Karley Sciortino’s story of an erotic discovery became the basis for a film starring Olivia Wilde — updated with a Gen Z twist.

On a sweltering Saturday in August, the lobby bar of the Marlton Hotel in Greenwich Village was cool and dim. A few patrons spoke in hushed tones over espressos.

“It’s very quiet,” Karley Sciortino said, surveying the scene. “Almost too quiet for what I’m about to say.”

Sciortino, 40, has made a career of saying what others will not. For nearly two decades, under the brand umbrella “Slutever,” she has turned private experiences into copy — in a blog, a web series, a television show and a memoir.

She spent a year as a dominatrix’s assistant. She interviewed cam girls and escorts. And she wrote about nearly every relationship she had along the way.

“If I thought that something seemed like a bad idea, but it might end up being a good story, I would do it,” Sciortino said.

Now, she has a movie out in theaters, “I Want Your Sex,” a sex comedy directed by Gregg Araki. It started 13 years ago as a script Sciortino wrote about a relationship she had with her much older editor. After a gender-swap rewrite, it became the story of an artist (played by Olivia Wilde) who takes her much younger assistant (Cooper Hoffman) as a sexual muse.

The role appealed to Wilde in large part because of Sciortino’s sense of humor. “I find her work hilarious, refreshing, enlightening, and deeply necessary,” Wilde said, adding that she shares with the writer a “distaste for slut-shaming.”

‘Quite Trashy’

Sciortino grew up in Highland, N.Y., about 80 miles north of Manhattan. She started her writing career two decades ago, when she was living among a crew of young artists in a London squat with no heat or hot water. She chronicled her roommates’ sexual exploits, and her own, on a blog called Slutever.

“I was writing as if the internet was written in pencil,” she said.

This was before Lena Dunham’s “Girls,” before Amy Schumer’s “Mostly Sex Stuff” special, before Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda.” At the time, writing about sex from a woman’s point of view was considered “quite trashy,” Sciortino said.

‘I Want Your Sex’ portrays a generational shift in its story of a millennial who believes sex is something you should be reckless with and a Gen Z-er who has been taught to be careful.Credit...Lacey Terrell/Magnolia Pictures, via Magnolia Pictures Via Ap

She moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and expanded her blog into a web series for Vice. It later became a Viceland TV show.

Sally Singer, who was then Vogue’s digital creative director, recruited Sciortino to write a sex column in 2012. In house, it was called the “emotional health column,” Sciortino said, adding that “writing about sex wasn’t very chic.” It ended up running online for seven years.

“She wrote about things that some people would consider trashy, but there’s nothing trashy about the way she thinks and talks about them,” Singer said. “She’s clever. And it was very well received.”

In 2013, Sciortino wrote a screenplay based on the relationship with a man whom she would describe in her book as “the first person to make me feel like my sex life wasn’t something to be ashamed of but rather part of what made me interesting.”

The script landed her an agent at ICM, who connected her with the veteran indie director Araki. The pair spent years trying to finance the project but their efforts stalled.

In 2023, Araki suggested revisiting the script and swapping the genders of the leads. The eager 25-year-old millennial woman would become an awkward Gen Z man; the Gen X editor would become a sexually adventuresome millennial artist. The changes gave Sciortino a chance to play with generational mores.

“Millennials were the first generation raised on internet porn, where there was something aspirational in being sexually transgressive, in eschewing traditional ideas of what a woman should be like or what sex should be like,” she said.

“When we rewrote the movie, the big difference is that the millennial woman who grew up on a very specific attitude toward sex is now dating a Gen Z man who is more reticent.”

Even so, the core of the story held.

“It’s still a story about a young person finding confidence and possibility through sexual experiences,” Sciortino said.

The film arrives in a cultural climate different from the one that inspired it. For Gen Z, dating has become something to opt out of.

Sciortino finds the sex recession sad. “In every other aspect of life, we’re told to lean in, play hard, make mistakes,” she said. “But with sex, it’s the opposite. It’s: ‘Be safe, or you’ll end up traumatized.’”

In March, Sciortino described her own hiatus from sex and dating in a post for Hotline, her Substack. “To recap: I’m 40, single, no kids, haven’t had sex in seven months. At any other point in history, this would make me a deeply tragic figure. But in 2026, I’m pretty sure it makes me … trendy?”

Though the period of voluntary celibacy has ended, she is still searching for what sex means to her and other women these days.

In “I Want Your Sex,” Erika tells her 25-year-old lover that sex is everything, that it forges us as human beings. Later, she takes half of it back.

“Sex is everything,” she says. “It’s also nothing.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5897438&forum_id=2most#50094080)