PLEASE NOTE: This is a minimally-edited transcript that originates from a program that uses AI.
Anita Rao
This is Embodied, from PRX and WUNC. I’m Anita Rao. When it comes to Gen Z and sex, there’s one fact that draws the most attention: they’re not really having that much of it.
Carter Sherman
Even though we're living in a time where thanks to the internet, you would imagine it's easier than ever for people to know what they want and to go after it. It's really become so difficult for people to feel like they can have the kind of sex that they want.
Anita Rao
Journalist Carter Sherman takes us into the hundreds of conversations she had with people under 30 and how they feel about the sex they are or aren’t having. She also makes her case for why we should all care about this no matter our generational identity.
Carter Sherman
I think we can learn from young people about how to live better sex lives as older people.I think it is also helpful to just, just stop obsessing over telling young people that they're doing sex wrong.
Anita Rao
Sex and the next generation, just ahead on Embodied.
It was an evening like many others. Carter Sherman was at her sorority house at Northwestern University. Swanning about with friends as they got ready for a frat party. But this particular night in 2013, there was someone else in the room, a journalist named Peggy Orenstein.
Carter Sherman
She was at the time working on what would become the book, girls and Sex. And she came to talk to my sorority sisters and I, because we were girls and we were having sex.
Anita Rao
Peggy asked lots of questions about how they decided what to wear and what they wanted from the men they were going to see. But as the evening wore on, Carter got the sense that they weren't giving Peggy what she was looking for.
Carter Sherman
I think what she really wanted from us was to feel like we were victims of quote unquote hookup culture.
Anita Rao
Stories about millennial hookup culture and the harms of no stringed attached sex were everywhere. At that time, while Carter and some of her sorority sisters were hooking up with men, their sex lives did not quite match that narrative, which was echoed in Peggy's book.
Carter Sherman
The tone was still the sense of finger wagging at young people. This idea that, oh, older people know best, that sex was better in the past, that young people had somehow lost their way when it came to dating and to sex.
Anita Rao
This whole experience left Carter wondering, what are the stories we tell about young people and sex, and why do they matter? This is embodied our show about sex, relationships, and your health. I'm Anita Brow. After college, Carter became a journalist herself covering gender and sexuality. And over her years of reporting, she observed some confounding things happening at the intersection of sex, culture and politics. The generation below her was coming of age amidst increased sex, positivity and unprecedented access to sex on the internet. Yet data shows Gen Z is having sex later and less often than past generations. The US as a whole is going through a sex recession, but the trend is especially pronounced in people under 30. So to make sense of all of this, both the story about Gen Z's, sex lives, and why it's important, Carter wrote her own book. It's called The Second Coming Sex, and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future. One important note, the sex recession didn't actually start with Gen Z. Perhaps surprisingly, this trend started a generation earlier.
Carter Sherman
We know that millennials were starting to have less sex than previous generations. In fact, the only generation that had a comparable amount of sex to millennials was the generation born in the 1920s. And frankly, I imagine their sex lives were somewhat hampered by, I don't know, world War ii. Yeah. And the Great Depression and the advent of hormonal birth control. So it was really interesting as I was diving into research for this book to see that, oh, all of these anecdotes and all of these. Concerns about millennials engaging in hookup culture. That really wasn't based on the data, and frankly, it made me feel better about myself because one of the main defining features of my sex life as a young person was that I wasn't having. What I thought to be enough sex. I didn't have sex for the first time until I was 19, and by the time I was 17, I was in a full blown panic about that fact. Hmm. And if I had known at the time that actually I wasn't an anomaly, I was part of a burgeoning statistical trend, I probably would've felt a lot better about myself.
Anita Rao
So let's talk about the narrative that we have about Gen Z and then we'll kind of break that down. Uh, the term that's used a lot is sex recession. So what exactly does that mean?
Carter Sherman
So the sex recession is the term for. Young people, actually, people of all ages, I would say, having less sex. What we know is that one in four adult members of Gen Z have not had sex with another person. We know that only about 30% of high school students have had sex, which is down from about 50% when I was in high school. And we also know that even masturbation is on the decline. Huh? Which is frankly. Shocking to me because masturbation is free, but I think it speaks to something going on for young people around sex and sex becoming more fraught, more difficult, and. One of the thesis that I bring up in the book is that sex is now laden with so much political weight that it has made sex very difficult for young people to even want to pursue even when it comes to having sex with themselves.
Anita Rao
Why do you think that the data about, um, this generation having less sex is hitting home for us so much now, but we weren't really talking about it when the trend started with younger millennials.
