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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 young people’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.
Cooper Hoffman and Olivia Wilde in I Want Your Sex — LACEY TERRELL
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 troubled 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 central lovebirds Owen (Callum Turner) and Allie together—proving that even the most repressive imaginable circumstances can’t keep two people from finding each other.
Where Araki’s film diagnoses and condemns sexual anxiety, and One Night Only romanticizes perseverance through it, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma takes the sharpest satirical angle of the three. The meta slasher uses horror genre conventions as a lens to examine how cultural scripts around sex—who has it, when, and what it means—have calcified over decades and continue to shape young people’s expectations and fears in equal measure. Together, the three films suggest that cinema, even as it shows less sex onscreen, is more preoccupied than ever with what’s keeping us from having it.
