive but extremely emotions-negative Dom employer, who is floating in a pool meters away. Oh, fuck. Opening credits.
I Want Your Sex, which was released recently on July 31, starred not only Hoffman and Wilde, but Chase Sui Wonders (Apple), Mason Gooding (Zap), and Charli XCX (Minerva—Elliot’s American-sorta girlfriend who hates him). I Want Your Sex, brought to theaters by cult-followed indie-legend Gregg Araki (The Doom Generation, Mysterious Sex) was the filmmaker’s exciting attempt to alchemize the conversation looming around Gen-Z and their (our, your, my) sex life—or lack thereof. From an article Araki read (scripted into an early scene with Elliot and Erika), a very, um,* low* percentage of Gen-Z are and were having sex. Whether that percentage came from The Atlantic’s 2018’s “Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?” Or possibly, NPR’s “Gen Z is afraid of sex – and for good reason”, and most recently with the ‘New Yorks’: The New Yorker’s “Are Young People Having Enough Sex?” and New York Times’ “Gen Z-ers Are Ditching Sex. They Might Be Onto Something.”, there’s an obvious theory swimming around Gen-Z’s cultural waters; sex is out, or maybe it never really came in, an uprising in virginity reclamation and what The Guardian labels, “The Sex Recession.”
Perhaps, that is the case. When Erika sat on her couch, smoking her very waist-skinny capri, asking Elliot about the sexually-repressed generation he lives in, his answer is everything that the journalists are calling into question.
Mostly, since Elliot is a cis-hetero straight man who yearns to start a podcast (hmmm), his answer isn’t outright about a cultural demographic traumatized by COVID-19, or the overturn of Roe v. Wade—as overturning this was the least sexiest (and most disgusting) act a government could do, but more so a lot of the other stuff, which is also true and certainly connected; the technology problem. Gregg Araki who puppeteers the conversation between the millennial jezebel and his passive Gen-Z de-penetrated puppy, is trying to get to the heart of an issue about technology, about their (our, your, my) fears.
I’ll say this, when I first heard this film was coming out, and read Araki’s remarks about this generation being hoity-toity and self-deprecating, I was deeply offended. As someone who is currently practicing abstinence (you just have to laugh), and has struggled with a deep-rooted awkwardness around sex, I had read his thoughts and immediately went: “well, does he know what we’ve been through?” I listed off what was mentioned earlier, and hell—probably planned to come up with a pitching idea to go against his opinions, because this wasn’t the first time a man had preemptively written and directed an idea centered around sex and youth. Sam Levinson, please step forward.
In 2019, Euphoria hit the streets of Generation-Z hard like the xandemic. Labrinth’s scoring was heavenly as a climax, fluttering over pink and lilac-shadowed scenes, Rue sat cross-legged in a burgundy hoodie with her lips just peekingly ajar, eyes rolled back in her head to somewhere so separate from here. And we loved it.
Euphoria, this generation’s Skins—one of the first shows to introduce that ‘stockings ripped up on the side’ and smudged mascara flamboyance—solidified the stardust of Hunter Schafer, Jacob Elordi, Alexa Demie, and Sydney Sweeney. Zendaya, who had already felt like a supernova from her Disney days, became practically immortal. I AM GIA two piece sets and glittery eyeshadow stormed Pinterest and Halloween parties. Levinson—even with the aggressive sex scenes for Jules and Cal, or the rough implications of buck-breaking and hazing culture surrounding McKay—gave us scenes that did feel like girl-world or a rowdiness only a teenager of today can have. So, we were all excited for season two.
And before season two, we received those special episodes. If I could go back in time, to pressing play on Jules’s episode, I absolutely would. The episodes about Rue and Jules were handled with so much grace and patience, I had felt soft when I’d watched them. I watched Rue sit with Ali at their diner, sobered thoughts gathering together until they braided into a quilt. It was the first time a watcher could find even a hint of peace behind Rue’s eyes.
Jules, with her bare and softly-freckled face sat on her therapist’s couch, she ruminated about how the femininity she’d been promenading to secure, was actually at the expense of everything she desired. Her memories were oversaturated with the grunts of men, them using her body like a harness to climb a mountain, for a horizon she never saw. That conclusion, I wanted to cradle that sadness, because it was also my sadness, and sadness everywhere for anyone who’s ever stopped to think about their experiences.
But when season two came out that first week of January 2022 like a popped bottle (maybe like that one Fezco used), my Jules came back with a bob and a lobotomy.
Season two, which closed the curtains on Kat, and put Cassie in Nate’s car, no longer represented the gentleness that was previously there, in the glimpses of that first season, and especially within those two episodes. And maybe that has something to do with Schafer being the writer of that Jules episode. Albeit, it may be about the philosophical lens Levinson seemed to be centering.
There were many hints. The consistent scenes showcasing Sweeney’s dreamies, the strict and obtuse tension lingering between Nate and Jules which never tore open the underbelly of Nate’s sexuality, or the fact that Jules and Elliot (remember him?) went off on their own rendezvous which directly went against what Jules had outed in her session. The gaze was changing.