Carter Sherman
I think what has gone on now with this sex recession is that the media and news outlets have just realized, perhaps a generation too late that this trend is going on. I also think we are in a moment where we see a lot of threats to sex. In the headlines, we see the overturning of Roe v. Wade, we see the emergence of the Me Too movement, and so I think we're spending a lot more time thinking about sexes, an endangered species, and the sex recession really fits into that narrative.
Anita Rao
So you had this firsthand experience of watching a cultural narrative about your generation's sexuality emerge that didn't match your reality. A lot of hand ringing about hookup culture that wasn't necessarily a full picture. Why do you not think that this Gen Z sex recession narrative is like, why is that just not more of the same?
Carter Sherman
Well, I think number one, it is based in data, and so we have more of a foundation for us to be even thinking about this narrative and why it's real. I think the other thing that really for me stood out when I was investigating this book and for this book, I talked to more than 100 people under 30 about their sex lives and their experiences and their thoughts around sex is that sex has really taken on. So much anxiety for people. It's really become so difficult for people to feel like they can have the kind of sex that they want, even though we're living in a time where thanks to the internet, you would imagine it's easier than ever for people to know what they want and to go after it. And so I think we're. Really mired in trying to understand, okay, how is it possible that on one hand we have all of this unfettered access to sex, yet on the other hand, people are not really engaging in it. I think that there's just a fundamental disconnect that's going on for a lot of people when we try to hold these two truths in our mind, and that is what makes this sex recession narrative so compelling to people.
Anita Rao
The next beat in a lot of journalism around the Gen Z sex recession goes to talking about population decline and what this means for our future. That is not what you are interested in and why you think this matters. Why do you think, uh, really analyzing this matters for us culturally and societally?
Carter Sherman
I very much want to stay away from these concerns that are coming out. I think a lot of the political right about things like pronatalism and the declining birth rates, and this idea that Americans should be having relationships and having babies for the good of the state. Instead, what. I really think about in terms of the recession is whether or not having sex is a proxy measure for young people's willingness to take risks, to face rejection, to put themselves out there and be vulnerable. And I think about this really not only in the context of sex, because honestly I'm just not that interested in whether or not young people are having sex. What I'm interested in whether is, whether or not they are able to form relationships, hmm. Sexual. Romantic platonic because I really do believe that forming those relationships is essential to society, to having a civil society where all of us can engage with one another and have empathy for one another and work towards building a democracy.
Anita Rao
One thing that has come up in past conversations about Gen Z and sex, um, is that we've heard from, from some Gen Z guests themselves, like we just defined sex differently. Do you think that that is a factor here in understanding the data?
Carter Sherman
It was really interesting to me in doing these interviews because I asked everybody effectively how they defined sex uhhuh and. One of my favorite answers that a young woman from Oregon gave was that she defines sex as when clothes are on the floor intentionally. Okay. And I felt that that was a great description because I think that when we say something is sex, that's what makes it sex. And so when it comes to looking at the data. You can see that, you know, there are changing ideas about what constitutes sex, but still we're not seeing that account for this decline.
Anita Rao
Okay. So we've been talking a lot about data and trends, but your book is really grounded in stories of how these political forces, uh. Really impact people's very personal experiences of sex and intimacy. And I know that there was a conversation that you had with a close friend that really catalyzed your desire to write a book about this and connect the dots between the political and the personal. Will you tell us about that conversation?
Carter Sherman
Yes. So what happened was this was, I believe in the lead up to. The overturning of Roe v. Wade, I was talking to a friend about this topic because both of us really followed the Supreme Court. Both of us pay a lot of attention to reproductive rights, and we were both very aware that Roe could be overturned shortly. She was telling me that she was struggling to have an orgasm because whenever she would get close, she would hear Justice Brett Kavanaugh's voice in her head. Oh my God. And right. A lot of people I think, remember his voice very acutely because of his confirmation hearings. And I think for a lot of people then that's not really a super sexy voice to hear. And I started thinking about, okay, well how is. The intrusion of politics into the bedroom affecting the ways that people are behaving in bedrooms.
Anita Rao
I really wanna dive into the Roe v Wade thing in a second, but first I just wanna kind of, um, understand your relationship to the people that you were interviewing. How did your experience, seeing your sex life kind of misunderstood shape, the approach that you took to doing the research and sitting down for interviews with the people that you spoke with?
Carter Sherman
I, that's a great question. I think one of the things I really wanted to do was to not map a narrative. Mm-hmm. Onto young people. I really wanted to ask people. All of these detailed questions, much more so about their own experiences and not necessarily try to say, okay, how do you fit into this trend? So these conversations tend to last around 90 minutes, and I would go through basic biographical details, and then I would go into asking them questions. About what political or cultural events do they think shaped their sex lives?
