Lesbians, latex and $2,000 condoms: why are this summer’s movies so obsessed with sex?

This summer's crop of films is unusually preoccupied with sex, offering a raunchy counterpoint to widely reported "gen Z celibacy". Titles including One Night Only, I Want Your Sex, The Invite and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma each explore young people's fraught relationship with desire, reflecting a broader cultural shift that also spans "smut" literature, OnlyFans-themed prestige TV and kink-inflected indie cinema. The article argues these films respond to a genuine generational contradiction: despite being the most sexually progressive cohort yet, young people are dating and having sex less, shaped by internet-driven alienation, pandemic isolation and rising sexual conservatism.

One Night Only imagines a dystopian America where premarital sex is banned except for one government-sanctioned night a year, following Owen (Callum Turner) and Allie (Monica Barbaro) as they navigate obstacles including $2,000 condoms; the article suggests it wrongly treats the "sex recession" as a matter of desire rather than existential disconnection. By contrast, Gregg Araki's I Want Your Sex centres loneliness through studio assistant Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) and artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), including a fraught threesome with roommate Apple (Chase Sui Wonders). It notes that I Want Your Sex, The Invite (directed by Wilde) and Jane Schoenbrun's Camp Miasma share a pattern of younger characters drawn into self-discovery by older, more experienced women, with Camp Miasma distinctively fusing sex, death and art. The piece also cites a statistic that 16% of single gen Z adults report being more wary of dating since the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade.