The Sex Lives of Gen Z

From sinking birth rates to a growing gender gap, an entire generation is figuring out how to have sex in a world that taught them to fear it.

This spring, I wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post exploring a growing tension between the Trump administration’s concern with young people’s baby making and Gen Z’s sinking desire to have kids.

Of course, moral panic with young people’s habits (especially around sex) is nothing new. But recently, the scrutiny of Gen Z and their sex lives has reached new highs. There’s constant talk of the sexsession, Gen Z’s virginity status, declining birth rates, and a growing gender gap complicating how young men and women interact. But in all that noise, young voices are often missing.

There are real and complex reasons why Gen Z is having less sex, a shift with far-reaching implications for American culture. To understand this generation, we need to understand the emotional, social, and physical factors shaping their choices, and what those choices tell us. I believe that what looks like sexual disinterest is often deep anxiety, or even trauma, masked as personal agency.

That’s the premise of The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over Its Future, a new book from gender and sexuality reporter Carter Sherman. I first met Carter in 2018 while interning at Vice News and have followed her work ever since. She’s now a reporter at The Guardian. For her book, she interviewed more than 100 teens, young adults, and experts.

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There’s a generational shift happening in how young people relate to sex, power, and each other, and Carter’s book helps make sense of it. What Carter found echoes what I’ve seen in my own work: for Gen Z, sex can be calculated and complicated. Thanks to a variety of social and political factors, some opt out as a result. Here’s our conversation, edited lightly for clarity and brevity.

Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash

Why write this book now?

CS: The moment where I think it crystallized for me was actually the week that Roe was overturned. I got a DM on social media from a young woman who was 23-years-old and living in Arizona. And Arizona, right after Roe was overturned, was not providing abortions because it was unclear whether or not a centuries-old abortion ban was now in effect. This young woman was pregnant, she did not want to be, and she could not access an abortion legally in her state. So I ended up following her through the process of herself managing an abortion in a hotel room with her ex-boyfriend. The process was humiliating, like she felt glad to have the abortion, she felt empowered by her ability to end a pregnancy that she did not want to carry, but she told me she felt she was being punished for having sex by Republicans. And that really floored me.

I started thinking, ‘Okay, how are people feeling about sex in this moment?,’ because the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the generational shift in the ways that people do and view sex. And then I started thinking about all of the other generational changes that are reshaping the way young people can have sex. You know, we had #MeToo, we had the COVID pandemic, we had the rise of the Internet, and smartphones, and social media, and all of these things really set a totally different tone for Gen Z’s sex lives than it did for previous generations.

What’s your number one takeaway about Gen Z’s sex lives right now?

CS: Number one, I really do feel like Gen Z is encountering a sexual landscape that we have not seen in decades, if ever. Obviously, the overturning of Roe v. Wade throws people back, in some ways, to a pre-1973 position, in that you cannot get a legal abortion in many states. At the same time, though, you have the Internet and you have the ability to order abortion pills online.

And so my second takeaway is that that landscape is profoundly shaped by sexual conservatism, and that rising tide of sexual conservatism being at war with the Internet and all of the sexual progressivism that the Internet has ushered in. Because thanks to the Internet, not only can people order abortion pills online, but they can encounter all kinds of communities that they would have never been aware of.

In particular, I found in my conversations that the Internet was really critical to LGBTQ+ young people's ability to come out and be themselves. More young people than ever are out and identifying as LGBTQ+, and I think that is because the Internet has made them feel affirmed in their identities and sexual orientations. I cannot tell you how many young people I interviewed who said that they realized that they were queer in some way because they started Googling, ‘Am I gay?,’ ‘Am I trans?,’ And that is just not something that would have been available to past generations. It's really that clash between sexual conservatism and sexual progressivism that I feel is the defining feature of the landscape facing Gen Z and their sex lives today.

What is the biggest misconception about young people’s sex lives today?

CS: That they are ‘sex negative.’ There is so much discussion about the sex recession, as it's called, which is basically the phenomenon whereby Gen Z is having sex later and less than past generations.

