A cluster of this summer’s films keeps returning to the same cultural preoccupation: a widespread unease about sex and intimacy, and the sense that younger audiences in particular are approaching both with new caution. The most talked-about of them is Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex, which uses the story of a directionless twenty-something to take on one of the decade’s most enduring tropes, the anxiety over Gen Z’s supposed disinterest in sex.
In the film, protagonist Elliot, played by Cooper Hoffman, drifts into a job working for a provocative artist named Erika, played by Olivia Wilde, while stuck in a listless relationship with a workaholic girlfriend, played, with some irony, by Charli XCX. Araki has said he worked on versions of the project for a decade, with its final shape coming together after he encountered a 2022 study reporting that Gen Z was having less sex than previous generations.
That fixation is hardly his alone. As the 2010s panic over millennial hookup culture faded, a fresh anxiety over Gen Z’s lack of one seemed to pick up in its place. Data suggests younger millennials were already having less sex to begin with, but the broader point holds that young people are not pairing off quite like they used to. The decline has reached the screen as well: a 2024 report found that major films contained roughly 40 percent less sex than at the start of the millennium.
What audiences are getting instead are movies with heady perspectives on a pent-up sexual culture, and this summer produced at least three. Alongside I Want Your Sex came the dystopian rom-com One Night Only and the meta slasher Teenage Sex and Death, each approaching the subject from a different angle.
One Night Only makes the most literal attempt to capture the moment, imagining a Black Mirror-style world in which an authoritarian United States has outlawed premarital sex except for a single night each year. The premise is deliberately absurd, but its underlying concern, about surveillance, control and shrinking privacy, is meant seriously.
Araki himself has acknowledged that he might not have pursued as many formative experiences had he come of age under the conditions Gen Z faces, with ever-present phones, facial recognition and a constant sense of being watched and judged. Add a global pandemic, recurring fights over bodily autonomy and a wave of resurgent conservatism online, and the films collectively suggest it is little wonder that younger viewers, and plenty of older ones too, are feeling uncertain about intimacy. Taken together, the summer’s releases read less as provocations than as attempts to describe a genuinely strange cultural mood.
