Summer Movies Probe Gen Z's Existential Sex Recession
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- One Night Only, a romcom starring Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro, imagines a dystopia where Congress has banned premarital sex with one sanctioned night a year; the film features a $2,000 price tag on condoms, which the essay argues treats the sex recession as merely libidinal rather than existential.
- The piece frames gen Z's so-called sex recession as existential — rooted in growing up online and coming of age during the pandemic — and cites that 16% of single gen Z adults report being more afraid to date since the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade.
- I Want Your Sex, directed by Gregg Araki and starring Cooper Hoffman and Olivia Wilde, centers Elliot's loneliness over his desire; a 'doomed threesome' with roommate Apple (Chase Sui Wonders) exposes how each character's muddled wants leave them 'worlds apart,' the essay argues.
- Jane Schoenbrun's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma casts Hannah Einbinder as Kris, a 29-year-old filmmaker rebooting a transphobic slasher franchise, with Gillian Anderson as the original final girl Billy Presley — a muse who teaches her slashers are as elemental as sexual desire.
- The essay draws a throughline across The Invite (also starring and directed by Wilde), I Want Your Sex, and Camp Miasma: each pairs a younger, less experienced character with an older woman whose desire becomes a path to self-knowledge — though Camp Miasma alone treats sex, death, and art as inseparable rather than all-consuming.
- Camp Miasma lands as the summer's most sincere entry, the author argues: Kris only arrives at artistic truth by abandoning overintellectualized critique of the franchise's transphobia and letting the movie 'play out,' a lesson the writer says its counterparts miss.
Why it matters: This summer's indie slate — films like Camp Miasma and One Night Only — is functioning as a real-time cultural diagnostic of how a generation shaped by the internet and the pandemic approaches intimacy, with filmmakers betting that younger audiences want their sexual anxiety taken seriously rather than played for laughs.
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