You’d think that if anyone was going to ring up Ofcom and ask them to turn down the sex, it would be your grandmother. Not so. Far from sex-starved teenagers, Generation Z would like to see less sex on TV, according to the annual Teens & Screens report from the Center for Scholars and Storytellers at UCLA.
Less of the television show Euphoria; more “lives like their own”. Less sex — 44.3 per cent said romance was overdone in the media; more platonic relationships. This is at odds with my own generation. At my girls’ school we were romance-mad, even if it was all in our imagination. Judy Blume’s Forever was passed around at primary school, the sex scene learnt by heart. If we’d had streaming platforms, I imagine we’d have found the bluest shows available, then dissected them in the playground at break.
Yet Gen Z are different, and it’s not just that they don’t want to watch sex — they don’t want to have it either. In 2021 the number of teens who’d had sex dropped to a record low of 30 per cent, according to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in America.
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I’m not sure how they managed to check their hormones, but apart from that at 35 years old I’m with them. They’re not the only ones having less sex, wanting less sex. And not just on TV.
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Although starting there, you can see why. Before you could watch free porn on your phone, sex on telly was more fade-to-black than full-frontal. Now shows feel the need to compete, giving us long, drawn-out sex montages such as Bridgerton’s: by a lake, on a stair, in the garden, on a chair; like something out of Dr Seuss, only with nudity. Sex on TV has become more honest, which is brilliant in lots of ways — the Netflix show Sex Education offers exactly that for a generation coming of age. But sometimes it was the smoke and mirrors that did it for us: true-to-life sex isn’t always a turn-on. Sex and the City was sexual liberation and fun when I was a teen, but now, watching Mr Big toot his own horn in his wife’s vicinity and call it intimacy isn’t the stuff of rom-com dreams. Gen Z are probably less bothered because they know more about what they’re getting themselves into than I did at their age; my friends and I were expecting lightning bolts, not erectile dysfunction.
But now that we know how to do it, and do it well … we’re still having less sex. I’m a millennial and spent a recent weekend with a group of friends in the countryside, rather than propping up a bar drinking cosmos and flirting with the waiter. After the pandemic sex drought — single and living alone, I found myself accidentally celibate — predictions were for a big sex boom. Even before that, millennials were having less sex than their boomer parents ever did — and still do, if studies (and gossip of gonorrhea outbreaks in care homes) are to be believed.
The Covid period of forced chastity might have changed our mindsets, sent us sprinting for the sheets. It didn’t. Gen Z drink 20 per cent less than millennials, one study found, which might have helped them to avoid some of the uncomfortable and unsatisfying sex that was normal in my twenties: having had it, my sexual agenda has changed. As we talk more about violence against women, about Andrew Tate and incels, I consider myself lucky that the few sexual blips that I feel unhappy about, looking back, are all that I have to regret. And it certainly makes me slower to go to bed with a man I barely know.
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Friends in long-term relationships enjoy sex, but don’t prioritise it over a good night’s sleep. They’re having it, but they’re not talking about it, and nor do they particularly want to watch it. Sex has gone from risqué conversation starter at a cocktail party to something unremarkable — not because the sex is unremarkable, but because what is there to say?
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As sex becomes matter of fact, so does wanting it, and finding it. There’s no shame in wanting it, for men or women, at least not among my peers; only toxic misogynists care about a woman’s “body count”. A friend used the app Feeld to find partners looking for sex without strings. One of the most common kinks among the men she found there was a breeding fetish, which is exactly what it sounds like. Transparency is always a good thing. It’s also, as I’ve come to realise, a very effective form of birth control.
My friends are too worried about getting a job to think about sex
By Zak Asgard
Sex used to be all that my friends and I discussed. Now I’m 23 and I find myself bringing it up less and less. It’s been a while since a friend has jabbed their finger in my face and said: “Any good shags recently?” These days, it’s more: “Have you found a proper job yet?” I can’t remember the last time I heard a wildly entertaining anecdote from a friend about a one-night stand.
