(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BRITTANY LUSE, HOST:
Hello, hello. I’m Brittany Luse, and you’re listening to IT’S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR, a show about what’s going on in culture and why it doesn’t happen by accident.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LUSE: A warning – this segment discusses sex and sexuality.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LUSE: OK. So I personally enjoy Sabrina Carpenter. But she got into some backlash recently. What was that about?
CARTER SHERMAN: Well, she put out a new album cover for her forthcoming album, “Man’s Best Friend,” where she not so subtly looked like she was pretending to be a dog, held by her own hair as a kind of leash by a man.
TOBIAS HESS: Yeah. It sparked a real wave of discourse, and it felt incredibly silly to me because it’s almost like the whole internet was debating a poster that said the word sex.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LUSE: This week, we’re connecting the dots between hot discourse, Sabrina Carpenter and the youths. I know, I know. How are all of these things connected? Well, we’re going to find out with Tobias Hess, contributing writer at Paper Magazine and writer of the Gen Zero Substack, and Carter Sherman, reproductive health and justice reporter at The Guardian and author of “The Second Coming: Sex And The Next Generation’s Fight Over Its Future.” Carter, Tobias, welcome to IT’S BEEN A MINUTE.
SHERMAN: Thank you for having us.
HESS: Great to be here.
LUSE: You know, I mean, Sabrina Carpenter has been getting criticism for a while now for being too sexy – notably for cheekily simulating sex positions while performing her song “Juno” during her concerts on tour, and it seems very, very, very tongue in cheek and not necessarily explicit, just to make that clear for the listener. And it seems to me, though, that this, like, criticism, this backlash, is coming from a particular demographic, Gen Z. There’s a tweet that came up during some of this discourse that sums it up, I think – quote, “I’m 17 and afraid of Sabrina Carpenter when she’s performing.”
SHERMAN: (Laughter).
LUSE: I don’t want to fall into the trap of saying this kind of discourse is representative of how all or even most of Gen Z thinks about sex and sexuality, but Gen Z is having less sex than previous generations at the same age. Some describe this decline as a sex recession. Carter, you talked to over a hundred members of Gen Z, and Tobias, you are Gen Zer yourself. Do you feel like some of this sex-negative discourse actually reflects what’s going on with Gen Z?
SHERMAN: Well, it is undeniably true that Gen Z is having sex later and less than past generations. One in four adult members of Gen Z have not had sex and, in fact, also only a third of Gen Zers in high school have had sex, which is down from about half when I was in high school. I’m a millennial. But in my conversations with young people, I did not find them to be, quote-unquote, “sex negative.” If anything, I feel like they felt really bad about themselves for not having had enough sex.
LUSE: Oh, yeah.
SHERMAN: They still felt like it was an obligatory coming-of-age rite of passage to have sex, and so they felt quite ashamed about the fact that they had not yet managed to get laid, frankly.
HESS: I haven’t studied this on a macro level. All I know is my own life.
LUSE: Hey. Listen. Lived experience is valid.
HESS: Exactly. But with that, I feel like I sort of got a ticket out of this sex recession of Gen Z because I’m queer. I’m now a gay man in my mid-20s in Brooklyn, which is, to say the least, not the most sex-negative milieu in America.
LUSE: (Laughter) Fair.
HESS: That being said, when I go online and I see the wider discourse, it feels just highly self-conscious and very fearful. And that does hearken back to some of my earlier experiences learning about sex. You know, I was in high school during the #MeToo era, then into college, and the anxiety surrounding sex was at a really, really stifling level.
LUSE: We definitely are going to come back to that. Carter, what did you find? Are teens less horny, or is something else going on?
SHERMAN: I would say that they are, in general, not less horny.
LUSE: (Laughter).
SHERMAN: I think what they are doing, though, is outsourcing a lot of their sexuality to the internet. They’re engaging in, like, watching a lot of porn. They’re engaging in LGBTQ+ communities online. And so I think that they are very interested in sex, but they’re not necessarily able to put it into practice as much. I mean, this is a generation that grew up during COVID, and so they missed a lot of key milestones. I talked to young people who, you know, weren’t able to go to graduation, weren’t able to go to prom, and these are the sort of things that create the space for young people to connect with one another, to be vulnerable with one another. And they just missed out on having that really critical IRL experience to know what it’s like to try and get with somebody else.
LUSE: To that point around, like, COVID kind of changing the teenage experience or the different modes of teenage exploration, one of the things you mention in your book was changes in sex ed. Of course, we know it’s long been fear-based and abstinence-minded in some areas of the country. But you also found that during the pandemic, when teens were getting sex ed at home, some parents were around while sex ed was being taught and they didn’t like what they were hearing. And that kind of precipitated a wave of pushback on comprehensive sex ed in schools. And it’s also important to mention that Gen Z were probably, by and large, not having, you know, a ton of sex during lockdown when they otherwise might have if they weren’t, like, cooped up in the house with their families 24/7.