In reality, the sex recession really started among late millennials like myself. I'm 31, and we started to see in the late 2010’s that millennials were having less sex than basically any generation other than the generation born in the 1920’s. But I don't think that this narrative really took off until Gen Z came into the picture, and people were able to attach this label to them. But the narrative around Gen Z goes further than ‘Oh, they're just not having sex.’ It goes into this narrative of ‘Oh, they are sex negative.’ ‘They don't want to have sex.’ ‘They are finding all of these relationships that we would have previously thought of as equal as being irredeemably tainted by power dynamics,’ post #MeToo, for example.

But really, when I interview young people, they're horny. They want to have sex. And in fact, I found that many of them felt really bad about themselves because they weren't having sex. They felt like, ‘Oh, something is wrong with me.’ ‘Everybody else is having sex without me.’ They were not really aware of the sex recession landscape narrative, and they definitely rejected this sex negative stereotype about them.

Along those lines, if people are having less sex, are they upset about it? Is there shame in it? What are the emotions behind having less sex?

CS: They felt profoundly ashamed about it. There was one young woman I talked to who spoke about how her friend group in high school would always be like, ‘Oh, Maddie is the virgin of the group.’ I could tell, even though years have passed, that feeling still rankled and still made her feel less than. I talked to another young woman who grew up in a town that was actually very Republican and had a lot of ideas around purity culture, and she still felt bad about the fact that she did not have sex in high school. And actually, by the time we spoke, she had not had sex with a man, she had had sex with a woman, (‘depending on the definition there,’ she said), and she still felt like, ‘Oh, something is wrong with me.’ And, ‘the fact I went to college without having had sex, this is the worst thing ever.’

I actually feel very sympathetic to that shame. As I talk about in the book, I did not have sex until college, and I was pathologically obsessed with my own virginity. I felt terrible about myself because of it, and it can just eat you alive, because you feel like you are not becoming an adult in the way that you're expected to be. And I think it's just so upsetting to see the way that virginity is still given all of this weight, even though I think we have sort of flipped around in a lot of ways, from being like, ‘Oh, it's really good to be a virgin.’ ‘You should remain pure.’ To, ‘Oh, it's really embarrassing to be a virgin.’

One of the biggest trends I’ve been tracking at The Up and Up is the youth gender gap, and not just the partisan gender gap, but the gap in how young men and women think about and experience the world. How is that gender gap playing into the data on young people having sex, but also the perception of sex?

CS: One of the stories that really stood out to me was this woman I talked to who also grew up in Texas. I called her Ryan in the book, and she told me that she had not had sex yet. She's straight, and she’s interested in having sex, but she hadn't had sex yet because she was worried that she would run into an incel. She was really terrified of the level of misogyny that happens online, and that drove her away from really wanting to interact with men romantically, sexually, at all. I think that young people are very aware of this gender gap, particularly post-Trump, and it makes them more wary of one another.

There's been polling out that looks at how many young women are single, versus how many young men are single. And it's thirty-something percent for young women who are single, and sixty-something percent of young men who are single. And so there's this question that arises, like, ‘Who are these young women dating?,’ ‘Are they dating older men?, ‘Are they dating other women?’ Young Gen Zers, who are female, are more likely to come out as LGBTQ+, and it seems like the gender gap is really shaping every element of young people's sexual and romantic experiences and becoming even more prevalent. Young Gen Z women are possibly the most progressive cohort ever documented. We're certainly not seeing the same from Gen Z men, and it's hard to tell, I think, at this point, about how far that divergence is going to go and what it means for the future.

But I think it is not good news if you think it's important for young women and young men to be able to connect with one another, not just sexually, but platonically, politically, to be in community with each other.

Do you think young men and women even know how to be friends?

CS: I want to say they know how. One of the ways that I found people through reporting was asking them, ‘Do you have any friends who would speak with me?’ And oftentimes people would recommend friends who were of a different gender. So there are those friendships out there. But I worry in the post-Trump world that people, particularly young women, will shy away from being friends with young men, because there is this fear that you can't trust them. You don't know what a man is getting up to online, and you can't ever really know in this day and age what your friends are doing online.

Similarly in my conversations with some young men, I hear they’re afraid of young women, because they don’t want women to ‘blame them’ for something they may not do. Are there misconceptions going both ways?

