Slight spoilers for I Want Your Sex below.
Partway through Gregg Araki’s film I Want Your Sex, the protagonists have a conversation that felt like it could’ve been lifted from a TikTok comment section. Twenty-something Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) and his boss Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde) debate Gen Z and sex.
Recent grad Elliot had recently started working for Erika, an esteemed artist. Erika is famous for pushing boundaries, and her art is often sexual. She takes a liking to Elliot, who at the start of the film is in a sexless relationship with his girlfriend, Minerva (Charli XCX).
Soon after this conversation, they begin an illicit BDSM affair — but at this point, the two characters are only steeped in sexual tension.
Erika, who’s 14 years older, calls Gen Z uptight and proclaims that they’d rather watch porn and play video games than have sex.
Elliot argues that sex is complicated for Gen Z. Nothing feels safe or OK — not making eye contact, and certainly not having sex. Parents and teachers removed them from uncomfortable situations.
Erika doesn’t buy it. She calls Gen Z’s sex negativity “retro.” (Elliot later masturbates to a fantasy of her calling his generation whiny, repressed “weaklings.”)
Their conversation isn’t much different from what the zeitgeist has been discussing for several years: That Gen Z, apparently, has less sex than in previous generations. While millennials were the first users of dating apps like Tinder and the forerunners of hookup culture, Gen Z is rejecting casual sex.
But is what Erika is saying true? Is Gen Z repressed? Mashable spoke to experts to find out, and turns out — surprise! — it’s more nuanced than that.
Why is Gen Z having less sex?
While it’s not right to brand an entire generation whiny and repressed, there is some truth to what Erika is saying. According to the 2024 General Social Survey by NORC, a nonpartisan research organization at the University of Chicago, 24 percent of people aged 18-29 didn’t have sex in the past year, which was twice as many as in 2010.
The GSS data isn’t perfect, as Mashable examined when its 2021 report was released, but it coincides with other findings about sexual inactivity in young adults. And researchers are noticing.
“Looking historically at data from prior generations and over time, it is a trend that we’re seeing that honestly seems to be plenty significant,” said Sara Vasilenko, doctoral program director and associate professor in the Human Development and Family Science department at Syracuse University.
Teen birth rates have also declined in the last 30 years. In 1991, the rate of live births born to mothers aged 15 to 19 was 61.8 per 1,000 births; in 2023, it was 13.1.
“There was a lot of concern about adolescent and young adult sexual behavior and high rates of pregnancy” in the 1990s, Vasilenko told Mashable, “and it’s been declining since then.”
And there’s not just one cause.
Data points to differences in how parents raised Gen Z kids versus how older generations were raised. Gen Z, for instance, was less likely to have freedom from supervision. Children’s “home range” (the distance between their parents’ home and where they can roam unsupervised), outdoor spaces, activities, and companions have all decreased over the last few generations. There was less time with friends in a way that facilitates relationships and dating, which eventually leads to sexual behavior, Vasilenko said.
This coincides with young adults being called “generation stay-at-home,” and being less likely to have a driver’s license or to drink alcohol.
Research also suggests that Gen Z spends much more time on social media than other generations, harkening to an adage that’s turned into a meme at this point: It’s the damn phones.
“I don’t want to say, ‘Oh, it’s just because Gen Z is on their phone all the time,’ but I think it would be undeniable to say that clearly these two things are at least correlated, if not causative,” said Carter Sherman, author of The Second Coming and cohost of The Guardian‘s Stateside with Kai and Carter podcast.
A new working paper published in June 2026 suggests that the iPhone has acted as “birth control.”
What there’s less data on, Vasilenko said, is the impact of the type of content Gen Z is consuming online. It’s possible that sexual attitudes are shaped by online porn, which could also be a substitute for sex. Last year, a LADbible survey found that 70 percent of Gen Z men reported that their first exposure to sex was porn.
But sex worker and sex educator Electra Rayne, who created and directs the sapphic porn site QueerCrush.com (link is NSFW), said, “Porn is this huge scapegoat, and it gets blamed so often for so many things.”
