As not just a sex and relationships writer, but someone born on the cusp of both the Gen Z and millennial generations, I’ve been avidly following the media interest in zoomers’ sex lives (or lack thereof).
With headlines repeatedly pronouncing that the generation has lost all interest in sex (a sample: ‘Gen Z more pro-marriage than millennials and have less casual sex’ in The Times and ‘The real reason Gen Z is off sex as new research shows 70% have less energy than their parents’ in The Daily Mail) it’s impossible to escape Gen Z’s prudish reputation.
There are now films, too, which explore the phenomenon: specifically the Gregg Araki movie I Want Your Sex, which explores one inexperienced Gen Z’s awkward office affair with his millennial dominatrix boss, as well as No Hard Feelings, which follows an attractive millennial woman who is hired to help an awkward, 19-year-old Gen Z lose his virginity.
Data regarding Gen Z’s dwindling sexual appetites has been established via research conducted by America’s Institute for Family Studies, and this trend is replicated in the UK, with a 2025 poll conducted on behalf of the sex toy brand Lovehoney suggesting that Gen Z has sex with less weekly frequency than Gen X, baby boomer and millennial generations.
Analysis has pointed to Gen Z’s desire to deconstruct traditional gender scripts around sex, while also suggesting that increased polarisation between male and female members of the generation could be to blame for the lack of recreational sex.
What, however, is the Gen Z response to sex work? Well, it’s complicated…
Negative attitudes towards porn among Gen Z men
Millennials have long been noted for their support of sex workers’ rights and a permissive attitude to porn, one which might differ from older generations – who may be more likely to see sex workers as victims, or to have purity or religious-based objections to porn. But what about Gen Z?
Well, it’s worth noting that this generation’s coming of age has been shaped by porn, with a 2025 UK survey suggesting that two thirds of Gen Z accessed porn before the age of 16.
The findings also note that Gen Z’s ideas on sex have been shaped by NSFW content: with 65% saying porn was their first exposure to sex, and 45% saying porn was one of their main sources of information about sex. The same study noted that 54% of Gen Z men worried that they watched too much porn.
Yet despite this familiarity with this type of content, the cohort is increasingly sceptical about porn as a whole. In the US, six in ten Gen Z men believe porn should be more difficult to access online.
Online, a flurry of content from male influencers promotes porn abstention: often for religious reasons among Christian and Muslim content creators, but also for psuedo-scientific health reasons among fitness influencers. Movements like NoFap and semen retention preach the benefits of avoiding porn and masturbation among, while the porn addiction recovery app Quittr has been downloaded almost 2 million times since being launched in 2024.
That’s one side of the coin. On the other, many of porn’s biggest names are Gen Z – from Ari Kytsya to Stella Barey – creating candid, informational content for a female audience on TikTok and Instagram, and NSFW content for a primarily male audience on OnlyFans. Plugging gaps in sex education, these young female voices have battled online censorship to become beloved online stars.
However, in the UK specifically, popular fansite creators such as Lily Phillips and Bonnie Blue have drawn ire from the public. Their respective challenges to sleep with 100 and over 1000 men sparked widespread controversy, crossing over into the tabloids and becoming mega viral online. Blue, in particular, has been subject to extreme controversy, which has spilled over into her allegedly being physically assaulted by a female student in a Sheffield nightclub.
On the one hand, Gen Z men seem to be more sceptical of porn than ever. On the other, it’s Gen Z women who have become the face of Only Fans and of porn creators breaking through into the mainstream. So, what should we make of this?
For Michaela Makusha, a freelance journalist writing about Gen Z issues, it’s worth pointing out that anti-porn ideology doesn’t begin and end with her generation. “I don’t think this is just a Gen Z thing, I think it’s also common among conservative, millennial women to demonise creators on Only Fans and women who use the internet to make money via their sexuality,” she explains. “I think you do get explicit anti-sex work sentiment with every generation of feminists: there are various gender critical and trans-exclusionary feminists in Gen X who are also very anti-sex work, for example.”
Makusha does point out, however, that Gen Z seems to have a particularly antagonistic view towards Blue and Phillips – something we can perhaps attribute to their visibility online. For Leanne Yau, a Gen Z sex and relationship educator, it’s worth taking into account how porn and the work of NSFW content creators circulate online.
