Look out! Wisecracking women are coming. And they're talking about sex.

Look out! Wisecracking women are coming. And they're talking about sex. And not just talking about it, but joking about it and even doing it.

Sure, you knew it was happening in real life, but now it's happening at the movies. Put away your American Pie and stop thinking There's Something About Mary. A no-holds-barred, shock-'em-till-they-scream Cameron Diaz comedy called The Sweetest Thing opens today Friday April 12, 2002.

''This is something that is slowly finding its way into our popular culture,'' says Diaz, 29. ''Women want to tell different stories.''

In the film, Diaz, Christina Applegate and Selma Blair play friends who have been burned by men so many times that they have decided that Mr. Right Now is preferable to Mr. Right.

They must deal with an embarrassing, Monica Lewinsky-type stain, a man who is so well endowed that he renders women speechless, and various non-sexual experiences with bodily functions, fake breasts and maggots.

The woman behind the story, first-time screenwriter Nancy Pimental, swears it's the real deal. ''A huge percentage of what happens to the women in this movie happened to me or my friends,'' she says. ''I was very conscious that it didn't happen in movies. I wanted to write women in a different way.''

Especially, Pimental says, because movies and TV represent women in only two ways: ''bitchy women who have been burned by men, or their life can't be happy unless they find a man. I love Monty Python and the Farrellys (brothers Peter and Bobby, who made Mary). I wanted to have women do those kinds of things.''

Applegate points out that the characters she and Diaz play aren't that promiscuous. ''We talk raunchier than men do, but that doesn't mean we act on it,'' she says. ''This is a testament to women finding love. I don't think it's right to have overly promiscuous characters unless they are finding themselves.

''But there's this phase that happens between 25 and 30 where, after being in juvenile relationships and being burned, women take a time where they act like men,'' adds Applegate, 30. ''That's a phase that I went through before I met my husband (actor Johnathan Schaech, who has a cameo as her pick-up at a bar). And Nancy is obviously still going through it!''

But Sweetest Thing isn't the only comedy breaking these barriers. Last year, Renee Zellweger starred as a lusty lass in Bridget Jones's Diary. In the current art-house comedy Kissing Jessica Stein, Heather Juergensen plays an art gallery manager who has had sex with so many men that she takes a whirl with women, just to experience something new.

''Art is finally catching up with life a bit,'' says Juergensen, who wrote the film with co-star Jennifer Westfeldt (who plays Jessica Stein) after interviewing many female veterans of the dating scene. ''I'm sorry that so many women have been portrayed as more reticent or more shy sexually. I know a lot of women who are out there.''

You need look no further than Sex and the City, HBO's award-winning comedy/drama. ''Sex and the City opened the door for women to talk the way women really talk,'' Applegate says.

Tara Reid couldn't agree more. ''That TV show has had a big influence,'' says the actress, 26, who starred in American Pie and is in the comedy National Lampoon's Van Wilder. ''Girls talk about sex just as much as guys do. And that show has figured out how to do it in a humorous sort of way.''

Blair chimes in: ''Sex and the City opened doors for women to talk about sexual things and to be sexy.''

But Thomas Doherty, author of Teenagers and Teenpics, grumbles that movies and City have little overlap in target audience. ''I don't know any straight male between the age of 25 and 50 who watches it,'' he says.

Pimental believes City ''paved the way and pushed the boundaries,'' but she agrees with Doherty that a mass-market movie is going for a different crowd: younger, more male, less jaded and less upscale.

Of sexy gals and sweethearts

It was inevitable that Hollywood would start to embrace different kinds of women, Diaz says.

''There are all kinds of women in our society,'' Diaz says. ''They are certainly now a larger audience. There are more cable channels, more kinds of programming, so people are finding new ways to entertain different audiences. Women want to see all their choices.''

Still, the women have a lot of catching up to do. For more than two decades, from Animal House to American Pie, from Porky's to Mary, guys with sex on their mind have been a mainstay -- if not the mainstay of American movies. But women? Nah.

''If a girl is a big slut in a movie, she's not going to become America's sweetheart,'' Reid says. ''We've been bred like that. It's kind of sad.'' And at this point, it's a Hollywood tradition.

''Being sexual and being aggressively funny have been pretty much off limits for women in movies for a long, long time,'' says Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, author of The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter and film studies professor at the University of Oregon. ''A woman who has confidence to be sexual and to be funny is a pretty threatening package. And if you do see a woman who is sexual and aggressively funny, she usually has to be a little ugly, like Roseanne.''

This crosses genre boundaries from comedy to drama. Whenever a heroine seems savvy about sex, whether in American Pie or American Beauty, it often turns out she has been faking it -- or she has been falsely accused, as in The Contender, in which a vice presidential nominee is accused of being in an orgy.

