I Want Your Sex is an erotic comedy-thriller, written by Karley Sciortino and Gregg Araki and directed by Araki. This sex farce follows Elliot Bell (Cooper Hoffman), an assistant to provocateuress and pop artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), who takes on Elliot as her sexual sub. Things go awry when Elliot wakes up at her house and (in an homage to Sunset Boulevard) finds Erika naked and floating in the pool. The film unravels what led to that moment.
Erika and Apple (Chase Sui Wonders) are bi foils of each other, with much more detail given to the former rather than the latter. Apple is funny, observant, and caring, but doesn’t do much beyond being a springboard for Elliot’s thoughts on his relationship with Erika and having a crush on Elliot. She speaks about being bi-curious (one time even wondering, “Is there a way to have sex without a penis being involved?”) and her jealousy at Elliot’s non-vanilla sex life. She has a disastrous attempt at a threesome with Elliot and Erika, which results in Apple asking Elliot out due to her embarrassment. But her story literally ends there, and we never see her again. We know nothing else about what she does, her family, her dreams beyond the plot — nothing. As a result, Apple’s closeted bi-curiosity — and character — is underdeveloped at best.
Erika is smart, sexy, well-read, darkly funny, and observant. She’s a successful pop artist who sees through the pretentiousness of contemporary art circles. She is also sex-positive and queer.
In the scene above, she notes when talking about her queerness and her perspective on Gen Z’s hesitancy to engage in sex:
I mean, sure, people should make informed decisions … but sex is everything: it forges us as human beings. I would not be the person I am today without my carnal experiences — good, bad, men, women, other.
However, this is where her good qualities end. Erika is also a pile-up of bad bi stereotypes: She is oversexed, manipulative, greedy, a liar, a cheater, and cruel. She has no qualms about starting a relationship with Elliot despite it being a sexual harassment violation and involving him knowingly cheating on his girlfriend, Minerva (Charli xcx), by default. Erika exploits the videos of Elliot’s sex sessions without consent for her art show and even frames Elliot for her murder to boost sales after the show flops. Erika may be “a sexual astronaut just exploring the outer limits of experience,” but she uses and endangers the people surrounding her without remorse. She is a horrible example of bi representation, in the same stratosphere of harmful stereotypes as Catherine Trammel of Basic Instinct notoriety.
Both creators Araki and Sciortino have dated men and women in the past. Araki is often hailed as a pioneer of Queer New Wave cinema, with important entries into the bi film diaspora like the Teenage Apocalypse trilogy (concluding with the very bisexual Nowhere) and the Starz television series Now Apocalypse, which he and Sciortino created and co-wrote.
In the interview above, Araki explains that Erika’s viewpoint and the story engine stemmed from his observation of different attitudes between generations towards sex and sexuality: “They [the characters] talk about this article I was reading when I was writing the script that 30% of Gen Z hadn’t had sex in a year.” (This, despite Gen Z having the largest percentage identifying as bi of the past 3-4 generations, according to Gallup.) In the same video clip, Wilde talks about the movie being “a love letter to post-adolescent [sexual] experimentation.”
Araki also noted in an interview with Roger Ebert that the film reflects many aspects of his own identity while offering something for audiences across the spectrum:
But there’s a wide array in everybody, in terms of the spectrum of sexuality in the movie. There’s Erika, who’s slept with men and women; she’s very sex-positive, performative, Madonna-esque, and very larger-than-life … There’s Apple, [played by Chase Sui Wonders,] who’s like — God only fucking knows. She’s just repressed … There are all kinds of colors along the spectrum there. There is definitely a lot going on in the film; it’s like “Nowhere,” in that way, in terms of its range of queer and straight relationships.
In the interview above with Next Best Picture, around the 5:30 mark, when asked whether Araki ever considered in the screenwriting process to make it into a same-sex dynamic, he explains in detail that many of the characters are already queer, the dynamics are queer, and that I Want Your Sex could not have been made by a straight filmmaker because sensibility is queer.
Araki put it even more simply when he noted to The Guardian:
For me, it is a very queer story. It’s a take on kink and alternate sexuality that goes right across the straight-queer spectrum. … The world’s so fucked up right now with wars and ICE and fucking genocides that I want to put a little queer joy and positivity into the world … It’s very important to be able to have a queer voice and be unfiltered about it.
I Want Your Sex was a major critical success, earning near-universal praise upon release and generating plenty of cultural commentary. However, despite Araki, Sciortino, and Wilde’s efforts expressed above, Erika and Apple’s bisexuality often got dismissed, missed, or erased in many think pieces. ArtForum praised Araki’s “diagnosis of heterosexual malaise” as well as how Araki’s past films “emphasized bisexuality and nonmonogamy in the 2000s, celebrating the unfixed work of self-discovery.”
Unfortunately, the article then concludes that Zap (Mason Gooding), Elliot’s co-worker, is “the film’s only out character.” Defector also praised the film but asserted that “the film’s running joke is that [Apple] might just not have considered lesbianism yet.” This negates Apple’s reaction after the threesome gone wrong, where she is embarrassed because she isn’t experienced enough for Elliot (who she has a crush on) and that he wasn’t really attracted to her.
But the review from MovieJawn did acknowledge that “Erika Tracy is the Norma Desmond of modern sex politics… She wears leather bodysuits to the office, sleeps with anyone titillating who enters her orbit, and designs giant vulva art installations.” So Erika’s bisexuality was not completely lost, but unfortunately often got overlooked in reviews and conversation.
I Want Your Sex is bawdy, fun, and generates a lot of good conversation about sexuality, boundaries, and sexual agency during a noted epidemic of sex apathy in a young generation. However, Erika Tracy, as a larger-than-life character, ends up being such a harmful, stereotypical “bad bi” that pushes consent and boundaries so much that she may end up hurting bi representation more than helping it.