Older Americans have obsessed over young people’s sex lives for generations. Either they’re having too much or too little sex, sex that’s too kinky or not kinky enough, sex that troublingly reinforces traditional gender structures or sex that’s too radical in blowing those structures up. Gen Z is no exception to this scrutiny, and, if anything, the political and cultural forces of our current moment have differentiated its sex lives from that of previous generations’ in ways we haven’t seen before. Journalist Carter Sherman explores these tensions in her book The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over Its Future, out on Tuesday.
“We love telling young people that they’re doing sex wrong,” Sherman tells me. But instead of pontificating, she interviewed more than 100 young people about how they’ve experienced Gen Z’s purported sex recession, what role social media and porn play in their sex lives, and the lasting consequences of Dobbs in their personal lives. “I just became very intrigued about how sex and politics have shaped the lives of young people in a way that we haven’t totally reckoned with,” Sherman explains. In this conversation that has been lightly edited for clarity, I spoke with her about what she learned and why she feels the battles around the sex young people are having ultimately boil down to a power struggle over their ability to fully participate in our democracy.
You’ve been reporting on gender and sexuality for years. What inspired you to write The Second Coming?
I started thinking about this book in 2021. The Supreme Court had taken up the case that would end up being Dobbs, and everybody who worked in repro knew that Roe was on its way out. I was talking to a friend of mine who paid a lot of attention to the Supreme Court. She was telling me that, because she was worried about Roe disappearing, whenever she got close to having an orgasm with her partner, she would hear Brett Kavanaugh’s voice in her head.
Oh no.
It was not sexy, as you might imagine, and kind of threw a wrench into the whole having-an-orgasm thing. I thought, The end of Roe is probably coming. What does that mean for people’s sex lives? Are people thinking about this? I started reporting that question out, and what I found was that, generally, no, people were not thinking about how the end of Roe could impact their sex lives, because most people just didn’t believe that it could be overturned.
But then it happened. This young woman in Texas told me that if she couldn’t access an abortion, she would probably stop having sex with her boyfriend. I got a message from another young woman who told me that she wanted an abortion and couldn’t get one because she was living in Arizona, where it wasn’t clear whether it was legal at the time. She ended up self-managing. She felt like she was being punished for having sex, that the experience of being denied care was meant to humiliate her. Even though she found self-managing empowering, even though she was glad that she was able to do that, she had been pushed into such a corner that she felt like she was being forced to feel bad about herself. I just understood at that moment that the overturn of Roe was going to set the sex lives of this generation apart in a way that we have not seen in decades.
What are some of the things that surprised you about how they are thinking of and experiencing sex?
Young people do think that they are being profoundly shaped by porn, but I thought I would be encountering a much wider range of opinions on the topic. Instead, I found that, in general, young people seem to feel like porn has negatively impacted their lives. The science on it doesn’t necessarily bear that out, but that’s not being communicated to young people. All they’re being told is that porn is messing them up and making them have worse sex, making them degrade and devalue one another. I do think there’s a lot of reasons to interrogate what porn is doing to young people, but we need to have a much more nuanced conversation about it.
I also didn’t realize that I was going to school at the beginning of this exploding campaign to convince young people to be virgins. I’m 31. The Bush administration spent more than a billion dollars on abstinence-only sex ed. And since then, we have continued to see hundreds of millions of dollars get poured into abstinence-only sex education. Many of the young people I talked to had no idea about the mechanisms behind why they were getting such shoddy sex ed and why they were only being told, “Don’t have sex or you’ll die.” It was profoundly shocking to me how inept so much of the sex ed that they were getting was. Many people were just given photos of STIs and told, “Don’t get these. These are terrifying.” One young man was basically told that if he had sex, he would go to jail and end up getting some kind of STI that would lead to his genitals falling off. The degree to which people had sex pathologized by their schools stunned me.
I found your approach to the topic of porn quite refreshing — it was considerably more nuanced than a lot of the discourse out there. At best, most analysis treats porn as a monolith; at worst, as if it’s the source of all societal ills. Based on your reporting, what do people get wrong about the impact of porn in young people’s lives? And what do they get right?
People are right in thinking that young people are looking to porn for sex ed. That’s because we’ve so hindered young people’s access to actual, comprehensive sex ed that all they have to look for, particularly when it comes to learning how to give and receive pleasure, is porn. People are right to be concerned about the role of porn in educating young people about sex. What people are not right about is understanding that porn is not a monolith. There’s all kinds of porn. I was interested in understanding the impact of fan fiction, erotica, smut, and romance novels. For young queer people and for young women in particular, those were profoundly impactful sources of eroticism and titillation and, yes, education. We can’t just group all kinds of porn into one bucket, especially because written forms of porn oftentimes are more affirming of female pleasure and of queer pleasure. There are valuable things to be learned in those sources.
What else did they tell you about having “bad” sex, other than the impact that porn had on their lives? What did you find contributes to young people having unfulfilling sexual experiences?
What contributes to young people having unfulfilling sexual experiences is probably the thing that contributes to all of us having unfulfilling sexual experiences, which is acting according to scripts and not communicating with our partners or listening to ourselves about what actually turns us on. Porn is a strong example of this, because something that has popped up quite a bit in both written porn and in video porn is this normalization of “rough sex,” which often manifests specifically in choking. If you are under 40, you are twice as likely to have been choked during sex. Many young people in studies have reported not being asked before they get choked.
