According to the Movies, We’re All Feeling Weird About Sex

6 min read

Early on in Gregg Araki’s new film I Want Your Sex, Erika, the boss-turned-dominatrix to hapless 20-something protagonist Elliot, offers a diagnosis for his generation’s libidinal woes: “You’re all dying to fuck, but you’re too chickenshit to admit it.”

The scene could be a synopsis for the film, which takes on one of the 2020s’ most enduring cultural tropes: anxiety over Gen Z’s purported disinterest in sex. When Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) first stumbles into a job working for “anti-woke” artist Erika (Olivia Wilde), he’s suffering from a lack of direction—both in his borderline-chaste relationship with his workaholic girlfriend (played, ironically, by Charli XCX) and in his career (maybe he’ll start a podcast!). When Erika enlists Elliot as her latest submissive boy toy, he dives headfirst into a latex-filled sexual education, finally free from the confines of Zoomer prudery.

Over the course of their relationship, Erika frequently takes aim at Elliot’s peers’ hesitation to put themselves out there without getting stuck in their heads—or behind a screen. As she blithely puts it: Gen Z’s “retro sex negativity” has rendered them “a bunch of whiny, repressed weaklings.”

Although Araki worked on versions of I Want Your Sex for a decade, its final iteration came together when he learned about a 2022 study reporting that Gen Z was having less sex than previous generations. He’s not alone in his fixation with my generation’s sexual activity. As soon as we all escaped the 2010s’ moral panic over millennial hookup culture, a new panic over Gen Z’s lack thereof seemed to pick right up. While data suggests that many younger millennials were already having less sex to begin with, the point still stands—young people aren’t hooking up quite like they used to. Apparently, that sexual decline also applies to the silver screen: A 2024 The Economist report found that major films had about 40 percent less sex than at the start of the millennium.

What we have, instead, are movies with heady perspectives on our current pent-up sexual culture. This summer, we got at least three. In addition to I Want Your Sex, the dystopian rom-com One Night Only and the meta slasher Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma also offered takes on the state of our sex lives—each with a similar starting point and a vastly different conclusion.

Araki’s own vested interest in Gen Z sexuality comes from a personal place. (In one scene, Elliot watches an interview with Erika in which her dialogue quotes one of the director’s own sound bites.) He was a key figure in the 1990s’ New Queer Cinema movement whose unapologetic depictions of sex and counterculture protested post-Reagan traditionalism during the AIDS epidemic. So perhaps it’s understandable that he’s bummed by Zoomers supposedly embracing the sexual repression he’s spent his whole career railing against.

Still, the director has conceded that he might not have pursued quite as many formative sexual escapades had he grown up under the same surveillance culture as Gen Z, in which one is always being watched and judged thanks to ever-present cell phones, facial recognition technology, and the like. Couple that loss of privacy with a global pandemic, frequent legislative attacks on bodily autonomy, and a barrage of resurgent conservatism online, and it’s no wonder the kids—and, let’s be real, plenty of adults—are feeling weird about sex.

One Night Only makes a clear attempt to capture this unique, somewhat dark moment in American sexuality. It’s set in a Black Mirror-esque world in which an authoritarian United States has outlawed premarital sex except for one night per year (August 7), a premise so bonkers that logistical follow-up questions could fill the entire runtime. Instead, director Will Gluck and screenwriter Travis Braun simply wedge a traditional rom-com inside it, using the dystopia as a backdrop for a series of well-worn romance tropes that bring our central lovebirds Owen (Callum Turner) and Allie (Monica Barbaro) together.

Like I Want Your Sex, the film takes interest in the toxic three-way between surveillance culture, late-stage capitalism, and sexuality. The New York City that Owen and Allie traverse is covered in hordes of advertisements exploiting August 7, ranging from Duolingo making innuendos to airlines promoting international trips where singles can get busy the other 364 days of the year. It’s unsubtle, but it gets the point across: If a country openly treats its citizens’ bodies as controllable capital, of course corporations will cash in.

Meanwhile, no one in the film seems interested in meaningfully rebelling against the status quo, outside of putting up milquetoast “resist” signs in their windows. But what at first seems like a setup to critique rising authoritarianism and our collective complacency feels, by the end of the film, like a bizarre endorsement. Complying with the present moment’s sexless, abstinence-forward messaging isn’t ideal, the ending seems to say, but what if it actually has some positive relationship side effects?

As different as they may be, both Araki’s and Gluck’s films speak to the sexual fears of young people, many of whom feel trapped and unsafe within our increasingly dystopian circumstances. With Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jane Schoenbrun goes a step further, giving us a horror movie in which the terror of sexual vulnerability is embodied as a literal villain for the lead to overcome—or embrace.

Camp Miasma’s protagonist, sexually inhibited queer filmmaker Kris (Hannah Einbinder), has been tapped to resurrect the long-dormant titular slasher franchise. Even after a slew of unsuccessful past reboots and the series’ problematic big bad—a trans killer cheekily named Little Death (Jack Haven)—have left this “zombie IP” looking particularly unsalvageable, Kris can’t shake the impact that the first film has had on her since childhood.

Initially, Kris hopes to recruit Camp Miasma’s reclusive original final girl Billy (Gillian Anderson) for a glorified cameo. Yet as she visits Billy at her home in the original sleepaway camp where the movie was filmed, Kris is finally able to admit to herself that Camp Miasma’s images of grisly slayings and life-or-death orgasms had an indelible impact on her sexual psyche—and, through a sapphic romance with Billy, finally finds the safety to lean into her taboo sexual fantasies and let go.

Schoenbrun has been open about the ways in which coming into their own body post-transition inspired Camp Miasma. It’s the rare film to explicitly explore how so many women and queer and trans people struggle to connect to their bodies during sex, after those bodies have been repeatedly positioned as commodities or aberrations from a manufactured norm. And it comments on American society’s Puritanical, sex-negative roots, which come across in the slasher genre’s tendency to pair adolescent premarital sex with brutal murder.

Ultimately, Camp Miasma’s resonance is in its personal specificity. Sure, not all of us can unpack our sexual hang-ups through slasher films, but the film’s argument about the value of confronting and accepting our internalized psychosexual baggage, no matter how dark, feels far more universal than polite society might like us to admit. Rather than offering yet another sweeping, prescriptive argument about how young people should amend our relationships to sex—whether that’s by embracing BDSM or settling for near abstinence—Schoenbrun acknowledges, through their own niche experience, that the solution isn’t one-size-fits-all.

Clearly, the culture has a lot of hang-ups around sex to sort through. I Want Your Sex, One Night Only, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma all try to help us do that, albeit each through a wildly different lens. Art doesn’t have the power to transform a culture’s sexual attitudes all at once—but, at its best, it can nudge us toward looking at our discomfort head-on, until it’s edged out by some welcome sexual catharsis.