I’ve never been much of a playboy. I don’t have the stamina for it. And that seems to be the case for the vast majority of my friends. Most of us are far too worried about our socio-economic stability to think about sex, let alone talk about it. When we contemplate being in a couple it’s for the companionship — or being able to split the rent.
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The great turn-off could have started in the pandemic — my friends and I spent most of our time inside watching news footage of hospital beds and repeat episodes of Gogglebox. That would put even the most lascivious people off.
Still, sex is seemingly at its most accessible. Vast swathes of young people tap into dating apps and meet in pubs and clubs for unsatisfactory hook-ups and next morning sneak-outs. Apparently this isn’t enough to keep our sex quota above that of our parents or our parents’ parents. Though, again, I’m not surprised. Anyone who uses a dating app has that sapped, jet-lagged look about them.
“How’s it going with Hinge?”
“I slept with a guy who told me I was shaggable for someone with an overbite.”
“Are you going to delete it?”
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“No.”
It could also be the case that we don’t feel the need to have as much sex. We can see, more than ever, what’s really out there, and what’s out there on dating apps just isn’t that appealing.
Maybe we’re just taking things slow. Two of my very close friends — neither of whom are repulsive men — lost their virginity after turning 21. It seemed perfectly normal. When I tell that to someone over 40 they look visibly distressed.
“What on earth were they doing with their time?”
I don’t know what a dwindling sex life means for our generation. I suppose it may mean less drama. It could also mean a lot less fun. But I don’t think our generation cares much about fun. Fun can wait. We need to sort out the rental crisis first.
Gen Z and sex — where did it all go horribly wrong?
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By Georgia Heneage
Baby boomers have been raising eyebrows at our gradual downsizing of lust for a while now. But researchers saying Gen Z aren’t that into it any more surprises me. Far from squeamish or, God forbid, prudish, I think of young people such as myself (I’m 26) as being sexually radical and permissive, open, liberal — accepting of all sexual inclinations and weird kinks. We are of a generation where every mother and her daughter read Fifty Shades of Grey on the Bakerloo Line; when to buy a vibrator is no longer hotly shameful.
So where did it all go horribly wrong? One of the issues, I think, is right there on the screen. Just look at the fictionalised sex on shows such as Euphoria, a Gen Z favourite — a lot of it is aggressive. I imagine this is supposed to reflect an age where consent is taken seriously, but I also think it reveals a wider shift that porn has engendered.
Men of my age grew up on a diet of unrealistic porn where violence, such as choking, is the norm. When this isn’t reflected in the bedroom, intimacy is compromised (evidence shows a rise in erectile dysfunction, almost certainly linked to porn). Porn has been around for decades, of course, and millennials also had to grapple with social media and smartphones. I think it’s all just got a bit worse. There are more incels around (involuntarily celibate men who blame women and society for having no sex), social media is more insidious, and dating apps, though offering casual sex, actually isolate people — as does a culture that sanctifies the self. The concept of “spectatoring” (being self-conscious during sex), presciently coined by the sex researchers William H Masters and Virginia E Johnson in the Seventies, has taken on a whole new meaning.
And then there’s the #MeToo movement, which has brought a new tentativeness to sex and dating. I know a lot of men who are scared to chat up women.
It’s great that consent is taken seriously, but compounded with technological shifts it has created a rift in real-life relationships and a culture of mistrust on a scale we probably can’t yet see.
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However, the survey also points out what I consider a positive trend: young people want to see more friendships on screen. They are probably just a bit weary of the fairytale narrative of boy meets girl, drops homework, finds out it was all a dare and then makes up with a sloppy kiss. It doesn’t reflect their messy lives. And focusing on friendships is in vogue: Dolly Alderton’s bestseller-turned-TV series Everything I Know About Love should actually be called How I Realised that Friends Matter More than Boys. We’d rather watch that any day.