This stems from the sense that this is how sex is normally, that you don’t need to ask because this is an average part of sex — even though, obviously, choking can be quite dangerous. I talked to one young woman who said, “All of us were having sex for the first time, and all of us were having rough sex.” She said of choking, or “a love squeeze,” “Some of us might like it, but I don’t think all of us liked it.” That is the critical thing to keep in mind. If you like choking, more power to you. Just do it safely and consensually. If someone doesn’t like it, that is a totally normal thing that they should be able to articulate. But we have to have real conversations about porn and what it teaches us in order to even get to the point where people can understand that they might not like some of the things that they see in porn.
As you said, a lot of young people turn to porn because they don’t have access to comprehensive sex ed. The push to eliminate it and replace it with abstinence-only sex education is part of a larger movement that you characterize as “sexual conservatism.” Can you talk more about the goals of sexual conservatives?
This was not a movement that I went into the book thinking consciously about, but the more I learned about the policy that shapes our sex lives, and the more I talked to young people, the more I felt like it was important to have a name for what’s going on. I specifically define sexual conservatism as the movement to make it difficult — if not dangerous — to have sex that is not married and that is not potentially procreative. Part of the movement’s goals is to eliminate access to abortion and, ideally, access to hormonal birth control. It raises the possibility that any time you have sex, you’re going to have a baby at the end of it.
Sexual conservatism is on the rise. They see the overturn of Roe as proof that their plan can work, that there is an ability to make sex they deem undesirable difficult and harder to access — even though most people in the United States don’t actually adhere to sexual conservatism. This is a small minority, but it is a very powerful, vocal minority. The other things that they are taking aim at include comprehensive sex ed, LGBTQ+ rights, books that might include any kind of depiction of intimacy or sexuality, attacks on gender-affirming care. This movement seeks to use young people as bogeymen, to use people’s fears about their children to push for all kinds of restrictions on minors and then eventually expand those restrictions to people of all ages.
What you’re arguing is that what happens with young people is a harbinger for everyone else in the country. Why is that?
Abortion provides a clear example of this. One of the first restrictions on abortion after Roe that was decided was the implementation of parental-consent laws, which made it so that minors in most states had to seek their parents’ consent or at least notify them about their intent to get an abortion. Those parental-consent laws carved cracks into the Roe fire wall.
They were treated as very normal restrictions to place on young people. Over time, anti-abortion activists used those restrictions to test out other possible kinds: They embedded arguments about fetal personhood, for example, into debates over minors’ access to abortion. When we accept those smaller restrictions, it paves the way for greater restrictions. We see this too in the attacks on gender-affirming care. At least one activist has straight up said to the New York Times that they’re trying to attack trans kids’ access to care because that’s where the consensus is right now but that they want to eventually eliminate access to gender-affirming care for people of all ages.
You spend a lot of time also talking about the other side of the coin: “sexual progressivism.” Can you talk about their goals and in which ways they have been successful?
Sexual progressivism was a movement that I ended up identifying over the course of talking to young people. They had this ardent interest in expanding the definitions of gender and sex, in rethinking old stereotypes about how we approach these concepts. Sexual progressivism has a deep, vested interest in expanding access to abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and comprehensive sex ed. I feel like this is something that has come about as a result of the internet. Young people have just been able to learn so much more — not only about sex but about themselves and about marginalized communities thanks to being able to log online and find all kinds of information that was simply not available to previous generations. It has contributed to an incredible outgrowth of activism among young people that is very heartening. When I was younger, I don’t think I had a sense of the resources that were available to me, much less how my actions or my sex life had political valence. I don’t think that’s true for many young people now. They know already that they deserve better.
I was in Charlotte for several weeks in 2022 reporting on a scandal in the local school district involving allegations that young women had come forward to report sexual assault to their high-school administrators and had been effectively silenced by them. These young women organized so quickly and stood up for themselves in school-board meetings at great personal cost. It was astounding to me because we’ve so long treated sexual assault as just a thing that happens to young women in particular. They were standing up and saying, “No more.” Their integrity and fortitude were very inspiring to me.
In the book, you make the case that the battle over young people and sex is a battle over their ability to have bodily autonomy and live full lives.
The right to not only have sex but how and with whom you want is critical to bodily autonomy. When we make people afraid of intimate relationships, we cut off their ability to build power, to build self-esteem, and to pursue the lives that they want. When you make particular groups of people afraid — to stand up, to bond with one another, to pursue what they want — you ice them out of public life. Look at sexual assault: It is one of the main reasons that women leave college. If she does, then she has so much less of a chance to flourish economically and professionally and to go out and participate in public life. It’s so important to think about sex not just in the context of this is something we do in our bedroom but this is something that informs the way that we approach the rest of our life, the way that we feel empowered within ourselves and in our relationships. Cutting off access to that right impacts our ability to participate in a full democracy.
Ultimately, what do you want people to take away from The Second Coming?
I want people to think about the ways that politics sets the terms of our sex lives. We are so resistant to thinking about this because we have this belief that sex is a private thing that occurs in a bedroom between two or more people. In reality, so much of our sex lives is determined by things that happen in courtrooms, at school boards, in state legislatures, in Congress, and in the White House. Embracing the fact that sex is a huge part of not only our lives but our public relationships with one another and a huge part of the body politic — that is something that we need to reckon with. How do we want politics to shape our intimate relationships? Because whether you acknowledge it or not, that’s already happening.