Rayne said that criticism of her work, and of porn in generally, often comes from young people. She believes there’s a growing puritanical idea that sex and desire are bad.
“I don’t totally know where all of this comes from, but I do think that it is a pretty pervasive idea that is spreading really aggressively,” she said, “and I do also think that current legislation really feeds into this,” referring to age-verification laws, which typically require one’s ID or biometric data to view explicit content.
Vasilenko also speculated on the impact that algorithms have on our sexual attitudes. Men and women could be served with different types of content about what relationships and sexuality should look like, thus they’re being socialized in a way that makes it problematic to have healthy relationships. One algorithm could surface incel and tradwife content, while others show posts related to #MeToo and the reversal of Roe v. Wade.
“If you’re socialized in those completely different streams, maybe that’s going to impact how you see relationships, how much you want to be in a relationship, what you want that to be, and cause mismatches in people’s attitudes,” she said.
The lack of comprehensive sex education could also impact how people feel about sex. In the U.S., only 19 states mandated medically accurate content for any topic as of 2025.
Less sex effects
We don’t yet know all the implications of these shifts, Vasilenko said. And they’re not all bad. From an adolescent health perspective, the decline of unintended teen pregnancy is a good thing.
As the research stands, sexual behaviors might be associated with negative mental health outcomes if it happens in an “off time,” meaning not a normative time relative to their peers (i.e., at a very young age). Vasilenko wonders if sexual behavior becomes less developmentally normative, then it will more likely be associated with negative health outcomes for the young people who do have sex.
Young adults are delaying life milestones such as moving out, buying a home, getting married, and having children. This is certainly not just because of phones; it’s because of the economy and rising cost of living. But if these events are getting delayed, relationships and sex might shift later, too.
In defense of Gen Z
Angie Rowntree, sexologist and founder and filmmaker of the adult site Sssh.com, said we should be careful about drawing sweeping conclusions from the statistics.
There are several questions worth asking before deciding that people are simply less interested in sex, she said: Are young adults lonelier or more stressed? Are they spending more time online and having fewer opportunities to connect face-to-face? Are economic pressures affecting their ability to date, socialize, and form relationships? “All of those factors can influence how frequently people couple up and become intimate,” she said.
Gen Z also grew up with the internet, and with it unprecedented access to sexual content — and content about bodies, period. The negative impact of social media on teens’ body image is well-documented.
“A lot of people felt like social media had exacerbated their lack of comfort with their bodies,” Sherman said about the interviews for her book.
Then there’s the impact of far-right beliefs, which have flourished on social media. “There’s a clear effort to make it difficult, if not dangerous, to have sex that is queer, that is unmarried, that is not procreative, and it’s that’s a really hard reality for Gen Z to be living under,” Sherman said. “When we’re accusing [Gen Z] of not having enough sex, of doing sex wrong, I’m always like, ‘You guys, have you looked at the political environment that they’re growing up in?'”
The internet undoubtedly impacts Gen Z’s sexuality, but it’s not all doom and gloom. A plus is increased knowledge around consent and agency. “Gen Z…seems more willing to question content that feels performative or disconnected from authentic pleasure and human connection,” Roundtree said. And social media can be a positive space for LGBTQ youth to find community.
Sherman also said she was routinely surprised by how sexually progressive the Gen Z people she spoke to were. They were more open to what sex and gender could look like, and were more accepting of BDSM and non-monogamy.
How Gen Z can be sexually free
Along with the positives of the internet, Roundtree acknowledges that talking openly about sex online isn’t the same as developing intimacy in real life. Both she and Rayne emphasized the importance of talking about sex to engender freedom.
You can also sexually explore with yourself or your partner. “The more people know about their own anatomy and preferences, the better prepared they are to communicate with a partner,” Roundtree said.
Above all, sexual freedom is personal. It’s not measured by how often one has sex, how many sexual partners one has, or whether the sex they have looks as it does online, she continued. You should be free to decide what works for you, without the pressure of cultural labels or societal expectations.
Source: https://mashable.com/life/i-want-your-sex-gen-z-sexually-repressed