Even hookers come off looking good. (Think Pretty Woman.) ''These women are amazingly, weirdly chaste,'' Doherty says. ''You still have the double standard.''

Cameron Crowe influenced filmmakers with his "Fast Times at Ridgemont High", which included a character played by Phoebe Cates who makes up a college boyfriend. Crowe, who also wrote and directed Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous, based the character on a young woman he got to know while posing as a high school student to write the book of the same name. That makes all the diference, he says.

''When you try and do it by the numbers,'' Crowe says, ''it emits a high-pitched siren that says to the audience, 'This isn't real!' ''

Well, this is real, says Sweetest Thing producer Cathy Konrad. ''When we were auditioning actresses for the Christina Applegate part, every single woman came in and confirmed that,'' says Konrad, whose earlier productions include Kids and Scream. ''They all said, 'Oh, my God, this is how my best girlfriend and I are when we hang out and we're having a really nice night.' '' Blair, 29, who appears in the most sexually outrageous moments of the movie, agrees.

''I have three sisters, and I'm that way with them,'' she says. ''You're bound to let it all hang out. Guys do it all the time in funny frat movies, so why not women?''

Blair was a logical choice to let it all hang out: She smashed into the moviegoing consciousness when she and Buffy the Vampire Slayer star Sara Michelle Gellar enjoyed a long kiss in Cruel Intentions (which, like Sweetest Thing, was directed by Roger Kumble).

''Whoever they really wanted for the (Sweetest) role probably turned it down because she had taste,'' Blair says with a laugh. ''People say, 'Oh, God, aren't you afraid of your image?' But whenever anyone else won't do it, they'll say, 'Call that cow Selma Blair.' I have a willingness to be humiliated. If I were actually the cool, funny girl, it would be pornographic, but I'm the whiny other girl. I actually think it's a refreshing gross-out movie.''

Even that might be too much for some men, says John McKay, who wrote and directed Crush, starring Andie MacDowell.

''Men are threatened by women of sexual experience and women seeking sexual experience independent of the chains of commitment,'' says McKay, whose new film is about three successful women in their late 30s and early 40s living in an English country town without men in their lives. McKay says he's astonished that fortysomething women and their sex lives are all but unexplored at the movies.

Unruly Woman author Karlyn applauds the explorers. ''It's exciting that we see girls and women moving into this turf. It's girls and women taking the prerogatives that boys have always had.''

On the other hand, Iris Cahn, chair of the film program at Purchase College, SUNY, doesn't buy it. She notes that the promiscuous women in these movies, particularly Diaz, are often on display in states of undress, presenting something for the men in the audience to ogle. ''And Kissing Jessica Stein seems the ultimate boy fantasy of watching two girls making it.''

Stein's Juergensen says her character had to be aggressive to get the story from Point A to Point B and was never intended to fulfill anyone's fantasy. ''She had to be a woman who was very daring and adventurous sexually, and we couldn't just pay lip service to that, no pun intended. We wanted to delineate her from Jessica, who is very nervous and reserved.''

Juergensen, who is writing her own Farrelly brothers-style comedy with women at its center, hopes that, with more women advancing to positions of power in Hollywood, filmmakers will take more chances with female characters. ''Yet I feel there have been more sappy, dumb, love-story chick flicks than ever in the last five years of romantic comedies.''

Do real women ooze sexuality?

More female executives may mean more female-driven movies, but a truly sexual woman is still too much for Hollywood to handle, Cahn says.

 ''There's a movie playing now (in New York), Margarita Happy Hour, by Ilya Chaiken, which actually presents promiscuous women as heroines, an independent film made for less money than most people spend on their cars,'' she says. ''Its women ooze sexuality. Its protagonist makes love in bathrooms and draws pornography for a living. But will anyone in Hollywood promote this type of sexuality, one that doesn't depend on the commercialization of teenage boys' sexual fantasies, Ã la Britney Spears or Cameron Diaz? Probably not.''

Billie Dziech, a University of Cincinnati professor who teaches Sex and Gender Roles in Biology, Film and Literature, makes the opposite point: Real women are less overtly sexual than the ones in movies such as Sweetest Thing. ''The vast majority of research suggests that males, especially young males, engage in more gross behavior and joke-telling and are more promiscuous,'' she says, citing a UCLA survey in which only 39.6% of recent freshmen said sex was acceptable between two people who had known each other a short time but ''really like each other.''

''Girls with semen in their hair don't fit a believable stereotype for the young audiences who attend these films,'' Dziech says. She worries that such movies could inspire young women to act more ''gross.'' Oh, please, Konrad says.

''The girls in this film aren't doing anything gross. Gross things happen to them,'' she says. (Much like Diaz's Mary character, who, after all, didn't know what was in her hair.) ''Gross people are doing things to them. We've all had unfortunate experiences.'' Copyright Andy Seiler