“You just love being loved!” Rue shouted in Jules face, tolerantly-panicking. So, couldn’t we get more of that? Could we have had more of that desperation, of that fragility? The grief Rue stumbles through from the death of her father is packed up in a suitcase of drugs, the only item left in there before Rue is possibly sex-trafficked. Could we have had more of that grief? A grief that starts healing? Nope, just onto season three.
In 2026, when the high school hallways are replaced with chase scenes and Mexican borders, any and all of those previous relationships, the softness and sensitivity of them are completely overturned for plotlines around strip clubs, Onlyfans, sex-trafficking, and drug mules.
The opening episode of the first season brought the longest scene I’ve ever watched: Rue and Faye (drug-mule coworker from season two) gagging on steamed dumpling-sized balls of fentanyl. Although Toby Wallace (Wayne) is a pleasure to see, I’m also distracted by the dog licking up the side of Faye’s upper-thigh, or the multi-purpose spaghetti strainer I personally wouldn’t eat from. There’s a lot going on, and it has nothing to do with the characters.
Cassie became a cam girl, biting off Kat’s nachos, her home away from Nate (who’s somewhere getting his toes cut off) is beautified in all the many sizings of fan-sent dildos, her new fame inflating her head so much she becomes topless King-Kong. It’s the fact that I’m not even being hyperbolic here. Sam Levinson’s season three, which has all of the shock value and Zendaya’s five-star acting, is telling a different story about sex and youth.
Through watching I Want Your Sex, Araki shut me up in terms of my previous opinions. I closed my mouth, then opened it—wider and wider—because I just couldn’t stop laughing. Araki was in on the Gen-Z joke. Levinson was the voyeuristic neighbor spying from the building across.
In I Want Your Sex, from those kitschy neon-orange walls of Elliot and Apple’s living room, Zap and Elliot gum-chewing debriefs, and even the montages of Elliot and Erika throughout their entanglement, position the topic of sex to feel comedically-inviting. Like, *if you’re nervous—just take a look around! *
Even though with Euphoria we worked for those heart-aching scenes, the audience was pushed into a season one that often exercised hollow hotel rooms and backstories riddled with shame. At the center of Levinson’s world of plum was a pulp to harvest shame. And from that, it makes sense how we got here. To all of this shame.
Euphoria was constantly architecting stories about relationships and their power. Rue and Jules, Nate and Jules, Maddie and Cassie, Cassie and McKay, Cassie and Nate, Rue and Alamo, Rue and Laurie—relationships grinding against each other for the clutch of power. To even push further, all of that backlogged humiliation, most of the time it never wired into any vulnerability, just cataclysms. As though rejection and embarrassment are signs of weakness, that someone has taken something from you, which you must go and get back by any means necessary.
Araki, who tenderized even a dom and sub relationship, who allowed a man to be at that position of submission (so that men could feel safe to be that—submissive), wanted to ensure the group he made this for, to the eighteens-nineteens-and the-welcome-aboard-twenties, to the twenty-ones, twos, threes (Elliot), fours (hey, that’s me!), fives, six-seven, eights and the last age of the Z—twenty nine, to reach into their heart for all that jadedness, and rip it out.
A jadedness, which glows from our loss: the pandemic simulacrum we endured, and to now living inside of a fascist subterranean armpit. A jadedness, from our heartbreak: friendships and relationships dying, without resuscitation. To what’s left underneath that, the anxiety: of having a high body count when Maddie’s is so low, of getting pregnant like Cassie—end tweet, of becoming like Nate, a kayaker in the red-pill PornHub no pubic hair tide.
This is the age of Overstimulated-Z, Gen-Para-Social, Gen-Afraid—afraid to experience:
“Ugh, yeah—um, wait, just give me a second. Could you uh, could you just—like, play with it a little?”
To:
“Yes! Yes, yes, exactly right there—wait, why did you stop?”
“Sorry, I finished. Wait, did you finish?”
“No.” *Obviously. *
The honorable mentions:
“Fuck, it just broke!”
“Can you just venmo me twenty-five, I’ll get it tomorrow.”
“Which day of your period are you on? Oof—day two?”
“Don’t run.”
“Where do you want me to—” “Oh, my chest, do it on my chest—fuck! That’s my fucking eye!”
“This just isn’t working. Yeah, sorry, can you go please?”
Since, if we went in, to grab that jadedness, to massage at it, and then throw it out, we could possibly get to:
*“Dude.” *
“That might’ve been one of our best.”
“You up for another one?”
And with characters like Zap, who are constantly trying new sexual adventures, some with just one, others where you can bring a plus one, Araki is reminding us that regardless of sexuality, we must live in a state of nuance, a likeness for surprise. We must figure out what we do and don’t like, because even though it can feel banal to put a YOLO sticker on top of these very turbulent conversations hydroplaning around us, we are truly only this once.
These conversations will still be here for us in the morning when we look around a stranger’s bedroom for our bras. We, you, and I cannot spend this age in liege to self-deprecation, wallowing will not bring us a revolution. We, you, and I must spend everyday as if it was the only one where pre-marital sex was legal—oh fuck, wrong movie.
JoliAmour DuBose-Morris is a multimedia journalist and screenwriter based in New York and California.
JoliAmour is currently in her final year of her B.A. at The University of San Francisco where she’s focusing on film and journalism.