SHERMAN: During COVID, what ended up happening is, yes, a lot of parents were seeing for the first time the kinds of sex ed that their children were getting. And a vocal minority became angry over things like comprehensive sex ed, which is the kind of sex ed that teaches about more than abstinence. It teaches about the diverse array of sexualities that exist. It teaches about things like condoms and preventing pregnancy and preventing STIs. And since then, there has been an explosion of debate in places like school boards, where people are arguing vehemently against expanding any kind of comprehensive sex ed. And I think what this does, overall, is really demonizes the very idea of sex. You have this simultaneous experience of not going through any of the things that you would see in teen movies while, at the same time, sex seems more political and more weighty. And you can see how that would dissuade people from engaging with it in a comprehensive way, in a way that prioritizes exploration and inclusivity.
LUSE: Tobias, you brought up how the #MeToo movement was something that was looming very large when you were, you know, like, developing your sexuality as a young person. I wonder – like, how did things like the #MeToo movement and the rolling back of reproductive rights contribute to this kind of caution or very real fear around sex?
HESS: I was a freshman in college in 2018, so really right after the height of the #MeToo movement and orientation around consent was really at its peak. And I think the tenor of discourse was so fraught and so scary that there was no sort of signal that sex was something that young people did for pleasure or for fun or to connect. It was, you know, all in terms of, this is what consent looks like. The kind of takeaway in terms of what we all understood about sex and consent is that, you know, consent is ongoing, it’s clearly affirmative and ambiguity is a danger zone. But the truth is, we often don’t know what we want or how we want it, and navigating through ambiguity, at least in my experience, is a part of sexuality. So I think that there was a diminishment in how to deal with your own, sort of, complex feelings about your own desire.
LUSE: You know, it’s interesting. #MeToo, for me at least, was, like, very much connected to some of my own experiences at work. I’d been in the workforce for quite a while by the time #MeToo happened, and so I had racked up enough experiences where that was truly the context where I was thinking about it first and foremost. I really hadn’t imagined how a big cultural change like that might also kind of affect burgeoning sexuality.
SHERMAN: I think your framing about #MeToo being about work is key to this because I think what potentially led to some of the backlash or the fault lines in #MeToo was this question of, is this about work or is this about sex? And I think for plenty of older people – I was already working by the time #MeToo broke out. I thought about it a lot in the context of work, and indeed the lasting legal reforms that we saw out of #MeToo dealt with work.
LUSE: Right.
SHERMAN: They were changing the laws around NDAs. They were introducing better HR trainings at work. But we did not see a commensurate change in the institutions that are tasked with dealing with sexual harassment and assault, particularly in schools and on college campuses. Title IX is the civil rights law that is meant to handle sex discrimination in schools, including harassment and assault. And what that law has become is basically a political football that one expert told me is, quote-unquote, “completely unusable” for survivors at this point. So what #MeToo did for younger people who thought about #MeToo, oftentimes in terms of sex, is it did generate so much anxiety around sex. It made so many of them realize that things that might have seemed like they were off were, in fact, wrong, that they were, in fact, harassment or assault, but it didn’t actually provide them with any resources to address that, to make it better, to seek accountability and justice and healing for themselves.
So for the young women I talked to, I think they understood much earlier than I had that certain experiences they had had they deserve to be made whole from. They deserve to seek accountability, but they didn’t actually have the resources to do that. And that makes the whole world just seem so much more dangerous ’cause it just makes it seem like now you know that something bad happened, but no one else cares.
LUSE: Like, where’s the recourse?
SHERMAN: Exactly. For the overturning of Roe v. Wade, when I talk to young people, straight ones who were worried about getting pregnant or impregnating somebody else, they were petrified. And I think that that feeling that people are now going to face a kind of punishment for sex because they’ll be forced to have kids that they don’t want to do – I think that is really rife within Gen Z. And again, that contributes to this overall miasma of anxiety and fear around sex that really doesn’t lead people to want to have it.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LUSE: Coming up, how our digital culture and the state of our sex ed is changing how Gen Z learns about sex.
SHERMAN: Learning how to have sex from porn is like learning how to drive by playing Grand Theft Auto.
LUSE: Stick around.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LUSE: You know, I can imagine how, like, that might make, you know, Gen Z women and girls more reluctant to have sex – both of these big sort of, like, cultural and political, like, touchstones, like #MeToo and, you know, the rollback of Roe v. Wade. But – I don’t know – how are these shifts also affecting Gen Z men and boys as well?