Anita Rao
Just ahead, we'll dive into the major forces that have shaped Gen Z's sex lives from the Me Too movement to the overturning of Roe versus Wade. You're listening to Embodied from North Carolina Public Radio, a broadcast service of the University of North Carolina, at Chapel Hill. You can also hear Embodied as a podcast. Follow and subscribe on your platform of choice. We'll be right back.
This is Embodied. I am Anita Rao. A heads up that today's program discusses sex. If you'd like to listen later, you can find the show at our website or in your podcast feed. Every generation has its defining moments, but when it comes to sexual politics, journalist Carter Sherman argues that Gen Z has experienced an inordinate number of lifetime defining events back to back. Think the rise of the internet, the Me Too movement, the B Brett Kavanaugh hearings, and most recently, the overturn of Roe v. Wade. And these events are the backdrop to an interesting data point. Gen Z is not having as much sex as previous generations, a trend known as the sex recession. So how does all of this affect how young people are feeling about their sex lives? Carter recently set out to answer that question, she conducted more than a hundred interviews with people under 30 that are featured in her book, the Second Coming Sex, and the Next Generation's Fight over its future. She tells personal stories, but with important context that of the dueling political ideologies around sex.
Carter Sherman
I think it is very much left people's sex lives stuck in the middle between the forces of what I call sexual progressivism and sexual conservatism. And sexual conservatism is a movement that I define as the movement to make it difficult, if not dangerous, to have sex that is not. Straight that is not married and that is not potentially procreative because it's being practiced with subpar access to abortion and potentially even subpar access to hormonal birth control. And so I think for a lot of young people, they see through their screens this emergence of sexual progressivism in a really unprecedented way in human history because they are able to access all of these different kinds of. Sexuality online, they're able to find all of these communities of people who might have been marginalized in the past due to their sexual orientation, due to their gender identity. And yet at the same time, they're watching this crackdown from political administrations on. Sexual progressivism in the form of sexual conservatism. So they're seeing, okay, if I go online, I can do all of these things, but out here in the real world, it is actually potentially dangerous for me to get pregnant. It is actually potentially dangerous for me to be gay or to be trans. And so I think that it just creates this profound sense of anxiety and even dislocation and just maybe even a desire to opt out entirely by not having sex.
Anita Rao
You had a really interesting kind of perspective watching this happen through your career in journalism, and it started in Texas. You were working at an alt weekly in Houston, and I'd love for you to help us understand how kind of that on the ground view in Texas in particular, shaped your understanding of the way that sexual politics was changing in this country.
Carter Sherman
Well, I am originally from Seattle, which I think is very well understood by most of the country as being a pretty liberal bubble. And so I can say when I moved to Texas to work at this Alt Weekly, I was. Maybe not exactly prepared for the sexual conservatism that was bubbling up in Texas at the time, because Texas is very much a laboratory for sexual conservatism. Its state legislature passes all kinds of restrictions that then get imported to other states that then move all the way up to the federal government and get implemented at that level. And it was really fascinating to see these policies affect Texans first while I was living there. I moved there in 2016, and that was right after the Supreme Court decided this case called Whole Women's Health Fee Heller Set, which was a case that dealt with araf of abortion restrictions that actually led about half of the abortion clinics in Texas to close. Hmm. And I was really interested in reporting on the repercussions of that decision because it felt like a moment within the abortion rights movement. For them to really claw back a lot of the losses that they had endured in the previous years. They thought, okay, this is a time where maybe we will start to win again. Maybe we can rebuild some of these clinics. Maybe we can lessen some of these restrictions. And instead, what happened was Texas anti-abortion advocates and sexual conservatives came out swinging. By the time I was there, they were already in the midst of passing a very restrictive law for minor's ability to get abortions and. What I saw at that time was that actually the anti-abortion movement had developed a blueprint for sexual conservatism where they realized that if they worked at the state level to pass all kinds of restrictions that would chip away at access to abortion or chip away at access to other things that they didn't like then that could. Make it more difficult on the ground for people to have abortions and ultimately create vehicles for courts to step in. That is exactly what we ended up seeing happen in the case of Roe v. Wade, right? We saw a state level abortion restriction go all the way up to the Supreme Court and get used to overturn Roe. And so being in Texas for me was a way to see, oh, this is what happens to people on the ground when they're caught up in the midst of this. This is how people are already struggling to live the kinds of sexual lives that they want. When sexual conservatism has a choke hold on a state government.
