What do Hollywood bonkbusters Bridget Jones: Mad About a Boy, Baby Girl, and Lonely Planet have in common? The middle-aged blonde ice maidens at the centre of each film are all women who refuse to age gracefully. Their faces show a toxic desire to cling onto youth.
The movies also all feature large age-gap relationships with the woman as the older party. Thanks to the gender reversal, pop culture is lauding the storylines as inspiration and liberating. But what message are young people – especially guys – supposed to take away? The bald fact is there’s a reason why it’s a social taboo to have sex with people young enough to be your kid. Anyone maintaining otherwise is indulging a luxury belief.
The tradwife phenomenon is the pretty face of the rebellion
My generation, Generation Z, drew the short end of the stick by growing up when the sex-positive feminism movement was at its height. The zeitgeist preached ideas which have aged like milk: kink-shaming is the ultimate faux pas – something only prudes and Tories do; sexual liberation is somehow the key to unlocking female emancipation; porn is great. We gobbled up contradictory lessons dished out by careless pointy-heads on what healthy relationship behaviours look like, and now everyone’s dealing with the fallout.
In the past few months, some revealing reports have been published about Gen Zers’ sex lives. Social scientists have dubbed us ‘the kinkiest generation yet’, and we are more likely to be open to hookups and breath control play – a euphemism if ever I heard one. One report found that 55 per cent of us have fantasies involving BDSM.
‘Fantasies’ is perhaps the operative word here though, because an eyebrow-raising one in four Gen Z adults haven’t had sex. Even those who have popped their cherry aren’t having a great time of it; 37 per cent of Gen Z reported no sexual activity in the past month, compared to 19 per cent of Millenials and 17 per cent of Gen X.
There’s no single cause for the sex recession. The unsatisfying truth is we were unlucky to be born in an age which has experienced immense societal and technological change in a short period of time. The result is we have become the most oversexed and sexless generation in history.
I find our response to living in a time of weird sexual mores fascinating. For instance, our knee-jerk hesitancy to kink-shame. It isn’t a sign that we’ve developed well-adjusted attitudes, but rather the opposite: people want to be seen as liberal at the expense of their actual sexual pleasure and, frankly, common sense.
Take prostitution. At university, a bloke in my tutorial went to great pains to explain the idea that sex work is work. When he finished and looked at me expectantly, and I couldn’t resist: ‘Well, in that case I pity your girlfriend.’
The other week over drinks with girlfriends, the topic of conversation drifted to how it’s always obvious to tell if a young guy watches too much porn. We dissected the giveaway signs: jittery body language, a very short attention span, a propensity for their faces to glaze over. This all came as something of a revelation to the only lesbian sitting round the table, who recoiled in horror. ‘Now it’s been pointed out, I won’t be able to unsee it,’ she said.
Another friend compared it to being given a pair of glasses you didn’t know you needed. She shook her head and continued, ‘God, these poor men.’ Yes, poor men, but let us not forget the poor women who are lumped with the emotional labour of trying to decalcify their pornified brains.
Yet there is hope. Rather betraying the title bestowed upon us, a report by dating app Feeld and the Kinsey Institute found that 81 per cent of Gen Z fantasise about monogamous relationships. Hardly a radical stance. Interestingly, we are more enamoured with monogamy than previous generations – perhaps because it feels out of reach for the average young person in our topsy-turvy dating landscape.
Happiness doesn’t necessarily lie in conventional relationships, but the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction a backlash is stirring. The tradwife phenomenon is the pretty face of the rebellion, and while it makes me feel uncomfortable, I’m clear-eyed about why it exists. Most people don’t want to be choked during sex, faff about making puff pastry, or date someone twice their age. Hopefully culture will soon meander back to a happy medium, because actually what we want out of love turns out to be pretty ordinary.
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