To enter Reykjavik’s Grafarvogur Lutheran church, worshippers and visitors are invited to make their way down 16 steps painted in the rainbow stripes and the white, pink, blue, brown and black chevrons of the Progress Pride flag. The artwork, which can even be seen on satellite pictures, was originally a project of former head pastor Guðrún Karls Helgudóttir, now the bishop of Iceland, and her colleagues. The point was to show support for the LGBTQ+ community’s “need to be visible and accepted”, the church’s current head pastor, Arna Sigurðardóttir, told me.

And then some time in between the barely faded midnight sun of 7 July and the early morning light of 8 July, someone painted over all those colours with just three: blue on the outside, and two thin strips of white encasing a thicker strip of red in the centre.

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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 their relationship sexual. Soon she’s handcuffing him and making him crawl on the ground. In the bedroom as in the office, she’s dominant and he’s submissive.

The film, directed by Gregg Araki, is hitting theaters at a time when many commentators (okay, myself included) are writing nervously about the “sex recession” and the “romance slump,” wringing their hands about why the youths aren’t getting laid. Some paint young people as coddled and fragile, too timid to put themselves out there. Meanwhile, many Zoomers point out that they’re not growing up in the same world that older cohorts did: They have plenty of valid reasons to feel inhibited (a pandemic, a housing crisis, a culture of constant digital surveillance) and plenty of other priorities (saving, studying, worrying).  

Araki sketches each generation with a cartoonishly broad brush. But the caricatures help illuminate what each perspective might get a little bit right. In an era of shifting etiquette and vigilance against inappropriate behavior, the film seems to ask, can sex be liberating, transgressive, and respectful all at once?

[Read: Too scared for sex]

I Want Your Sex knows that a person’s most intimate experiences can be shaped by their historical context. At first, the choice to make Erika a 30-something struck me as odd; Millennials, who’ve partnered later and less than prior generations, were the ones who kicked off the sex recession. But although they may have been having less sex in their 20s on average, they were also known as the “hookup generation.” Compared with older cohorts, Millennials were more tolerant of gay and premarital sex, and more likely to report having casual sex. And they enjoyed a culture of relative erotic frankness and optimism.

Araki, who is 66, grew into adulthood during the AIDS epidemic. In his 20s, he said in a 2023 interview, he felt as if “this black cloud of doom is hanging over you every fucking day.” By the time Millennials were coming of age, some of that darkness had lifted. The HIV pre-exposure drug Truvada was approved for use in 2012, when the median Millennial was about 24. The internet opened up access to information about sexual health and kink. Last year, Match Group’s Singles in America poll crowned Millennials “the horniest generation”: Of all the cohorts surveyed, they reported the highest levels of sexual desire and the most boredom with “vanilla sex.”

Erika is, in her way, a perfect encapsulation of the Millennial sex paradox: She has made the erotic a major part of her identity. But it’s not clear that she’s happier for it, or that she’s scratching whatever itch she has—one that might be more existential than physiological. “Sex is everything; it forges us as human beings,” she lectures Elliot. Later, when he reminds her of this, she amends that point: “Sex is everything. It’s also nothing.”      

If more Zoomers are openly questioning the value of intimacy, perhaps it’s because they’ve picked up on some of that quiet ambivalence. And in the time since Millennials entered adulthood, the rules and expectations about sex have gotten even more complicated. The MeToo movement heightened people’s suspicion of uneven and potentially exploitative power dynamics—perhaps especially in the workplace, one of the primary places where romantic partners used to meet. After decades of relaxing societal norms regarding what’s appropriate to talk about and with whom, backlash arrived in the form of “boundaries”: a suddenly ubiquitous pop-psychology concept. And then COVID hit. By the time Americans emerged from isolation, many were socially rusty and fond of a good night in. The gaps between people aren’t generally getting easier to bridge.   

[Read: The great romance slump]

Yet the idea of Zoomer sexlessness seems to have galvanized even just slightly older people to champion eroticism. In one slightly on-the-nose scene in the film, Erika confronts Elliot about what she sees as his age group’s failure of joie de vivre, in sex and in general. “Gen Z is all about FOMO, and yet you’re willing to miss out on the sexual prime of your life?” she asks. He replies earnestly about spending formative years amid a pandemic: “My peers have not been well served growing up in a time where nothing feels safe.” That’s what Erika thinks is the problem with his generation’s risk aversion, though. Why is feeling safe their overarching goal? “Being outside your comfort zone,” she tells him, “is the whole fucking point.”