Anita Rao
I really want to understand the stories and hear the stories that you heard from people about how the overturning of Roe influenced their sex lives. I was pretty floored by some of the statistics that you cite in the book, like 16% of Gen Zers say they're now more hesitant to even date since Roe was overturned. So tell me about kind of a, a, a story that comes to mind that really brought this impact home for you.
Carter Sherman
Well, one of the stories that. Actually led me to first be interested in writing this book was the story of a young woman who reached out to me right after Roe was overturned. So she was living in Arizona, she was in her early twenties, and she had realized right around the time that Roe was overturned, that she was pregnant and that she didn't want to be. What was happening in Arizona at the time was that because Roe had been overturned, no one was sure whether or not this century's old abortion ban was back in effect, and abortion providers were no longer working. So it was just not an option for this woman to go to a clinic in her home state and enter her pregnancy. Instead, what she ended up doing was ordering abortion pills online, which medical experts widely agree are safe to use in the first trimester pregnancy. And she self-managed her own abortion in a hotel room with her ex-boyfriend. And I followed her through that experience. We stayed in close contact through the 11 days. It took her to get from being in a position where she realized she didn't wanna be pregnant to actually ending that pregnancy, and she felt empowered by that experience. She felt like. This was the right thing for her to do. She was really proud of herself for taking all of those steps to end the pregnancy, even though it was profoundly difficult. But she did tell me that she felt like she had been humiliated for having sex. Hmm. She felt like she was being punished by conservatives for daring to have sex. And that really stuck with me because it's so. Awful to hear that you feel like your government wants to particularly punish you for doing something that millions of people do every day. And it really pushed me to want to see if this was something that was happening to other young people. Because what we've effectively done is create a generation that has been thrown back into a pre 1973 sexual environment. The overturning of Roe v. Wade creates a sexual landscape that we have just not seen. More than half a century, and I think it's really important for us to understand that abortion is an outcome of sex. We oftentimes think of abortion as being a standalone event in people's lives, but it's not. It's something that happens because people have sex. It's something that happens because people survive sexual assault and. I think we really need to think about it within the context of people's sexual lives.
Anita Rao
You interviewed folks across the political spectrum. I'm curious about how some of the more conservative activists talk to you about how the overturn of ROE has affected their sex lives, their sex behaviors.
Carter Sherman
I did, I did really wanna make it a point to talk to young people who were on the right, in particular because there are more young people who are on the right these days, and I think we really see this in the drift of young men to the right. And what I found, honestly is that a lot of them weren't having sex. Hmm. Because they don't believe that it's right to do it before they get married. And so for them, the overturning of Roe v. Wade was a victory that they didn't necessarily have to feel the effects of because it didn't affect them all that much. It wasn't really changing the behavior that they were already engaging in. And I think that is worth sitting with and thinking about because it's. It is really interesting to think about, you know, these people really wanted a particular outcome that then doesn't really shape their lives in the same way that it shapes most Americans, because most Americans do have premarital sex, and most Americans do support abortion rights.
Anita Rao
I wanna pivot to the other cultural event that came up most often in your interviews, which was the Me Too movement, and again, you interviewed folks of a variety of genders and and sexualities. I'd love to hear a story that comes to mind from a more masculine person about how Me Too impacted his relationship to sex and sexuality.
Carter Sherman
There was a young man who I really appreciate him being so honest with me about this, but he told me that he felt that the Me Too movement was at times an anti cis male movement, that it really made men to look like the bad guy and. What was interesting was for a lot of the young men I spoke to, they weren't more afraid of sex because of the Me Too movement. They didn't think like, oh, I'm gonna be falsely accused of sexual violence, because they thought of themselves as, you know, not being the type to do that. They weren't really worried about raping people 'cause they were like, I would never do that and. Of course, I'm not saying that any of these men would do anything like that, but it was really interesting to me that that was sort of how young men felt and that they were being demonized for something that they would never do. And it was interesting to me, honestly, in contrast with the young women I was speaking with, because, you know, I didn't ask anybody directly whether or not they had ever been sexually assaulted. That was not a question that I had as part of my standard questionnaire, but it did come up a lot. Hmm. I would say most of the young women I interviewed did tell me that they had been sexually violated in some way. And what's interesting about the Me Too movement is that it didn't really lead to a lot of policy changes. The main changes that came out of the Me Too movement were changing NDA Laws and Strengthening HR trainings for. Workers, and those are not things that really help young people because they're not at work. And so for the young women I was speaking with, they felt like, okay, now I know that sexual violence is much more common. They, I think, realized. Much earlier than I did that sexual violence may have occurred in their lives, that it had occurred to friends of theirs. But then they felt like there wasn't really any kind of policy or institutional change that could help them. And so it created this miasma of, again, anxiety that they were just walking around in where they felt like the world was, um, they felt like the world was a really dangerous place, that it was riddled with sexual violence, but they didn't really feel like there were any resources that they could turn to for help. And I think that is. Profoundly unfortunate that these two genders, young men and young women, are on these different trajectories in some ways because of the Me Too movement where young men feel okay, we've been demonized and young women feel okay. We've been told that we're in danger everywhere, but no one's doing anything about it.
