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The Mary Sue
The Mary Sue
Jenna Anderson

Gen Z continues to miss the point of sex scenes in media

Here we go again. It’s a day that ends in “y”, and the Internet once again has feelings about sex scenes.

On Wednesday, UCLA’s Center for Scholars and Storytellers debuted their annual Teens & Screens report, the result of a survey of 1,500 Americans between the ages of 10 and 24 about their media habits. There is a lot to glean from the study: a desire to physically go to the movies, a fondness for animation, a proclivity to occasionally watch things through YouTube and TikTok clips. But, maybe unsurprisingly, all of that has gotten eclipsed by the study’s findings on sex scenes.

According to the report, 48.4% of participants said that there is “too much sex and sexual content in TV and movies.” A whopping 60.9% expressed a desire to see romantic relationships depicted as “more about the friendship between the couple than sex.” When compared to the 2024 results of the same survey, these numbers are pretty much the same… although that year’s findings also included the wallop of 62.4% arguing that sexual content is an unnecessary plot device.

As is the case every single time we’ve written about (and will surely continue to write about) this topic: the situation is complicated. For one thing, there is surely more nuance to the feelings of teens and young adults across the country than the sample size of UCLA’s study can provide.

Sex Scenes Still Matter

Even then, I don’t entirely fault Gen Z and Gen Alpha for having that opinion. It is arguably a right of passage to feel uncomfortably about sex scenes at some point in your adolescence, at very least because of the age-old fear of having to awkwardly sit through a graphic sex scene with your parents or your friends.

That opinion can also be fueled by how sexual autonomy is (or isn’t) being taught to you as a young adult. Having grown up during the height of the 16 and Pregnant era (and being taught Sex Ed in the state of Texas), I can understand how difficult that dichotomy can be… especially once you fold in the current state of the world and battles around reproductive health.

In my mind, the problem with this never-ending debate is when it gets boiled down into absolutes: the idea that there should be no sex scenes in media, or that there are no instances in which they are relevant to the plot. That mindset is not only untrue, but it is arguably anti-art, and dismisses the decades of instances of sex scenes having thematic significance. (I will continue to plug Karina Longworth’s work on the “Erotic 80s” and “Erotic 90s” seasons of her film history podcast You Must Remember This, which reframed so much of the historical context for me.) Beyond the actual meaning it can have for the participants, there are countless other meanings that those scenes can take.

I’ll use my favorite piece of television from this year, the second season of HBO Max’s Peacemaker, as an example. In the season premiere, after getting rejected from both the woman that he loves (and, as we learn later in the season, romantically kissed at a concert) and a high-profile superhero team, Christopher Smith (John Cena) begins to spiral. He goes home, rips a bong, and starts to drown his sorrows in every vice he can think of… which builds to a massive orgy happening in his house.

More specifically, the orgy happens around Chris, as he numbly realizes that he is still unfulfilled, and eventually uses the dimensional portal in his bedroom closet (yes, I know this sounds wild out of context) to revisit a world where his brother and father are alive and love him. Sure, what we see as Chris walks around the orgy and to the portal is shocking… but that shock ultimately serves the emotional and thematic purpose of illustrating the mental space that he is in. If that scene had just been referenced instead of shown, or not a part of the plot at all, we might not have understood just how broken he is.

Inevitably, the sex scene discourse is going to start up again. But here’s hoping that when it does, we can at least see that there is nuance within it.

(featured image: HBO Max)

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