Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex is Olivia Wilde’s second sex comedy of the summer. In the first, The Invite, directed by Wilde herself, she’s a tentative, neurotic wife whose marriage has turned into a sexless misery. In I Want Your Sex, in contrast, she plays Erika Tracy, a sexually aggressive artist and dominatrix who exploits her interns. The range is impressive—as is the contrast between a women-directed feature in which empowerment involves women themselves and a feature directed by a guy in which women’s empowerment is mostly treated as a masochistic fetish for men.
I Want Your Sex is open about the focus on men’s perspectives. The main character—who narrates most of the film in flashback—is Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) a young would-be podcaster whose first real job is as Erika’s assistant. She starts to groom him during their initial interview, flirting and asking inappropriate questions. A week into the job she propositions him for an inappropriate relationship which becomes more inappropriate as it goes on, leading him to despair, homelessness, and a police interrogation.
Men are sometimes harassed at work, but women are much more likely to be the targets. The film relies for its edginess and sexiness in no small part on this role reversal—and the fact that Hoffman is a lot less conventionally attractive than Wilde, who inhabits the nightmare art sex goddess role with panache. Elliot sees himself as lucky and viewers are supposed to see him as such too. Various people (and Elliot himself) comment on the fact that what Erika’s doing is unethical, selfish, and cruel. But Erika responds by denouncing the whininess and puritanism of Gen X—and the film itself sees the ugly dynamics as part of the turn on.
Elliot says as much. The film isn’t subtle about its masochistic investments. Wilde makes Elliot crawl—but more than that she makes him perform femininity. She orders him to wear lingerie; she has him refer to himself with gendered slurs during sex games; she anally penetrates him as he weakly protests. As in many a noir, the castration of the male, the debasement before a powerful woman, is sexy and wrong—or sexy because it’s wrong.
Erika’s games with Elliot escalate past BDSM play and on into life-destroying sociopathy. The hyperbolic arc, though, ends up minimizing the dangers and harms of workplace harassment. This isn’t a movie which uses BDSM to explore trauma and abuse, like, say Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter. It’s a film in which real abuse is a BDSM fantasy, divorced from consequences or real ethical weight. Elliot tells Erika “no” and says she’s violating his consent at various points, but the film doesn’t really believe him and puts little effort into making us believe him. Erika’s own belated signs of vulnerability don’t humanize her so much as they assure us that she’s not in fact an evil harasser and it was just dress up.
BDSM play isn’t assault, and a portrayal of workplace harassment isn’t actual workplace harassment. The glib suggestion that having your boss come onto you might be fun is ethically dicey, but so is the glib suggestion in action movies that the way to solve all your problems is to shoot people in the head. People hopefully enjoy not very thoughtful fluff entertainment (to the extent they do) as fluff entertainment, not as a guide to life.
The movie’s bland refusal to engage with the ethical issues it’s mining for edginess and cred gets old quickly. It won’t address trauma or systems of oppression, but it also isn’t willing to go full Bataille and explore the limits of debasement in fantasy. You’re left in a familiar Hollywood zone of half-assedness, where difficult themes are papered over with never-too-challenging imaginings.
That’s especially the case given the inevitable comparison to The Invite, where Wilde plays a person who’s struggling with and/or enjoying her own sexiness and horniness, rather than performing a fetish who mostly exists as a fantasy for the topping-from-the-bottom director/main character/male viewer. Watching I Want Your Sex underlines who gets to want in movies and who’s supposed to be the sex that’s wanted. No wonder Wilde has grabbed the director’s chair so she can at least intermittently control her own stories, wants, and sexuality for herself, rather than for Elliot or Gregg Araki.