With every generation comes a moral panic about sex. Usually, the fear is that young people are having too much of it, or that the art they’re consuming — movies and TV, music, even video games — is encouraging reckless and immoral behavior. But the arrival of Gen Z, the first generation to grow up fully online, has upended that narrative.
Statistically speaking, they are having less sex than young people of the generations before them, and there is no shortage of cultural discourse around their supposed prudishness . (They’ve even earned the nickname “ puriteens .”) These modest tastes, along with a #MeToo reckoning that seemingly made Hollywood skittish about sexually explicit material, have been partially blamed for a recent decline in sex on our screens.
According to one study, there’s been a 40 percent decrease in sex scenes in films since the millennium. But the TV shows and movies of the last 12 months or so definitively buck that trend. In simple terms, 2024 has been a very horny year onscreen.
From the tennis love-triangle drama Challengers to the deviant bankers of Industry to Nicole Kidman ’s transgressive May-December kinkfest Babygirl , much of the work that’s recently captured the zeitgeist has radiated sex appeal — either in the form of explicit sex scenes or pulsating sexual tension. Most notably, it’s not all about sex for its own sake. In all of these works, sex is a vehicle for talking about power: Who has it? And to what end? Take Que.