F*ck Around and Find Out with Anna Lee: Gen Z isn’t ruining sex, they’re rewriting it

Millennials and Gen Z have been pitted against each other for years. Skinny jeans versus baggy jeans. Side parts versus middle parts (thank you for bullying me out of my terrible side part, though, honestly). Being called "cheugy" by someone who was in diapers when I opened my Facebook account. I've made my peace with all of it.

But earlier this week, Playboy and the Kinsey Institute released their 2026 Gen Z Sex Survey, and my group chats haven't stopped since. So when this landed in my DMs, the timing felt perfect:

"I'm 25, and all I keep hearing is that Gen Z is ruining sex. We're not having it. We're broken. We don't know how to connect with people. Blah blah blah. I'm so tired of it."

No question. Just filing a complaint. Honestly, it's valid, and I'm kind of tired of hearing it too. Let's talk about why.

What the survey actually says

The survey asked 2,373 Americans ages 18-29 about their sex lives. The headline numbers sound bleak. About one in five have never had sex. Twenty-nine percent had zero partners in the last three months.

But look closer. Seventy-four percent report moderate to high sexual desire. Nearly half kiss someone almost every day. Only 18 percent say they're unsatisfied with their sex lives. The barriers they name aren't a lack of interest. They're money, privacy, and fear. Forty-three percent say finances make dating harder; 60 percent fear rejection. Among singles living with their parents, two-thirds had no partners at all in the last three months.

So yes, young adults are having less sex. The researchers call the recession real. And publications have been writing Gen Z's sexless obituary for years, from 2019, CNBC's "America’s Sex Recession Could Lead to an Economic Depression" to Newsweek's headline this very morning: "Why Is Gen Z Not Having Sex? They May Be Too Broke to Date."

But "less sex" and "broken" are not the same thing.

We've been here before

History swings like a pendulum. It leans too far one way, then corrects.

When researchers compared generations using national survey data, high rates of sexual inactivity started with the group born in the 1920s. That generation came of age during the Depression and World War II. Then, the pendulum swung. For American women born between 1939 and 1978, the share who had sex before marriage by age 25 rose from about half to nearly nine in 10. The 1960s and '70s brought the pill, second-wave feminism, and the sexual revolution. The 1980s swung back with the AIDS crisis and a conservative backlash.

And here's the part nobody wants to hear: the decline didn't start with Gen Z. It started with us. The cheugies. In 2016, researchers found that 15 percent of Millennials born in the 1990s had no sexual partners by their early 20s. For Gen X at the same age, it was six percent. In 1990, 55 percent of American adults had sex weekly. By 2024, it was 37 percent.

I grew up in the Millennial era of "sex sells." Sex was in every ad (the Carl's Jr. ad featuring Paris Hilton is burned into my brain, and may have been my gay awakening or I’m craving a burger, I'm still not sure), every movie was a competition of who can have a raunchier sex scene, and every pun we made proved we were in on the joke. Culture looked like it was having more sex than ever. In reality, we were already having less.

The funny part? We got the opposite reputation. Researchers suggested our "hookup culture" image came from the most active among us posting their exploits online, while most of us were home watching Netflix.

The pendulum Gen Z is pushing against isn't really about how much sex people have. It's about how sex is portrayed. They grew up watching the male-gaze version of sex get picked apart in public, and a lot of them decided they didn't want to perform it.

Gen Z isn't rejecting sex. They're rejecting the version of sex they were sold.

The "others" were never a minority

For a long time, I felt like an outsider in conversations about sex. There were the loud, effortlessly sexy people who seemed to have it all figured out, and then there was me. Scared of my body. Scared of what and who I liked. I wanted to understand my body and intimacy in ways that didn't look anything like what I saw on TV. What I eventually learned is that there were far more people like me than like them. We just weren't the ones being filmed.

I think Gen Z is saying out loud what many of us felt quietly. When asked, Gen Z names monogamy as their most preferred relationship style, according to a 2024 Feeld and Kinsey Institute report. In a 2022 Lovehoney survey, nearly half of young adults called sex on a first date a dealbreaker. That isn't a generation that has lost interest in connection. It's a generation redefining it. Romantic connection, sexual connection, and intimate connection are merging instead of living in separate boxes. They still want connection. The old script for getting there just doesn't work for them.

Maybe it's time to redefine "sex" itself

Here's a fun fact: we've never actually agreed on what sex is. When the Kinsey Institute asked people ages 18-96 what "had sex" meant to them, there was no consensus. About 30 percent didn't count oral sex. About 20 percent didn't count anal sex. Even penile-vaginal intercourse wasn't unanimous. So when a headline says a generation is "having less sex," it's worth asking: less of what?

The Playboy survey itself tracked six different acts, from kissing to manual play to intercourse. Kissing was the most common daily activity by a mile.

I suspect the future will look back at our definition of sex as oddly narrow. Maybe we'll stop treating two genitals touching as the only thing that counts. Maybe sex once a month, scheduled sex, or a long night of foreplay with no intercourse at all will just be considered normal, healthy sex lives. Maybe we'll measure a sex life by how connected and satisfied people feel, not by a weekly tally. If that's where Gen Z is steering us, I'm not mourning the old scoreboard.

What does worry me

I don't want to wave all of this away. Some of it concerns me.

The desire gap is real. Wanting connection and not being able to reach it is painful, and involuntary sexlessness can turn into loneliness and resentment. Young men and women are also drifting apart politically and socially, and that makes connection harder on both sides. The bigger risk isn't fewer hookups. It's fewer humans touching, talking to, and trusting other humans.

People ask me all the time what AI means for the future of sex tech. AI porn, AI companions, sex robots. My honest answer? Who gives a damn. They're asking the wrong question. The real question is what need people are trying to meet, and whether we're building things that bring people closer or just keep them comfortable alone.

So here's what I'd tell you

How much sex you have is your decision. There's no correct frequency. If you have a partner, or partners, it's something you figure out together and meet somewhere you're all satisfied. Even though I work in this industry, I don't think anyone needs to be having sex or masturbating constantly, or making it their top priority.

But please don't let "sex isn't popular anymore" turn into "let's stop talking about it." We have been in that position before, and it meant generations of people making decisions about their bodies with almost no information. The Playboy and Kinsey survey also found that only 35 percent of young adults typically use condoms, and about a third have never been tested for STIs. Less sex does not automatically mean safer sex.

We should learn about sexual wellbeing the way we learn about history or personal finance: early, honestly, and without shame. Not because everyone needs to be having more sex, but because everyone deserves to make informed decisions about the sex they choose to have.

So, to my annoyed 25-year-old: you're not broken. You're part of a generation asking a better question. Not "How much sex should I be having?" but "What kind of connection do I actually want?" Keep asking it.