A friend recently informed me about the surge in articles about Gen Z’s “sex recession.” Naturally, I fell down a rabbit hole.
This hyper focus seemed to emerge after the publication of “The Second Coming,” a book by progressive journalist Carter Sherman on the sexless culture of Gen Z. In an interview with NPR, she asserted that young people are not less “horny,” but have transitioned their sexual outlets to the online-sphere, creating less opportunities for in-person rendezvous. One of my favorite Substacks, “Musings of a Twenty-Something,” hypothesizes that the sex recession is linked to a feminist movement. Women are not willing to settle anymore and perhaps men are not yet willing to step up, which has led to a horde of politically frustrated, touch-starved, and horny college-aged youth.
My senior thesis is on erotic autonomy—a phrase coined by M. Jacqui Alexander to describe a revolutionary Black politic of sex and sexuality that defines our bodies on our own terms—so I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about sex and Erotics. As Audre Lorde describes it, Erotics exists counter to the quantitative reasoning of white supremacy, and is a somatic way of sharing our deepest knowledges and personshood with each other—it is an alternative way of knowing. My question: If we aren’t having enough sex, are we knowing each other anymore?
There are parts of the NPR article I disagree with—namely, the implication that anxiety around pregnancy post Roe v. Wade and #MeToo has led to a sexless society…okay? I am more interested in their idea that a life online has led to cultural sexlessness. It’s no secret that Gen Z spends more time on our phones than any other generation. The internet has in many ways facilitated so much community and at the same time cut us off from each other. I wonder if our “sexless” (that is, in-person sex acts) culture, a world where we no longer coexist somatically, is an extension of this isolation.
Sex has always been sociological. Over the summer, I learned about an aspect of gay culture that had thus far eluded me: cruising. Cruising is the act of searching for anonymous sexual partners, historically done outside in green spaces. The art of cruising has been lost on younger generations with the emergence of convenient hook-up apps like Grindr. But part of cruising is the unknown: not knowing who you’ll meet, whose body you’ll be intertwined with, who you’ll exchange pleasure with. These green spaces became places of social convergence, where “the poor Black gay man” and his “rich white closeted lover” could come together and be intimate, momentarily transcending sociopolitical boundaries. These green spaces were where gay men got to know each other in ways that white supremacist heteropatriarchy feared so deeply that they began policing said green spaces, especially those where they knew cruising was most prominent. Dominant white culture knows about the power of the Erotic, so why don’t we?
But as I was talking to one of my sociology professors about this, Courtney Patterson-Faye, she quickly reminded me that actually, marginalized people have known about the power of the Erotic for a very long time. Black women have historically existed in this liminal space between hyper and hyposexuality because subjugation of sexuality is a subjugation of self-expression and ultimately self-actualization. But they have always been fighting back against what Patricia Hill Collins calls controlling images since slavery, so for Black women especially, the sociological importance of sex has been known. Perhaps the issue is Gen Z after all, and the way that we have been continuously stratified by our devices and the increasing individualism of (American) culture. Maybe what we need is a return to green space, a return to somaticism, a return to the ancestral knowledge that acknowledged the sacredness of the Erotic.
There are multiple things existing in tension with each other: We both know way too much about each other and not enough, and we are simultaneously very interested in sex and also not having any. More than any generation, we have open dialogues about sex, we are overwhelmingly sex positive, and we encourage explorations of identity amongst each other. But for some reason, we are not acting on those desires and our somatic knowledge has been lost. Interestingly, this phenomenon can also be seen in the mental health crisis we are currently facing. While we are more open to therapy than any other generation, we are more depressed than other generations as well. Obviously, I’m not an expert or anything, but as a member of Gen Z I do feel like I have some insider knowledge. Perhaps these incongruencies are evidence of a desperate need to evolve. Our social attitudes are rapidly changing, but the ways that we address them are not.
Maybe it’s time for Gen Z to come up with an alternative to the alternative way of knowing—a way of knowing that both supplements our screen-lives and our deepest desire: connection.
Celeste McKenzie is a member of the class of 2026 and can be reached at cmckenzie01@wesleyan.edu.
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