I Want Your Sex isn’t an anti-MeToo movie; it takes manipulations and abuses seriously enough to show that Erika is, at some points, truly acting egregiously. But you also get the sense that she’s right about a few things. Elliot wants to let go of some control. He enjoys a lot of what happens between them. And what he doesn’t enjoy, the movie insinuates, he’ll learn from. Araki seems to be grieving a bygone era: one that felt a little looser, a little spicier, and perhaps more resilient. At one point, when Erika is encouraging Elliot to lighten up, she gives him a copy of Harold Robbins’s Never Love a Stranger, a raunchy novel that became the subject of an obscenity trial in 1949. Certain progressive impulses, the film suggests, somehow led the nation in a big loop—right back to a puritanical streak in which pleasure is seen as threatening enough to suppress.  

In a perfect sensual landscape, everyone would feel safe and free all at once. I Want Your Sex doesn’t identify the secret to making that happen, of course—and the film arguably avoids the trickiest parts of its own debate by making Erika’s character a woman. Araki has said that the original script featured a young female intern and her male boss, but “after MeToo, I was like, I kind of don’t want to have a male dragging a female around by the hair.”

Still, by focusing on BDSM, he offers an alternative framework for navigating desire. The practice inherently involves power differences—but also a code of ethics. When I talked with Yehuda Duenyas, the film’s intimacy coordinator, he drew an analogy between kink etiquette and his own work: Having a clear permission structure and good communication from the start means that people might actually feel more able to lean into passion; they’re not worrying in the moment about what’s acceptable or desired, because they’ve already established it. His job isn’t to make people feel comfortable. It’s to foster clarity and openness.

Erika and Elliot don’t exactly model a healthy dynamic. But the film makes a point of emphasizing his agency, even at his most vulnerable. When an incident brings Elliot to an interrogation room to be questioned about his relationship with Erika—don’t ask why—he tells police that he was “way over my head” and “under her control.” And how does he feel about that? Thankful.

Schoenbrun’s previous films were intensely melancholic affairs, and it’s immediately clear that Camp Miasma is having a bit more fun with the same themes. It jabs at Hollywood’s impulse toward rampant intellectualization—and corporatization—of the cinematic junk food of decades past. Kris, who has a minor Sundance hit under her belt, endeavors to create a “woke” and hip take on Camp Miasma without alienating its enduring fan base. A charmingly stylized early montage establishes the franchise as akin to many 1980s VHS cult classics, garishly mixing gore, nudity, and an eerie campfire vibe. The film’s many sequels yielded diminishing returns, and the series eventually stooped to wacky concepts à la Friday the 13th—the main monster, Little Death, who carries a spear and wears a mask shaped like a cubic air vent, traveled to Manhattan, then space, and so on. At her hotel, Kris watches the original film and eagerly takes notes; during a cheesy sex scene, she scribbles DESIRE in her notepad and underlines it forcefully.

Yet Kris, despite her intent to take a cerebral approach, also comes at the project with a teen sensibility. Any movie nerd might recognize her behavior: When she stops off at a gas station on a work trip, she grabs fistfuls of candy and then lazily spins through the cheapo DVD rack, excitedly calling a friend when she finds a junky Camp Miasma installment for sale. The opportunity to visit the now-abandoned sleepaway camp where the first entry was shot is both useful to her as a director and delightful to her as a fan.

[Read: Make culture weird again]

The film mostly takes place there, and Kris spends a bizarre weekend with Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), a reclusive actor who starred in the original Camp Miasma but refused to participate in any of its follow-ups. Billy, however, now lives at the campground with the goal of giving herself what appears to be a peculiar form of exposure therapy. Anderson, herself a towering legend of genre television and cinema, is an imperiously fun and sexy figure for Einbinder’s nervous and dorky character to bounce off of. Billy seems both enticed and exhausted by Kris, who professes her struggle to bring an academic eye to the world of Camp Miasma. Billy reminds her that the franchise’s initial appeal was straightforward: The draw was “flesh and fluids.”

As Kris spends more time with Billy, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma metamorphoses from an industry satire into a dreamlike reflection on how what we watch can shape us, no matter how lowbrow. Schoenbrun renders the desolate grounds with beautiful matte-painted backgrounds; as Kris and Billy watch the old film, the fuzzy visuals and synthy score bleed away into contemporary CGI blood and carnage. Both the throwback and present-day imagery look surreal; even though Kris can identify the obvious tropes in Camp Miasma, she can’t seem to face the power that familiar scripts hold over her. And in a fantastical twist, Little Death somehow finds its way out of the Camp Miasma movies, emerging from the on-site lake.

But this is not a tale of cinema coming to life and invading the mundane real world; it’s more about two different styles of storytelling blending into one. As past and present, “fiction” and “reality” swirl together for an inscrutable final act, Schoenbrun finds a fresh way to make an incisive observation about 21st-century life: Today’s moviegoers are immersed in their screens and hungry for pop culture, to the point that a trashy flick such as Camp Miasma can feel intrinsic to Kris’s sense of self. Someone like Kris may want to interrogate that relationship over and over in search of meaning, but perhaps it’s best not to subject what we watch to endless analysis and meta-critique. Instead, we may be better off embracing how we feel.

