Member-only story

Why is Gen Z Having Less Sex Than Other Generations?

Netflix Killed the Libido And It’s Not the Only Culprit

Mary Carter
6 min readFeb 15, 2025
Photo by оксана Gromova

43% of Gen Z men haven’t had a single intimate encounter in the past year. The generation that grew up with Tinder at their fingertips is having less sex than their conservative grandparents who met at a high school prom. The moral panic of the ’90s about “hypersexualized teenagers” has transformed into such an ironic opposite reality that it feels like a joke.

That generation parents feared would be having orgies is actually at home, alone, watching Netflix series and sending depressive memes in their WhatsApp groups. And no, it’s not an exaggeration — the numbers only get worse when we look closer.

While previous generations hid magazines under their beds, this one grew up with an infinite menu of explicit content one click away. The result? A generation that saw more sex before their first kiss than their parents did in their entire adult lives. How can we expect someone to develop a healthy relationship with intimacy when their first “sex education” comes from videos with titles that sound like they were written by a hormone-overdosed teenager?

Early exposure to this type of content is literally reshaping how these young people understand and experience intimacy.

--

--

Responses (6)