Anita Rao
Mm. You were entering the workforce right about that time recently out of college. I'm curious how seeing this all play out affected your own relationship to sex at that time?
Carter Sherman
I think what the Me Too movement did for me was similar to what it did for a lot of people, which is that it definitely made me reevaluate past experiences that I had had, and. I will say, as I say in the book, you know, I am a sexual violence survivor. I was assaulted during college, and when it happened, I knew what was wrong. Pretty soon afterwards, but I didn't think that there was anything I could have done about it. It was me and him alone in the room. I knew what would be a he said, she said situation. I didn't really ever entertain. Going to the police or going to the school 'cause we were at college about it. And when the Me Too movement happened, I think my sense of injustice at that experience deepened because I did feel like maybe I deserved more resources. Maybe I deserved to be treated better. I deserve to have an institution that presented me with the resources before anything bad happened, so that when something did go wrong, I could have immediately known what my options were. And maybe I wouldn't have taken them, maybe I would've still acted exactly as I did. But it was really frustrating for me when the Me Too movement broke out to realize that, oh, I, I deserve better. And I think most people, all people who survive sexual violence do as well. You know, when. The Brett Kavanaugh hearings happened. I actually had a very difficult day at work watching those hearings, and that was because what Christine Blasey Ford alleged happened to her was actually very similar to what happened to me and the way that I felt those allegations were treated, not just by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, but even oftentimes in the press to me, spoke to a sense that sexual violence is. Customary even expected, particularly among young people, that, especially for young women being sexually assaulted is kind of a rite of passage and we shouldn't really take it all that seriously because boys will be boys. And I felt that that was such a disappointing attitude to have, not just for young women, but for young boys as well, to not believe that we can make a better society. And I. Honestly had to go and sit in my workplace's bathroom and breathe deeply for several minutes to think to myself, okay, like what can we do to take this kind of thing more seriously? Because it does have a profound impact on the rest of people's lives.
Anita Rao
I'm really curious to ask about. How you saw events like this converted or not converted into sex ed? I mean, you and I were both in the workplace during the Me Too movement. I was far outside of getting kind of a formal sex ed in school. When you asked young folks about the sex ed that they were getting. Do they have, like are they talking about Me Too in school? Are they getting sex education that addresses some of this fear and anxiety?
Carter Sherman
I would say largely no. Mm-hmm. I think for a lot of people, their sex ed sounded a lot like that scene In Mean Girls where Coach Carr tells people Don't have sex or you'll die. And in fact, a lot of people brought that scene up specifically to me without me bringing it up. Wow. They were basically like, yeah, I saw that movie and. That was pretty much accurate to my experiences. What a lot of people were basically told was just say, no, don't have sex. Don't worry about STIs, don't worry about pregnancy. You'll be fine if you just avoid all of it. And the thing about that is that that kind of sexed doesn't account. For the possibility that you might say no and your no might be ignored. It certainly doesn't account for the diverse array of sexualities that exist in life and it can't accommodate things like talking about sexual pleasure, talking about healthy communication, talking about just the nuances that we're all going to experience as adults trying to grapple with our sexualities and the sexualities of the people we love, and I felt that. If there was anything that came out of the book that I was really struck by, it was the dearth of comprehensive sex education in this country, and the extent to which. We also treat bad sex ed as being the norm. It's a joke at this point, how bad American sex ed is, and yet there's not a lot of action being taken at the community level or at the federal level to improve it.
Anita Rao
Yeah. And reading your book, I almost felt like the sex ed that you were describing, that Gen Z folks were telling you was worse than the sex ed I got. I don't even, I don't think I got good sex ed, but like why? Why is it getting even worse? What's behind that?