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However, tipping has morphed from a signal of good work to something that resembles a socialist experiment or the dreaded school group project: everyone expects the same outcome, regardless of their effort or the service they deliver.

When you order a cup of coffee at a counter today, they often present a screen asking you to include a tip. If tipping were acting as a price signal, as it should, then we would not know what to tip at the time of ordering. The tip would be given to a specific individual at the end of the experience, after you received your coffee, so that you could properly evaluate the experience and service to see if a tip is warranted, and if so, how much you would want to give.

AUTOMATIC TIP OR SERVICE CHARGE? NEW STATE LAW REQUIRES RESTAURANTS TO TELL DINERS BEFORE THEY ORDER

Making tipping an obligation upfront takes away the agency and valuable price signaling of tipping. In fact, it may be pooled with other tips and split by the group instead of rewarding the person who provided the service.

Tips, it seems, are being added to anything and everything. While it makes sense to tip your bellman who helps you with your bags to your room at a hotel, it does not make sense to tip on your e-commerce purchase, something I have seen popping up online from various retailers.

Additionally, many service businesses are abusing tipping, as well as other “service fees” and charges, to obfuscate pricing. Instead of raising their prices, some businesses are adding dressed-up fees to their bills. Customers want transparency in pricing, not to have to guess what the bill might be after all the added charges and fees.

CRUISE TIPPING CHARGES ARE ‘OUT OF CONTROL,’ SAY PASSENGERS AS COMPANIES TOUT ‘EXCEPTIONAL SERVICE’

Cruise ships are adding “crew appreciation” charges. Restaurants are adding “surcharges” for reasons like “offsetting rising costs.” That’s something that has typically been handled by increasing prices on the menu, transparently. Adding fees to the end of the bill doesn’t create loyalty; it feels like a business is pulling a fast one on you. Moreover, nobody likes to feel like they have been nickeled and dimed by a business.

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Many of these charges are touted as “optional,” with the businesses noting that customers can ask to have them removed from their bills. That seems more like a humiliation ritual than a good business policy. A customer shouldn’t have to go out of their way not to be inundated by extra charges.

Now, of course, I do have sympathy for businesses and service workers. There are certainly some customers who do not tip appropriately, even when service is outstanding. If that’s the case and your employees aren’t making enough, a more sincere solution would be to raise your prices and pay employees higher wages, being straightforward and not appearing like you are taking advantage of customers, which is likely to affect tip amounts, too.

Tipping is a time-honored tradition, and we should hold it as such. That means treating service providers well and tipping generously for very good service, where it is customary. It also means pushing back on non-transparent pricing tricks and distorting traditional tipping customs that have morphed into fee insanity.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM CAROL ROTH

After it was first reported by OutKick that Clark would be among a collection of on-air talents let go by the four-letter network Tuesday, July 21, the story shifted focus to a combination of cause and blame around the situation, and not the termination itself.

Clark was told the news on Monday during a taping of ESPN’s ‘NFL Live’ after OutKick had obtained the information and had asked the network for comment. ESPN acted in such a manner, telling Clark during a taping, in an attempt to keep OutKick’s Dan Zaksheske and Bobby Burack from breaking the story.

SPORTS MEDIA RUSHES TO CAST RYAN CLARK AS VICTIM WHILE PORTRAYING ESPN AS THE VILLAIN

In his first public comments following his ouster, Clark accused ESPN of intentionally leaking the news to OutKick. The fact that OutKick obtained the information hasn’t exactly sat right with at least one CNN contributor.

During ‘CNN This Morning‘ on Sunday, Jason “Jah” Lee raised questions about the situation as a whole while also pointing to Clark getting caught up in a “culture war” leading to his demise at ESPN.

“I think Ryan Clark got swept up in some level of culture war retribution,” Lee, the senior editor at Bossip, explained. “The reason he got fired during the segment is because an outlet called OutKick contacted ESPN threatening to leak this information. How would OutKick get this information?

“OutKick is owned by Fox News Corp and was established by Clay Travis. If you know Clay Travis, he is not a bleeding-heart liberal. I feel a lot of this was purposefully done to embarrass Ryan Clark. ESPN has taken a lot of heat for being a liberal bastion lately, and I feel like perhaps [Clark’s] bosses thought this was a time to push the other direction.”

Clark, a former Super Bowl champion with the Pittsburgh Steelers, began his NFL analyst career at ESPN in 2015. According to Burack, he made around $2 million per year, roughly four times what the average NFL analyst earns.

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