Bad day for letter "X" as study shows teens rejecting Twitter, sex in movies and TV

Potentially igniting the latest front in the ongoing discourse war over sexually explicit content in film and movies (and whether the up-and-coming generations are too boring to think it kicks ass), a new study from the University of California’s Los Angeles’ Center for Scholars & Storytellers suggests that younger viewers are getting ever more weary of both sex and romance in TV shows and films. Also, Twitter: The Youths do not like Twitter.

The 2024 installment of the Center’s Teens And Screens report surveyed 1,500 young people between the ages of 10 and 24, asking them several questions about their media interests. (Respondents 13 and under weren’t asked the sex questions, to be clear.) When asked whether they wanted “to see more content that focuses on platonic relationships/friendships,” 63.5 percent of survey respondents said they did, with that number jumping up 12 percentage points from the same survey last year. Sex took an even harder hit than love; 62.4 percent of respondents said that sexual content “isn’t needed as a plot device”; in the similar survey from last year, just “47.5 percent said the same thing. (All of this, per Variety, although you can read the study for yourself right here.)

The “is sex in movies and shows ‘necessary’?” discourse has, of course, been borderline overpowering (and way past borderline exhausting) on the internet in the last few years. Opinions about those opinions are just as diverse, firmly held, and likely to get loud—we’ll confess, the original draft of this story’s headline was just  “Study reveals teenagers no longer cool,” but our mentions don’t need the stress—but the data itself seems at least moderately clear: Teenagers, or at least the kind of teenagers who participate in media surveys, aren’t surreptitiously seeking the horny stuff anymore. (For the record, the exact statement they were rating was “I feel that sex and sexual content is not needed for the plot of most TV shows and movies”; 62.4 percent strongly agreed, 16 percent strongly disagreed, and 21.6 percent came down in the middle.) Also: They prefer fantasy stories (36.2 percent) to stuff about rich and famous people (7.2 percent), or personal issues (24.2 percent), actually still like going to the movies, and prefer “Hopeful, uplifting content with people ‘beating the odds’.”

We actually got our biggest shock of the whole survey when we got to the part about social media consumption: While teens obviously favored social media as the “media space” that made the most authentic-feeling content, they apparently reported that YouTube was doing a better job of serving it up these days than TikTok. (It was close, 38.8 percent to 36.3 percent, but still a shift from 2023.) Twitter, meanwhile, came in dead last on that particular metric, with only 18.1 percent of respondents saying it produced authentic content. (Oh, and they hate how social media use is depicted in TV and movies, by the way; get on that, Hollywood.)