SHERMAN: One young man I spoke to about #MeToo – I really appreciated how straightforward he was about this. He said that he felt that the #MeToo movement, even though he supported it, could at times be very anti-cis male. And I think that this was a feeling that was common among some of the men I spoke to because they felt like this movement demonized them unfairly for something that they thought they hadn’t done. They felt like they were preemptively perceived as guilty.
The other thing that I found really interesting about the reaction to #MeToo among young men is I don’t think it actually changed some of the things that contribute ultimately to sexual harassment and assault. One young man I spoke to was telling me about how in high school, he and his friends would rank the girls in their class on the basis of hotness. They’d do basically, like, football drafts. And that is dehumanizing.
LUSE: Yeah.
SHERMAN: You know, it’s not treating these women as whole people. And I was sort of trying to figure out a way to talk to him about this, to get him to open up about how he felt about doing that and if he felt it was a good thing. And he was saying, you know, you’re talking about #MeToo, and that’s about consent, but it’s not really about a person’s humanity. But they are connected, right? You respect somebody’s consent because you respect their humanity.
LUSE: Yeah.
SHERMAN: And so I don’t think that the fundamental connections about why consent is important or why we treat other people equitably were necessarily landed post-#MeToo.
LUSE: That kind of sentiment – it feels so connected to kind of, like, a lot of the complaints that I feel like I see online or that I hear in discourse around this season of “Love Island USA,” around how, you know, young men relate to, you know, the young women that they want to date. It seems like you can’t kind of divorce dating standards and dating mores from this kind of, like, web of complex feelings around straight men’s sexuality and how they express that and their sexual behavior and what’s OK and what’s not OK. It seems like there have been a lot of young men who feel burned by that in some ways and almost, like, run in the opposite direction perhaps toward more red pill kind of incel stuff.
HESS: I mean, I thank the powers that be every day that I’m gay because I sometimes think if I were a straight 25-year-old man, who would my role models be? Like, what would I be modeling my sort of behavior and affect around? You know, how would I approach women? I struggle to think of a sort of cultural figure who represents a positive, expansive form of masculinity. I mean, there’s been so much discourse about Hasan Piker versus Joe Rogan.
LUSE: Right.
SHERMAN: I think many of the people who are even talking about this, many of the male cultural figures who are even talking about this, are on the right.
HESS: Yeah.
SHERMAN: You know, Andrew Tate does talk about masculinity. Joe Rogan talks about masculinity. Jordan Peterson talks about masculinity. And if you’re a young man, a young straight man who is looking to understand why he feels this way, you are going to gravitate towards people who are talking about why you feel this way.
HESS: Yeah. Recently, Andrew Schulz, the podcaster who’s the…
LUSE: Yes.
HESS: Yeah. He made a comment. He’s, like, you know, whenever they want to denigrate a movement, they call it the bros, so the podcast bros or the Bernie bros. It’s, like, bro and masculinity as kind of a way of diminishing, or it can be used in that way – tech bros. So I can totally understand if you’re a young man who identifies with listening to podcasts and you hear everyone describe you as a podcast bro as if that’s an insult, you’d be like, wait. Why are you backing me into a corner? I like podcasts. I like tech. I like Bernie Sanders. What’s wrong with that? So I think it becomes a problem.
I also think that, you know, I understand the sentiment of, you know, cis straight men feeling, like, the implicit negativity around them, as I just discussed, when talking about sex and dating. But I also at the same time hear from my girlfriends about very casual dates that they have, where the men are acting totally, for lack of a better word, porny in a way that it just feels really, really icky. And, you know, spitting, choking, using, you know, verbal denigration – I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with any of those sexual acts, but they require a certain level of trust. And I’m hearing about first dates, spitting, choking, without clear communication. So I think there’s this dual experience of, you know, why is everyone against us? – and not having the tools to kind of act considerate.
LUSE: You both gave such great answers to that question. I mean, this is something we’ve been turning over a lot on this show. A lot of people are kind of turning this over in culture. But you both gave really thoughtful responses to that question in a way that really highlights there’s lots of young men who want to be acknowledged also for being thinking and feeling whole people. But as you just have acknowledged, Tobias, we don’t really encourage young men or boys to kind of, like, gain the tools of consideration.
But, you know, you brought up porn. Gen Zers are, quote-unquote, “digital natives,” like, you know, all grew up with the internet, and you don’t have to go very far to find porn on there. There’s this, like, totally different level of access and a totally different culture around pornography on the internet than there was, I think, in previous generations. How has our culture’s relationship to porn changed from previous generations, and how does that affect younger people?