CS: One of the things that I did in my interviews was I always asked people if they could name a cultural or political event that made a difference in their sex lives, or the way that they approach sex, and almost everybody said, #MeToo – particularly young women. And the young women talked about realizing at an earlier age that it was unfair that they had been left haunted by their sexual experiences. That something that might have felt off was in fact wrong. That it was, in fact, sexual assault or sexual harassment. And I think that that is very much a good thing to know. You want to know what your experiences are, and you want to understand how the personal can be political.

But what #MeToo did not do, is it didn't really lead to institutional change. The most lasting reforms that we saw out of the #MeToo Movement were changes to NDAs and better HR trainings around sexual harassment, and those are not things that are really helpful for young people who are not working. And so what this did is it really created this fear of this awareness of sexual harassment and assault, but it also created a profound anxiety about the fact that, well, there's really nothing I can do about it. And so it leads young women to walk through the world with arguably more anxiety now, because they're more aware of the dangers. For young men, the #MeToo movement, I think many of them felt like, ‘Oh, well, I would never do that, so I don't really need to worry about it in a real way.’ Although one young man I appreciated was very straightforward and said, ‘I'm afraid of catching a case for something I didn't do.’

But what I think is one of the big dividing lines here between young men and young women is this concept I talked about in the book called ‘hegemonic masculinity,’ which is basically the dominant narrative around masculinity and how men should be. And under those myths and stereotypes, men are supposed to be big, strong, emotionless cavemen who are good at obtaining sex, and probably should also like sex to be ‘rougher.’ And I think we've done a really good job over the last 50 years of expanding the ways that we think women can be. Allowing for archetypes like career women or tomboys. But we have not done the same for young men. We're still expecting them to fit into this incredibly narrow stereotype, and I think that has led a lot of young men to have really profound anxiety about who they're supposed to be and how they're supposed to interact with women, particularly post #MeToo, because I think they are aware that the expectations that are being placed on them around masculinity do not mesh with a post #MeToo understanding about how young men and young women are supposed to treat each other equitably.

What role does the internet play in how young people are or are not having sex?

CS: It's nuanced. As I said, I think the Internet has been an incredible tool for young LGBTQ+ folks, and that is true.

On the other hand, I think the Internet makes people very aware of their place in a sexual hierarchy. When you spend all of this time on social media apps and dating apps, you become really aware of what gets liked, who gets liked, and who is prized for the ways that they look. This has a very devastating effect on young people's body image, both men and women. I talked to one young man who was telling me, you know, all of my female friends edit their bodies before they post photos of them on social media. And I asked, ‘Oh, well, have you done that, too?’ And he said, ‘Yes, I made my shoulders bigger.’ He kept on using this term called the ‘criteria,’ and the importance of ‘meeting the criteria.’ And I think young people are really aware that they have to look a certain way in order to be attractive. And they see that being quantified all the time through things like likes and comments and matches, and that can lead people to not wanting to have sex. Some research shows it’s because it turns the experience of being naked in front of another person into another opportunity for someone to measure your body and for you to come up short. It can also lead people, conversely, to actually have more sex, but particularly for women, to have sex that is less satisfying, or to basically agree to go along with sex that they don't want because they feel so objectified.

The science on social media and sex is very muddy. I don't think we can say for sure that you know social media is bad. But what I found is that young people feel like social media is bad for them. And this is this concept in sociology called the ‘deep story,’ which is like the story that feels true. And the story that feels true can have just as much, if not more, of an impact than the reality, because people are responding to the story that feels true more so than they necessarily respond to facts.

Noteworthy reads and listens

• They’re calling her an influencer. She’s calling it campaign strategy, Jessica Kutz for The 19th*

• How ‘Hot’ Became a Bipartisan Political Buzzword, Callie Holtermann for The New York Times

• Are TikTok’s 5-9 videos creating burnout?, Mariah Alanskas for Fast Company

And my theory of the two gen z’s was mentioned by

kyla scanlon

on today’s episode of The Ezra Klein Show… Thank you, Kyla, for sharing!

• How the Attention Economy is Devouring Gen Z – and the Rest of Us, The Ezra Klein Show