It’s easy to dismiss young people as prudes. But our perspectives on sex are more nuanced than naysayers think.

 Izzy Ampil, Buzz Feed -  When I asked Jana, a 21-year-old grad student from Florida, how men react when she tells them she doesn’t want to have sex with them after the first date, she said that so far, Gen Z men are mostly down to respect her boundaries. It’s the millennials who try to pressure her into casual sex. Most men her age say something like, “OK, cool. No problem.” But it’s “that 26-and-up crowd that tries to guilt you into having sex anyway; they try to make you feel bad about it,” she said. “They're like, ‘But I just paid for your dinner,’ or, ‘I picked you up,’ or, ‘I gave you gas money…and you still won’t have sex with me.’ I would expect it to be the other way around.”

In 2018, the Atlantic declared young Americans to be “in the midst of a sex recession.” Last month, the New York Times proclaimed, “Younger Americans are, infamously, less likely to have sex than their parents’ generations — and when they do have sex, they’re doing it with fewer partners.” Online, a loose cultural consensus has emerged: Gen Z is a sex-negative — even regressive — generation. Social media users have coined the term “Puriteens” to condemn young people who are trying to “cancel porn,” censor kink at Pride, decry relationships with age gaps, skip sex scenes, or, most recently, scold parents for having audible sex while their children are home. It’s fair to push back on anyone trying to enforce militant moral boundaries around sexual expression. But valid criticism of Twitter’s most vocal minority slips easily into unchecked condescension. Last month, Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson wrote, “it is tempting to … declare everyone 30 and younger to be puritanical prudes whose minds have been warped by too many hours spent online.” 

I'm 23 and skeptical of sweeping dismissals of young people's ideas. I talked to 15 members of Gen Z, aged 18 to 26 — and read through 200 responses to a BuzzFeed News form — to better understand how my generation thinks about sex. What I found was, unsurprisingly, more nuanced and less dire than people online seem to think. People abstaining from sex in the long term were supportive of everyone else’s right to have sex however they chose, provided their partners were consenting adults. People looking for emotional connections in monogamous sexual relationships also appreciated the value of casual engagement; often they’d tried both. People who talked freely and joyfully about their “high body counts” also reflected rigorously on what they wanted out of sex and why.