Gen Z Are “Puriteens,” But Not For The Reasons You Think

Jojo has no moral qualms about casual sex. “The equation of sex and morality is bullshit, as long as everyone’s consenting,” the 23-year-old non-binary, bisexual theatre graduate in New York says. Still, hooking up is not Jojo’s cup of tea. “I’ve tried it just a little bit and it was not satisfying. I didn’t enjoy it, it was awkward and generally mediocre, so I’m not into it.”

Plus, in Jojo’s friend group — which they describe as “a bunch of mostly queer nerds, many of whom are ace” — hookups are “not the general way of things.” “I have a lot of friends who aren’t comfortable with sex or they prefer to keep their feelings on sex quiet,” Jojo says. “I will say this because I don’t know of a word that means the same thing and doesn’t have a negative connotation: I have a lot of friends who are prudish.”

Jojo isn’t the only person who describes their peer group this way: The prudish label has been stuck to Gen Z many times in recent years. Now there’s the pejorative new Twitter term ‘puriteen’ — meaning “an online child who...proactively demands people curtail behavior they interpret as sexually suggestive,” according to Urban Dictionary. Young puriteens have recently been seen on social media moralizing about large age gaps in adult relationships and partaking in the perennial “No Kink at Pride” debate. “Hearing Gen Z talking about not wanting to see kink at Pride is giving Karen vibes,” tweeted 35-year-old RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Bob the Drag Queen last month, and “aging internet twink” @notn1co birthed a meme about Gen Z being such hysterical killjoys they’d call the cops upon seeing a jockstrap.

While generalizing about tens of millions of people is always difficult, a series of studies in recent years have reported that teens since the tail end of the millennial generation trend towards being less sexually active; they launch their sex lives later and have fewer sex partners than earlier generations. Gen Zers themselves—defined as those currently aged between 6 and 24—are aware of how they’re perceived. “I would say [my generation] is characterized as being exceptionally concerned with trauma and consent, almost to the point of being prudish,” says Luna, a 23-year-old grad student in New England. “People think we're kind of puritanical,” agrees Kiran, a 21-year-old in Miami.

As the “puriteens” label suggests, this phenomenon is often cast in terms of morality; not long before Gen Z took center stage in media trend pieces, and after acres of coverage describing older millennials as the hookup culture generation, young millennials were characterized as “new Victorians” and “the most prudish generation in history.” But once you broaden the lens beyond actual intercourse, Gen Z isn’t especially puritanical: According to data from evangelical polling firm Barna, this generation tends to be least conservative on issues like same-sex relationships and the morality of sex before marriage. “One thing that seems to have changed dramatically is attitudes towards diverse gender identity and sexuality,” says Cicely Marston, a sexual and reproductive health researcher from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who specializes in transitions to adulthood. “There is so much less prejudice against LGBTQ+ people, that seems to be a really striking difference.”

Rather than morality, the decline in sexual activity among young adults is driven by the unique conditions of their lives, particularly economic and technological factors. Tom, a 22-year-old computer engineering graduate in New Zealand, says living with parents is the “biggest factor” in the lack of sex among his “nerdy group of friends,” two of whom are still virgins. “It’s hard to have sex as a Gen Z if you’re living at home and the people you’re talking to are living at home,” he explains. “[Either] you don’t want your parents to know, your parents won’t let you have someone over for the night, or you’ve got thin walls.” Jojo faces similar practical barriers: “I live [at home] in the suburbs and I don’t have a car; I don’t want my mom to drive me to my hookup, I’m not doing that,” they laugh. A recent study confirmed the fact young people are drinking less, spending more time gaming and living at home longer than previous generations, which contributes “significantly to the decline in casual sex.”

Tom freely admits he and his friends aren’t exactly party animals — “I only went to two or three drinking parties in high school, and had far more ‘parties’ where I had four friends over and they all brought their computers,” he says — and this is true of Jojo, too. “In high school my time was spent mostly on Tumblr and going to drama club,” they say. “Parties aren’t fun when you don’t have any friends and also don’t like beer and also don’t understand how hooking up with people works.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that, some Zoomers have recalibrated the level of clout attached to casual sex. “I feel like having casual sex is a sign of being cool and desirable for Millennials and Gen X, [but] my Gen Z peers value it much less,” says Jo, a 23-year-old civil engineer living in Colorado. “The idea that casual sex could be purely enjoyable is pretty foreign to most people my age, I think — we see it as objectifying, pointless and not worth the effort.”

Katie, a 23-year-old working at a homeless shelter in Virginia, describes herself as “jaded [and] apathetic” when it comes to casual sex. She didn’t date in high school and lost her virginity in her freshman year of college, but says her brief foray into hookup culture “sucked.” “I look back at a lot of the things I did in my first three years of college, how dangerous they were and how much they didn’t make me feel good, and I think this era of Girls from HBO imprinted on me that I have to be having weird sex with all these strangers all the time,” she says. “We’re told that’s gonna make us feel empowered and feel good — that’s how we show them we’re in charge and we’re the cool girl, we don’t need to have feelings — and then afterwards it’s like, you’re still just being used.”

