Less sex and more friendship – that’s the verdict of gen Z on their preferences for US media, according to a new study by the Center for Scholars and Storytellers (CSS) at UCLA.
According to the center’s annual Teens & Screens report, today’s adolescents want less of the sex and trauma seen in shows such as HBO’s Euphoria and The Idol, and more storylines reflecting “lives like their own”, namely more platonic relationships and less of a focus on romance.
The center, based in the psychology department, surveyed 1,500 adolescents between the ages of 10 to 24, and found that the majority of adolescents aged 13-24 (51.5%) wanted to see more content centered around friendships and platonic relationships, rather than romantic ones. A near-majority (47.5%) said sex was not needed for the plot in most TV shows and movies, while 44.3% felt romance was overused in media. Nearly 39% wanted to see more aromantic or asexual characters on screen.
Adolescents also expressed dissatisfaction with several tropes, such as the expectation that male-female friends would fall in love. “There’s a complete lack of platonic relationships in American cinema,” wrote one respondent, a 17-year-old Black boy from Georgia. “I don’t like that every boy and girl friendship has to be romantic at some point. Sometimes people can just be friends,” said a 16-year-old white girl from the western US.
“While it’s true that adolescents want less sex on TV and in movies, what the survey is really saying is that they want more and different kinds of relationships reflected in the media they watch,” Yalda T Uhls, the founder and director of CSS and co-author of the study, told IndieWire.
“We know that young people are suffering an epidemic of loneliness and they’re seeking modeling in the art they consume. While some storytellers use sex and romance as a shortcut to character connection, it’s important for Hollywood to recognize that adolescents want stories that reflect the full spectrum of relationships.”
The findings reflect several studies on decline of sexual intercourse among gen Z. A 2021 study by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that 30% of teens said they’d had sex at least once before, down from 38% in 2019 and over 50% in decades prior. It was the largest drop ever recorded by the survey, which polled over 17,000 adolescent students and has been conducted every two years since 1990.
And the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, which has tracked shifts in Americans’ behavioral trends for decades, found in 2021 that three in 10 gen Z males aged 18 to 25 reported having gone without sex the previous year. One in four gen Z women also reported having no sex in the previous year. A UCLA study found the proportion of young adults who reported having two or more sexual partners also declined, from 23% in 2011 to 10% in 2021.
In an authors note, two gen Z co-authors of the study, Stephanie Rivas-Lara and Hiral Kotecha, described how the isolation of the Covid pandemic was foundational to their generation’s prioritization of friendship, and cited clinical studies on the “friendship recession” and the epidemic of loneliness declared earlier this year by the US surgeon general, Vivek Murthy; according to the Cigna Group, young people today are twice as likely to report feeling lonely as those over 65.
“As researchers in the industry, this felt like a headline-worthy discovery,” said the authors on the study’s finding of more friendship, less romance. “But as young people, this felt like an idea that could casually blend into our many conversations and reflections on community (or lack thereof) that have been center-stage for our generation this year.”
“As a member of gen Z myself, I wasn’t surprised by some of what we’re seeing this year,” Rivas-Lara told IndieWire. “There has been a wide-ranging discourse among young people about the meaning of community in the aftermath of Covid and the isolation that came with it. Adolescents are looking to media as a ‘third place’ where they can connect and have a sense of belonging – and with frightening headlines about climate change, pandemics and global destabilization, it makes sense they are gravitating towards what’s most familiar in those spaces.”
The report also found that teens overwhelmingly disapprove of aspirational content about wealth and fame, with only 10.5% of respondents listing it as their preference. Fifty-six percent of adolescents also preferred original content over franchises, remakes or adaptations. Of topics gen Z wanted to see, the top preferences were hopeful, uplifting content with people beating the odds, and characters with lives “more like their own” – which, reportedly, means less romance, and more platonic relationships.