Carter Sherman
What is behind that is a couple different things. First of all, the George W. Bush administration started pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into absence only sex ed. And that trend has just continued over the last 25 years, including under democratic presidents like Barack Obama and Joe Biden. And so there's just been a ton of money being thrown at absence only sex ed in a way that previous generations have not had to reckon with. The second thing though, and the thing that I was. Really struck by and have been really struck by as a journalist in my day job at I'm a Reproductive Health and Justice reporter at The Guardian is the extent to which schools in particular have become battlegrounds for a lot of cultural debates around sex and gender. And so we have seen, I think, since the pandemic in particular, this incredible intensifying of the debate over sex ed and taking it into. Places that are totally untethered from reality. One of the events that I reported on in the book was this effort in Texas to amend the state's sex ed guidelines, and I watched a hearing with the Texas State Board of Education where people got up and shared these stories and these ideas about sex ed that were just. So garbled and so unrealistic that I frequently had to rewind the hearing because I was like, this person cannot have said what I thought they just said, you know, they were talking about teachers grooming kids and that talking about consent. Even in schools would lead to teachers preying on students or that would lead to turning kids gay or turning kids trans, which is just not a thing. And so I really feel like what happened over the course of the pandemic was that people were trapped inside with their computers and they were fed all kinds of maddening conspiracy theories that they have now taken out to their school boards and used to fight to tamp down. Any mentions of sex and gender and intimacy in such a way that is a real disservice to young people because of course, life encompasses all of those things. Even if your teachers don't tell you about them.
Anita Rao
Just ahead, we take on the tangled web that is sex and the internet. And learn how despite it all, gen Zers are working to build the sex lives they want. As always, you can hear the podcast version of this show by following embodied on your platform of choice. We'll be right back.
This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao. Please note that today's show discusses sex, and this part of the conversation also includes mentions of sex acts and porn. If you'd like to listen later, you can find the show at our website or in your podcast feed. In the past few years, there has been a stream of think pieces about the sex recession, a body of data showing that Americans and particularly young Americans are having less sex Journalist Carter Sherman has years of professional experience reporting on sex and gender and lots of personal curiosity about the stories we tell about young people's sex lives. So she wanted to go beyond. The data. She interviewed more than a hundred young people about their thoughts and feelings on sex and compiled her findings in the book, the Second Coming Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future. She heard how young people's sex lives have been profoundly influenced by events like the Me Too movement and the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and by their lack of access to adequate sex education, but more than almost anything else. Carter heard stories of what it's meant to grow up on the internet and just how much that's shaped what young people learn about sex and intimacy.
Carter Sherman
The most obvious source of online sex education is porn, uhhuh, and I think sometimes these experiences of porn actually could be really fulfilling for young people and really empowering for them. One of the things I really wanted to do with the book was not look just at video porn, but look at things like erotica and fan fiction and romance novels and written porn, because I think that that has been a real source of titillation joy education for. In particular young women and young queer folks. There was one young woman who I spoke with who talked about, I'm laughing as I recall it, because this honestly made me laugh more than anything else I did in the book was she and I were talking and she was explaining that one of the first ways that she started to turn herself on was by going to Urban Dictionary.
Anita Rao
Urban Dictionary.
Carter Sherman
and okay, yes, yes. She would go to Urban Dictionary and she would look up dirty words. And it turns out that for a lot of dirty words, including things like sex, so very basic word here, there are these SM vignettes that are appended to the entries. And so people would use these words in a sentence. Explain how they could be used and like people have constructed entire imaginative worlds on urban dictionary that are filthy and you can go and look them up yourself. Um, and it was really fun for me to see all of these different ways that young people were teaching themselves the things that schools were not telling them. On the flip side of that though, there were a lot of young people who I spoke with who felt like they had learned really unfortunate lessons from porn and learned lessons that were not accurate to the ways that they wanted to actually have sex or the ways that their partners actually wanted to have sex.
Anita Rao
I wanna ask you one more question about this kind of alternate. Education from sources that are not video porn. 'cause I found this super striking and, and one of the things that feels most different to my experience on the internet. I wanna know more about fan fiction and erotic fan fiction and maybe through your own experience. I know that was something that you encountered, I think in middle school online.