Then there’s the Internet. An American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry report found teens spend around 9 hours a day looking at screens and online, where they encounter tons of sex. There’s porn, obviously, which about 87% of teens have viewed. But there’s also horny fan fiction, pop-educational videos by sex-positive YouTubers like Laci Green, intricate Tumblr dissertations about sexual identity and sex work, Teen Vogue guides to anal sex and hookups, memes about eating ass. There are Netflix shows like Bonding and Sex Education, reporting about the #MeToo movement, and endless discourse about kink and BDSM on Twitter, Reddit and TikTok, where the #kinktok hashtag currently has 5.1 billion views and clips of Gen Z girls bragging about their BDSM bruises and OnlyFans earnings regularly go viral.

“Choking and degradation and domination, especially in a heteronormative [context], are now seen as pretty normal,” Tom says. “For a period of time, every second girl had on their Instagram story or in their bio, ‘I might like being choked but sea turtles don’t, so don’t put your litter in the ocean’...I think that’s a slight [generational] shift.”

These are ripe conditions for anxiety. Siose, a 24-year-old occupational therapist in New Zealand — who has slept with only two people, including his fiancée — blames his lack of interest in “sleeping around” on feelings of sexual inadequacy generated by porn, which he viewed from age 12. “It was about being insecure about my body,” he says. “I was like, ‘I don’t have [a pornstar dick], so I’m probably not going to satisfy whoever I hook up with.’”

Kristen, a 24-year-old architect in Iowa, thinks many Zoomers are still virgins in their 20s because of a “general sense of discomfort with their bodies” and “a lack of confidence.” “I think because they’ve waited for so long, they’re nervous about finally engaging with other people,” she explains, using two virgin friends her age as examples. “They’re starting to get on dating apps and they’re just appalled when they stumble across people [solely] looking for sex, and that baffles me because these aren’t like, extremely religious people that I’m around. They’ll joke about wanting to go out, hook up, put themselves out there, but in reality, they're so uncomfortable.”

Sometimes sexual discomfort is caused by early and distressing sexual encounters online. Few female digital natives make it through their teens without encountering unsolicited dick pics and videos; Katie and Kristen both named Omegle as a notorious example, a free chat website that became a popular activity at high school get-togethers. “We would all sit on there thinking we were going to talk to people, but then every three clicks you’d just see a guy wanking off,” Kristen said, and Katie confirmed that “definitely [at] slumber parties, everyone would go on Omegle and see a bunch of penises.”

Then there are digital sexual advances from older men. Tess, a 21-year-old journalist in Chicago, said she started using Tumblr at the age of 12, a platform where older guys began engaging her in sexual conversations. “These weren’t the kinds of ‘older men’ that I had been taught to avoid, [like] some Chris Hansen gotcha moment,” she explains. “They were guys that were 17, 18, 20 or 25 when I was 14 or 15, mostly. And that just didn't raise as red of a flag as it should have.”

Charlotte, a 23-year-old student in the U.K., had a similar experience. “I would be 15 [years old] talking to men in their 20s on Twitter in a sexual context,” she says. “I would Snapchat them from school in my uniform, and they would ‘tell me off’ for being on my phone in class...very much in a flirty way. When I think about it now, I get very angry about how blatantly they were grooming me.”

Child “grooming” is a topic that’s attracted significant new Google search interest in the past 18 months, partly due to celebrity scandals; the topic has been searched in connection with YouTubers like Onision, Benji Krol and James Charles but also due to personal experiences like Tess and Charlotte’s. “[Gen Z] thinks of older generations as sexually regressive and predatory,” Luna says. “There's a big fear of predators and pedophiles [and] a lot of very, very contentious debate about what behaviors, relationships and desires constitute pedophilia and predation.”

This is by no means a unique anxiety — Stranger Danger campaigns date back to the 1970s — but one difference is that Gen Z came of age during the #MeToo movement, which has heightened their anxiety about sexual misconduct. According to the latest Stress in America report by the American Psychological Association, Gen Z reported significantly higher stress levels than other generations, and 67% of Gen Z women reported widespread sexual harassment and assault reports in the news as a significant source of worry.

So much internet ‘discourse' is what writer Angela Nagle called a “response to a response to a response,” especially on Twitter, where the main character, dunking and ratio phenomena encourage context collapse and elevate extreme and often fringe views, creating an alarming sense that the world is actually jam-packed with puritanical children. But given all the above, it’s easy to imagine why some Zoomers might become puriteens who share Go To Horny Jail memes and moralize about toxic romantic dynamics that plagued the relationships before them. “I think everything is hypersexualized,” Kristen concludes. “I think [social media] is opening up a whole can of worms that nobody understands yet.”