Generation Z wants less sex on screen. This is reflected in a study by the University of California from 2023 that has moved again this month on social networks, with data as eloquent as that 51% of the zoomers (born between 1995 and 2000) want to see fewer sex scenes in films and on TV: they prefer content about friendship or platonic love. And 39% would like to see more asexual characters. Since its publication, the study has sparked a lot of interest among experts and social media users. Also in the audiovisual industry. I read a lot of comments and comparisons between generations of users and experts and, in general, I miss a reflection on what the new and refreshing youth understands by sex.
Columnist Barbara Hellen spoke about the puriteensin his column in The Guardian to point out the supposed puritanism of this generation. As if wanting to see more sex or have it as often as possible was necessarily related to greater freedom or enjoyment. We often forget that sex has been synonymous with repression and that the way it has dominated the minds of preceding generations has also exercised repression. And that is how we have seen it represented over and over again on the screens. Paradoxically, this was a repression whose images spread and dominated imaginary worlds. In a certain sense, repressive sex – that which was and is everywhere – is the opposite of a life open to desire in all its manifestations or, to put it another way, of an eroticism of life. What if the new young people had discovered that lustful, explicit and obsessive sex is the opposite of the eroticism of life? What if they demanded a sexuality less centered on the genitals, to put it clearly?
It is no coincidence that this is a generation that is particularly interested in defining itself in terms of gender in a way that is no longer so dependent on the genital as on identity. It must be hard, perhaps pathetic, to see the same heteronormative and often aggressive sex repeated over and over again in every film and in every series. The same positions, the same struggles, the same moans, the same rhythm. The repetition is not accidental. On the contrary, it is explained because repressed sex is the opposite of eroticism: it is obsession and compulsion, and as such it focuses on a single object and a single panoply of images.
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Movies, series and songs introduce genital sex (heterosexual and articulated through penetration) as a form of merchandisingbecause there is a large audience that still lives in repression and compulsion, but also because the eroticism of life is much more difficult to tell. If we eliminate from the sexual scenes that we have consumed in the last hundred years those that reveal degrading stereotypes, romantic clichés and gender violence, how many are left? Maybe the only thing that happens is that their parents have done a good job. Maybe they have educated a new generation oriented to the eroticism of life that perceives a certain kind of sex as an aggression, and as a kind of moral poverty, when they sell it to us as the true and only source of pleasure. How clever the Zetas are and how erotic.
