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.
When I started working on the script 13 years ago (yes, Hollywood timelines are truly psychotic), I wrote it true to life—a young woman with a much older man. Gregg and I spent years trying to get it made (i.e. taking infinity meetings with people who loved the story but didn’t want to give us money) before we eventually gave up.
But a few years ago, Gregg suggested we dust off that old script. Re-reading it was bizarre—the screenplay was only a handful of years old, but #MeToo had happened in the interim. Suddenly, a comedy about a 40-something man dragging his 23-year-old female assistant around on a leash seemed a tad, shall we say, problematic? Not to mention unfinanceable.
So Gregg suggested a fix: why don’t we swap the genders? At first, it felt like a practical decision. But somewhere in the rewrite it became clear that seeing a woman as the pervy boss, and a man as her wide-eyed and willing submissive, made for a far more interesting—and sexier—movie.
The culture apparently agrees with me. The sexual dynamic of older woman/younger man is extremely hot in Hollywood—and with audiences. Over just the last two years we’ve seen Babygirl, The Idea of You, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, Vladimir, Marty Supreme—to name only a few. But not only is it en vogue to be a woman in her 40s or 50s banging a man whose frontal lobe isn’t fully developed—it’s also just a lot more palatable. A young woman being told to lap milk out of a dog bowl for a man’s pleasure? A little ick. But Nicole Kidman doing it? That’s liberation, baby.
But… why? It’s not inherently more ethical. Maybe the obvious answer is that it’s hot because it’s new. Female desire has been shamed and hidden for so long that when it finally shows up—loud, messy, maybe even a little deranged—it feels like a win. We also almost never get to see a man be the pretty, naive, wanted one. In I Want Your Sex, Olivia Wilde’s Erika is sleeping with (and tying up) her younger male subordinate—but he’s also her artistic muse, historically a feminine role. To watch a man be ogled and objectified still feels genuinely novel, sometimes so much so that it’s literally played for laughs (i.e. Leo Woodall plunging slo-mo into a pool as a slack-jawed Bridget Jones gawks at his beauty). In boy-toy cinema, every woman who’s been reduced to a body gets to watch a man find out what that’s like. Turns out, it can be as deeply satisfying as it is hot.
