A Culture War in the Bedroom
In the new film I Want Your Sex, characters are action figures in a staging of generational war. On one side is Gen Z, its members portrayed as anxious little prudes. Twenty-three-year-old Elliot is bumbling and directionless. His high-achieving girlfriend is far more interested in studying than she is in him. (When he tries to initiate intimacy, she accuses him of “constantly draining my qi energy.”) His best friend, Apple, is angsty about her lack of interesting life experience—yet she almost always seems to be home, donning pimple cream and loungewear. None of them is having much sex. Their Millennial foil is Erika Tracy: self-serving, insensitive, and ostentatiously sex-positive. She’s a visual artist who has hired a league of underpaid Zoomer assistants—including Elliot—mostly to chew gum and then affix it to a giant drawing of a vagina. She has said publicly that a one-night stand “knows you better than your mother or your best friend ever will.” And she has no problem crossing lines. Amused by Elliot’s innocent skittishness, she promptly suggests that they make …
