Araki's 'I Want Your Sex' Satirizes Gen Z vs. Millennials
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- Gregg Araki's new film "I Want Your Sex" satirizes Gen Z as sexually inhibited "anxious little prudes" against their sex-positive Millennial foil Erika Tracy, a visual artist.
- Erika hires Zoomer assistants — including 23-year-old Elliot — to chew gum and affix it to a giant drawing of a vagina; she soon handcuffs him and makes him crawl on the ground.
- Match Group's Singles in America poll crowned Millennials "the horniest generation," with the cohort reporting the highest sexual desire and most boredom with "vanilla sex" among those surveyed.
- Araki, 66, came of age during the AIDS epidemic; the HIV pre-exposure drug Truvada was approved in 2012, when the median Millennial was about 24, marking a generational shift in erotic optimism.
- "I Want Your Sex" 's original script featured a young female intern and male boss, but director Araki scrapped it after MeToo, saying, "I kind of don't want to have a male dragging a female around by the hair."
- Intimacy coordinator Yehuda Duenyas drew an analogy between kink etiquette and his own work, arguing that clear permission structures let people lean into passion rather than worrying about acceptability in the moment.
- The film references "Never Love a Stranger" by Harold Robbins, a raunchy novel that was the subject of a 1949 obscenity trial — used to argue progressive impulses have led the nation "in a big loop" back to a puritanical streak.
Why it matters: Araki crystallizes a live cultural debate with hard data attached: Match Group's own poll crowns Millennials the "horniest generation" even as they were the cohort that kicked off the sex recession, while Gen Z cites pandemic isolation, MeToo, and digital surveillance as reasons for pulling back. By staging BDSM as a consent framework, the film lands on Duenyas's argument that explicit permission structures — what kink calls etiquette — could reconcile erotic liberation with the post-MeToo demand for respect.
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