SHERMAN: I was very interested in reporting out this book to understand what porn has done, and also specifically what young people think porn has done to them. So the science on porn, I would say, is one of the great modern mysteries. We really don’t know from a scientific perspective how porn affects us.
LUSE: Really?
SHERMAN: And that’s in part because it’s impossible to find a control group. You cannot find young people who have not seen internet porn, so you can’t compare and contrast in that way. But what I found in interviews is that regardless of what is true scientifically, young people very much felt like porn had warped their relationship to sex. And this is what sociologists call the, quote-unquote, “deep story,” which is the story that people feel to be true. And that story can be more moving and impactful than the actual facts. And in particular around choking, young people very much felt like porn had normalized more, quote-unquote, “rough” sex. So if you are under 40, you’re almost twice as likely to have been choked than folks who are above 40. And a significant fraction of people say that they were not asked before they were choked, which – I agree with Tobias – if you’re into that, you go for it. But you definitely want to ask somebody before you choke them, not only because consent is obviously critical to any sexual encounter, but because choking in particular is strangulation. It is a more dangerous sexual act than other things that you can do.
LUSE: Yeah.
SHERMAN: I do think, though, that a lot of this discussion around pornography misses some of the nuances around what kinds of porn are out there. So many young women and many young queer people I talked to didn’t actually enjoy video porn so much, but they loved fan fiction and erotica and romance novels.
LUSE: Right.
SHERMAN: And they learned a lot about themselves through those forms of pornography, and they learned what made them feel good. And this is, I think, the ultimate point of what has gone on with internet porn, whether video or written, is that because we do not have quality sex ed available in many schools, young people have to turn to the internet to understand what sexual pleasure looks like, how they make other people feel good, what makes them feel good. And so we have basically elevated porn to being sex ed, even though I think most people would agree that is not what porn is for. Learning how to have sex from porn is like learning how to drive by playing Grand Theft Auto – lots of crashes.
LUSE: Lots of crashes. Lots of crashes. What does all this say about how sexual culture has changed? And where do you see Gen Z’s sexlessness having cultural reverberations outside of online discourse?
HESS: Well, sexlessness leads to probably resentment, as we’re seeing. You know, we’ve seen the rise of incel culture, which is a stand-in for just general sense of solitude and hopelessness among young men. There’s incels. There’s also femcels.
LUSE: Yes. I’ve heard of femcels – girls and women who are celibate, either voluntarily or involuntarily. Yeah.
HESS: Yes. I’m not an expert in either space, but I know that they’re around and, you know, are kind of the most extreme examples of this larger context that we’re living in and my generation is going through. So with that, I think the gender divide and the political gender divide will get more extreme as this kind of bears on and people and young people feel increased sort of alienation from each other, from their own sort of sexual selves.
SHERMAN: I think we’ve already seen a political harnessing of the narrative that Gen Zers are sexless. We’ve seen talk from the Trump administration about wanting to raise the birth rate, for example. And so it’s impossible to disentangle that pronatalist impulse from this idea that young people are not having enough sex. I think the narrative of the sex recession is being used to basically say – by the right – oh, gender roles have irretrievably broken down. The American family is in chaos. We need to reinstate a more hierarchical sexual order where we prioritize or even compel people into sex that is straight, that is married and that is potentially procreative because it’s being practiced without access to abortion or access to hormonal birth control.
LUSE: I’ve learned so much here. Thank you.
SHERMAN: Thank you.
HESS: Thank you. This has been great.
LUSE: That was Tobias Hess, contributing writer at Paper Magazine and writer of the Gen Zero Substack, and Carter Sherman, reproductive health and justice reporter at The Guardian and author of “The Second Coming: Sex And The Next Generation’s Fight Over Its Future.”
And I’m going to put on my influencer hat for a second and ask you to please subscribe to this show on Spotify, Apple or wherever you’re listening. Click follow so you know the latest in culture while it’s still hot.
This episode of IT’S BEEN A MINUTE was produced by…
LIAM MCBAIN, BYLINE: Liam McBain.
LUSE: This episode was edited by…
NEENA PATHAK, BYLINE: Neena Pathak.
LUSE: Our supervising producer is…
BARTON GIRDWOOD, BYLINE: Barton Girdwood.
LUSE: Our executive producer is…
VERALYN WILLIAMS, BYLINE: Veralyn Williams.
LUSE: Our VP of programming is…
YOLANDA SANGWENI, BYLINE: Yolanda Sangweni.
LUSE: All right. That’s all for this episode of IT’S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR. I’m Brittany Luse. Talk soon.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
Copyright © 2025 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript text may be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its original broadcast or publication. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
