When Karley Sciortino wrote a script based on a BDSM relationship in her 20s with an older man, no one would touch it. More than a decade—and a gender swap—later, “I Want Your Sex” starring Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman was born.When Karley Sciortino wrote a script based on a BDSM relationship in her 20s with an older man, no one would touch it. More than a decade—and a gender swap—later, “I Want Your Sex” starring Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman was born.
Are we officially in the era of boy-toy cinema? Next week sees the release of I Want Your Sex, a film I co-wrote with director Gregg Araki. It’s a warped little love story about a Dom/sub relationship—a “dom-com,” if you will—in which a provocative artist (Olivia Wilde) taps her fresh-faced, far younger assistant (Cooper Hoffman) to be her sexual muse. He falls hard—but has no idea what he’s gotten himself into.
I Want Your Sex is based on a personal experience of mine, back when I was 25 and found myself in a BDSM situationship with my then editor—a terrifyingly charming British man, 20 years my senior. It was one of those transcendent, growth-spurt sexual experiences that change your life, and also kind of blows up your life, but you’re ultimately glad it’s part of your story. I did not, at the time, think: One day this hot HR violation will be played for comedy onscreen by Olivia Wilde. Life’s funny like that.
It’s also just fun—and long overdue—to watch women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s be sexual onscreen. As a millennial, I was raised on the idea that a woman’s expiration date was basically 40, while at 45 George Clooney was the most eligible bachelor alive. That’s what we’ve been sold—and what was greenlit—since pretty much the dawn of time.
But there’s an exciting shift happening. Gen X and elder millennial women are aging into midlife and saying, “No, actually, I’m not doing the invisible thing.” Forty just doesn’t mean what it used to. As Emma Rosenblum recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “In 1991, a 45-year-old Diane Keaton starred in Father of the Bride, dressed in pearls as the mother of the bride; in The Odyssey … 43-year-old Lupita Nyong’o plays Helen of Troy, the most desirable woman on earth.” On screen and in life, women are rejecting the lies we’ve been told that sexiness is rooted in youth alone.
They say art imitates life—in this case, for me, quite literally. But I think it works the other way too. Watching a woman break the rules—and get away with it—gives the rest of us a script we didn’t have. But underneath all the discourse about age gaps and boy toys and the female gaze, I Want Your Sex is a movie about a young person having a heart-wrenching, eye-opening sexual experience that changes them forever. It’s about deciding that someone who’s clearly bad for you is worth it anyway. And that part isn’t gendered.
I Want Your Sex opens in theaters nationwide on July 31. Read Karley Sciortino’s Substack, Hotline, here.
