‘I Want Your Sex’ Is A Raunchy Plea For Young People To Have More Fun

Everyone believes their generation is uniquely maligned; invariably, so do I. The formative years of my generation—I’m at the older end of the dreaded Gen Z—vanished within the global despair and uncertainty wrought by COVID-19. In lieu of the presence of other human beings, many of us retreated into our phone screens and never left. The pandemic irreparably altered our sense of the future. Many are concerned about the blankness in our eyes. We don’t touch grass; instead, we bed rot. We have taken refuge in therapy speak, are increasingly skeptical of monogamy and our parents’ relationships, and are incredibly, remarkably lonely. The New Yorker buzzily asked in 2025: “Are Young People Having Enough Sex?” From Vice, another headline: “Gen Z Isn’t Having Sex. They’re Doing This Instead.” The “this” we are doing is having “a solid night of sleep.” We may be sleeping—just not with each other.

Enter the 62-year-old director Gregg Araki, who is back with a message for my generation after a 12-year absence from feature filmmaking. His latest movie I Want Your Sex is raucous, jubilant, and unafraid to name the very “chickenshit”—the film’s words, not mine—quirks of today’s young people. Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) is 23 and clueless about his direction in life. On his hands read tattoos that say “Yes?” and “No?” Accordingly, everything the young Elliot does is punctuated with a question mark. Experiences in the world present themselves as either “cool” or “embarrassing” to him. He begins working for Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), an artist whose challenging work is drawn from her own sex life. Erika is indisputably “cool” in Elliot’s estimation—after all, didn’t she have sex with Vincent Gallo at the night of The Brown Bunny premiere? Most of all, we sense that Erika has everything Elliot lacks: drive, identity, a career, a healthy libido.

Araki’s films are landscapes of sex and destruction scored to Slowdive, the Cocteau Twins, and other artists who embody the angst of his young characters. Passion, intensity, and alienation are the fundamental feelings of Araki’s films, many of which—notably, his Teen Apocalypse trilogy—are about the frictions young people encounter against the injustices of their heteronormative, capitalist milieu. Sex, violence, fantasy, and lawlessness happen to be the few tools a young person has in their arsenal to feel seen in their Totally F***ed Up world. Still, Araki’s work has a tender lining, even under all the bloodshed and existential melancholia. His characters, despairing and angry at the normalized cruelty of their world, search for others who feel as miserable and unseen as they do. Love happens in every way possible in his films: unrequited yearning, group sex, fantasies of alien abduction. The young people of his films just want to find someone to be with as the world ends.