“The Summer I Turned Pretty” series finale featured a scene of Belly and Conrad kissing in the back of an Uber before sleeping together. A post on X, formerly known as Twitter, went viral, dubbing the smudged lipstick on Conrad’s face the result of their “freak on freak” behavior. 

On social media, a man and a woman making out and then having sex is the new frontier of sexual deviance.

What strikes me about this response is how tame the scene was compared to the content featured in older teen dramas. It was 17 years ago when Blair lost her virginity to Chuck in the backseat of a limo in season one of “Gossip Girl.”

This summer, Sabrina Carpenter scandalized audiences when the cover of her new album “Man’s Best Friend” featured her in a kneeling position with a man in a suit pulling her hair, sparking conversations on sexuality, submissiveness and empowerment.

Pop stars embracing their sexuality as part of their brand identity is nothing new. Just look at Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and perhaps Carpenter’s closest analog, Madonna. 

So again, why is the internet so shocked?

These trends highlight a larger shift among Generation Z, not just away from media depictions of sexuality, but sex altogether. 

University of Minnesota communications Ph.D. candidate Clare Frances Kennedy said the internet has played a major role in Gen Z’s attitude toward sex.

“A lot of the contemporary research on why these numbers are going down really connects to digital trends,” Kennedy said. “We’re in this moment where a lot of Gen Z is craving more intimacy and connections than they feel like they’re being granted on social media platforms.”

University history of sexuality professor Anna Clark said many factors impact how society views sex.

“The way we think about sex and feel about sex is really shaped by our cultural surroundings,” Clark said. “Our cultural context and parents and education and religion and media, and so on.” 

In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, eroding women’s access to abortion throughout the United States. As access to reproductive healthcare is lowered, it makes sense that young women would become more distrustful of sex. 

“We’re seeing a lot of Gen Z embrace distrust of things like contraceptive pills,” Kennedy said. “There’s also a lot of anxiety about things like pregnancy and STDs in the contemporary moment.”

Among these real concerns over the state of reproductive rights, many women have developed a sense of cynicism in relation to men. Fed up with accepting objectification and maltreatment from men, some women are opting out of romantic and sexual relationships.

Abstinence, while traditionally a tool used by conservatives to maintain a purity culture that shames women for expressing their sexuality, is being reclaimed by the feminist movement as a way to free women from the expectations of the patriarchy.

“We’re in and navigating this moment of what we call popular feminism,” Kennedy said. “It’s really built on this, like, empowerment model. There’s this notion of, ‘I’m going to be empowered such that I’m going to choose not to have sex in this way or not to have sex altogether.’”

Clark said women are using their agency in a way that allows them to say no to sex.

“Access to birth control, right to an abortion, gives women more freedom to choose and think about what they want rather than just pleasing someone else,” Clark said. “Maybe they don’t want to have sex, maybe they do want to have sex, but having more autonomy there, I think, is really important.”

Feminists are pushing back against the idea that acting as a sexual being is inherently empowering, especially when doing so forces you to appeal to misogynistic beauty standards that objectify women. 

They cringe at Carpenter’s writing, which unabashedly conveys her experiences embracing her sexuality in all of its vulnerable, isolating and often pathetic glory. 

However, this feminist reprisal to sexual empowerment is occurring in conjunction with a reemergence of the classic purity culture. 

The tradwife lifestyle, which promotes the work of homemaking and having families as the best option for women, has taken the internet by storm with social media influencers like Hannah Neeleman rising in popularity. 

“The rise of influencer cultures has allowed for the rise of feminist influencers and the rise of ‘let’s wait till marriage’ purity culture influencers as well,” Kennedy said. “I think we’re seeing both of those play out together and in conversation with each other.”

Tradwives might let Belly and Conrad slide, but they definitely do not like Carpenter. 

The women I know in my life who were the most angry at Carpenter also had very conservative views about gender, marriage and sexuality. Though they framed their criticisms as feminist stances against objectification, it quickly became clear they don’t actually care about empowerment under the patriarchy. They just don’t want women to orgasm before marriage. 

Even then, they should focus on their husbands.

Whether it’s the feminist movement or its conservative shadow, these anti-sex attitudes appeal to a generation of women who are lost in a maze of online dating and transactional relationships. 

As Kennedy said, the internet has stripped intimacy from sexual and romantic relationships. 

Some of us aren’t cut out for a culture that pressures us to dilute our personalities down to quippy comments on Hinge or flirty but nonchalant attitudes in the bars to get laid.

Sex is never going away. It’s in our politics, our healthcare, our pop stars and our TikTok influencers. Our culture is not less sex-obsessed just because we’re having less of it. 

I am also not here to judge anyone’s reasons for opting in or out of sexual relationships. 

The world is complicated, and we are all looking for our own peace of mind. But developing healthy relationships with sex is important for young people, and I hope calling out where these sex-negative attitudes come from can help us try to be more normal about the topic in the future.

But I’m sorry, the Belly and Conrad scene was boring.