Carter Sherman
Yes, I, uh, got really into Harry Potter fan fiction, which is a profoundly millennial thing to do, and I think that was a gateway drug to all kinds of other fan fiction. It was fascinating to me in doing these interviews. I was never all that interested in One Direction or Justin Bieber, but one Direction in Justin Pee fan fiction was like an erotic awakening for a lot of Gen Zers, and. For me, what would end up happening when I would look through Fanfiction, particularly as a young person, is that I would stumble upon. More extreme stories. Hmm. And by extreme I mean things where there would be instances of what's called dub con or dubious consent, or non-con, which is non-consent. And when I first started encountering those stories, I was really turned off by them. And I thought that they were gross. But then the more time you spend on the internet, the more you kind of get used to the way that the internet works. And I stopped being so. Instantly repulsed by it. I just got used to it. And a lot of young people I spoke with described as similar sensation and for a lot of young people, I think what this did is in their telling anyway, it mixed with what we oftentimes see in video porn, which can be more rough forms of sex and include things like choking. And it taught them that these were normal forms of sexuality. And you know, honestly, they are normal. And if you like those things, go for it. What I worry about is the sense that these things are so normal that you don't have to ask for consent to do them. Hmm. And so what I found when I was interviewing young people, for example, one young woman told me that in high school she and all of her friends were getting choked during sex. They called it a love squeeze. And she was saying, you know, some of us might have liked it, but I don't think all of us liked it. And. If you are under 40, you are twice, almost twice as likely to have been choked during sex as people above 40. And many people who are choked during sex are not asked first. And so I think what porn both written and video has done is create this narrative that rough sex is not something that you need to ask special consent for, and you do. And it became very clear to me pretty quickly that young people across the political spectrum did feel like porn, both written. And video had worked their sexuality, and I should say that science does not back that up. We do not really know what the effects of porn is on young people. From a scientific perspective, the science is incredibly murky on this issue, and oftentimes clouded by the bias of researchers who will just assume that a certain form of sex is degrading and. We don't even have a control group, right? Because it's basically impossible to find a group of people who haven't viewed internet porn in some way. And so it was really striking and important to me to emphasize in the book that the science of porn is very far from settled. However, it became clear to me that young people across the political spectrum, regardless of what the science says. Felt that video and written porn had warped them sexually. There's this concept in sociology called The Deep Story, which is the story that people feel to be true. And we see this all the time in politics, right? We see that people adopt stories that they feel to be true, and that those stories can be stronger than the actual facts. And so what I realized in reporting this book was that the deep story of internet porn for young people is that internet porn has been bad for them. That's not really the actual truth. We don't know what the truth is, but that doesn't mean that the deep story isn't valuable and important for us to know.
Anita Rao
I know that compared to their straight peers, L-G-B-T-Q, young people are twice as likely to turn to the internet for information about sex. So what did you hear from young queer folks where they frequenting the same online spaces? Did their response and and reaction differ at all?
Carter Sherman
I think for a lot of young queer people I talked to, I don't know that they were frequenting the same online spaces so much as they were going everywhere they could possibly go to find information that would feel applicable to their sexual orientation or to their gender identity. Basically, every young queer person I interviewed brought up the fact that they had Googled, am I gay? How do I know if I'm gay? Signs you're gay and things like that to help them understand what exactly was going on inside of them. And I think that it was so critical for them to be able to realize that there are people out there like them, especially when they were in home situations that were not very accommodating. I talked to one young man from the Midwest who was still not out to his parents. Had really found a lot of solace in YouTubers who talked about coming out and who shared health information about being queer and having queer sex, and that was how he learned about things like prep, which guards against HIV. He's still not on it because he is afraid that his father will find out if he uses his parents' insurance to get on prep, but it was critical to helping him stay safe while he's having his intimate relationship.
Anita Rao
Did you get a sense from folks how their sexual politics intersected with their actual sex lives? The queer folks in particular, like finding community online was helpful to get this education to maybe feel less alone. Was that translating into them having the sex lives that they wanted?
Carter Sherman
Not necessarily. There was one young man who I talked to whose name is Cameron, and he lives in Florida and he is very much an activist for LGBTQ plus rights. He's gay and he has spent several years of his life fighting against Florida. Governor Ron DeSantis and DeSantis don't say gay legislation, which limits the ways that teachers can talk about LGBTQ plus people and rights and issues in schools. What was interesting about Cameron though, at least at the time we talked, is that he actually hadn't had sex. He was not dating anybody. He thought that in fact he would kind of be a bad boyfriend because he was so committed to this political fight. And so on one hand, I think one of the things that I found really heartening when I talked to young people was the way that they were connecting the political and the personal, and the ways that they were going out and fighting for better sex lives for themselves and for their peers. And yet on the other hand, they weren't necessarily having the kind of sex that they were fighting for because it was just so all consuming for them to even be in the fight to begin with.
Anita Rao
That's so interesting. Did you hear stories in your research about people who have been able to have the sex lives they want? And I'm curious what has made that possible?
Carter Sherman
Yeah. It's not all doom and gloom to be really clear. Sometimes things work out. A lot of the kids are all right. There was this one woman whose story I was really moved by and she grew up in Wisconsin and to be honest, she had a really difficult early sex life. She. Had her nudes leaked several times online by people who she had trusted and by people who she thought she was in a relationship with. She actually even had her boyfriend at one point, uh, post a sex tape of her that she had not consented to be filmed in. And she, after that was very hurt and I think really retreated into herself and really tried to figure out. What am I doing? How can I trust people? How can I ever have the kind of sex life that I want? When all, when the sex that I want seems to lead me into situations that leave me damaged and. What she ended up doing was she got very into sex ed advocacy. Mm-hmm. And she got very into what's called pleasure advocacy and really was fighting in her college for people to have good, healthy, informed sex lives. And then she also started dating this guy. And you know what was interesting to me when I spoke with her is that she had begun to be open to sending him nudes, even though she knew. With her past experiences that those nudes could leak a again, that he could be the person to leak those nudes. And what she was telling me was that she had embraced that vulnerability. She had realized that this was always going to be a risk, but that she was going to take that informed risk. And I think that that. Was so moving to me because that is where all of us are at, right? None of us can predict what the future is going to hold. We can trust other people as much as we want, but things can still go wrong. Those people can still betray us, but the way to help yourself move through that is to trust yourself and to believe that, okay, I can get through this. I can make these choices for myself, and regardless of what other people say and do about me. That trust in my own authenticity is what's going to see me through at the end of the day. I wanted to share also a story of a young man I spoke with who had really. Poor body image because of the internet. He felt like he wasn't fit enough. He felt like he was too big, and he opened up to his partner about that and cried in front of her about how he felt like he just wasn't good enough for her. And she accepted him. And she told him like she loved the way his body was and that she loved him. And that too also inspired me because. It sounds so trite, and I think people really wanna complicate this in a lot of ways, but just being open and communicative and vulnerable about your feelings like that is the recipe to a good relationship. And it's easier said than done, of course, but the solution is not that complex and it is possible for young people to achieve it, even in times like these.
Anita Rao
So I wanna close by taking a step back and kind of thinking about what do we do with all of this information. You, we talked early on about your experience of seeing someone kind of reflect your generation, sex life back to you as part of this broader cultural narrative, and maybe not all of it fitting. As you synthesized all of this information about Gen Z. You said earlier you didn't want them to feel like you were trying to fit them into a narrative. What did you wanna give back to the people that you spoke to?
Carter Sherman
I wanted them to feel seen and to feel like what they were going through was not uncommon or singular. It may have been unique to them, but so many people are going through similar experiences and that they could, I wanted them to feel like they could find commonalities in their stories without me imposing a top down narrative. I wanted there to be a. Groundswell of commonalities, if that makes sense. And I really was so impressed by the degree to which these young people were working to improve their own communities and were working to improve themselves, and were actively engaged in the search for a sexuality that fit them and for sex lives that made them feel whole and valuable. And. You know, some of the stories that I relay in the book are really, for lack of a better word, grim. But you know, this is all like, we are constantly in a fight between sexual progressivism and sexual conservatism in this country that is not new. We're just in a particular moment at this time. And so I do want people to understand, you know, there are historical antecedents for this and there are. Ways for people to understand this current moment as opposed to just retreating into hopelessness.
Anita Rao
What do we get from kind of interrogating the sex lives of younger people? Like what do other generations, I guess, get from that? That's more than, more than the hand ringing? Like, what do we get that's, that's, that's good and useful?
Carter Sherman
I mean, I think we can learn from young people about how to live better sex lives as older people, you know, young people are. Fairly famously open to trying a lot of new things. And so I think if we see what they're trying that's new and try it out for ourselves and see if it fits us, that is a good thing. I think it is also helpful to just, just stop obsessing over telling young people that they're doing sex wrong. I think sometimes people feel like they're doing sex wrong in their own lives, and it's easier to just reflect that back onto younger people. But you know, I think instead of doing that, maybe. Take a look at what you would like to change in your own life and see if you can have any inspiration from young people.
Anita Rao
Carter Sherman, thank you so much for the conversation, for your book, for all of your research. It was so fun to talk with you about all of this.
Carter Sherman
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Anita Rao
You can find out more about Carter Sherman and her book, the Second Coming at our website, embodiedwunc.org. You can find all episodes of Embodied the Radio show there and subscribe to our weekly podcast. For bonus and behind the scenes content about every episode, follow us on Instagram, we're at EmbodiedWUNC. Today's episode was produced by Kaia Findlay and edited by Amanda Magnus. Wilson Sayre provided editorial guidance. Nina Scott is our intern. Jenni Lawson, our technical director, and Quilla wrote our theme music. This program is recorded at the American Tobacco Historic District. North Carolina Public Radio is a broadcast service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I'm Anita Rao.