“Social media algorithms tend towards favouring the sensational, so a lot of sex workers, as a result, are doing kind of sensationalist stuff in order to get views; Bonnie Blue is a very classic example,” Yau explains. “There's also something to the fact that a lot of sex workers do advertise their presence on Instagram. In the same way that some people resent influencers who make a funny video that turns into an ad, some people have a negative response when they find out that a creator they are following is using Instagram purely as a funnel for their OnlyFans page.”
Yau’s analysis here is worth paying attention to. Due to the lack of discovery tools on fansites like OnlyFans, many NSFW creators are forced to grow and shape their own audience on mainstream platforms and carry them over to their paid-for content. In this sense, they function like traditional influencers – and carry the same scrutiny, criticism, and parasocial attachments that female influencers are forced to bear, coupled with much wider financial and social barriers in their IRL lives.
Beyond porn, what are Gen Z attitudes to other forms of sex work?
Naturally, porn, camming and NSFW content are more visible forms of sex work – in large part, due to the fact they are online-based forms of work, meaning that self-promotion is a significant part of the job. However, there exists a broad spectrum of sex work including full-service, kink services, stripping, and more.
Gen Z has grown up online, meaning that they have had greater exposure to the language around sexuality, desire, and sex work. But that doesn’t mean that the stigma towards the profession has disappeared.
This seems to especially be the case among women, with a 2024 poll showing that UK women hold harsher attitudes towards sex work than men, with a quarter of women thinking that sex work should be stigmatised. The age breakdown of these findings is less clear-cut, but it’s worth noting, anecdotally, how Gen Z online are discussing sex work.
The Gen Z Swedish pop star Zara Larsson has, for example, previously spoken out strongly against sex work on Instagram and Twitter/X, while posts platforming sex workers’ voices in Gen Z-focussed media can attract thousands of negative comments such as “Why in the hell would I care what a sex worker thinks or how they feel”, “The earth is gonna have to end before I listen to opinions from sex workers” and “Working on Only Fans should be something humiliating rather than something to praise”.
It also appears that the work of feminist thinker Andrea Dworkin, who was staunchly anti-sex work, anti-porn and argued that “violation is a synonym for intercourse” is receiving new-found relevance among Gen Z women – with the Australian writer and consent educator Chanel Contos saying: “I think it’s a shame that Dworkin fell out of fashion.”
Why might generations have different opinions on sex work?
It’s worth considering the different factors which impact how generations understand or talk about sex work and porn – from religion, to social media, to economic conditions.
Speaking to SimpleMedia, clinical sexologist, couples therapist and psychotherapist Lulu Sunnucks explains that younger generations have ultimately been exposed to different information and points of view, which has informed how they view sex work. “I think later generations are growing up with much more sexual liberalism, digital-native porn access and destigmatisation/labour-rights framing,” she says. “Older generational views have been shaped more by the second-wave feminist anti-porn debates and religious or purity-based norms, different formative sexual scripts essentially.”
However, for those who do subscribe to an abolitionist or purity culture approach – hoping to ban porn and all forms of sex work, or shaming and denigrating sex workers for a lack of sexual purity – she explains that this sentiment may not be about sex work at all, but about easing sexual anxiety.
“Purity culture and abolitionist sentiment could also be functioning as defenses against anxiety about sexuality itself,” she explains. “This is called splitting in the therapy room, and it looks like dividing the erotic into ‘pure/safe’ versus ‘contaminated/dangerous’. This is a common way for people to soothe anxieties about themselves as it resolves ambiguity or nuance about the self. It reduces the discomfort of holding sexuality as something that's both desired and threatening at once.”
Ultimately, a desire to abolish sex work can also be a desire to contain our own messy and complicated feelings about sex itself. “Sex work and porn become convenient containers for projected anxiety, particularly about commodification, loss of control or one's own disavowed desire so abolishing them offers a fantasy of restoring purity/safety without having to sit with the more uncomfortable ambivalent feelings sexuality actually provokes,” she says.
Is there a middle ground?
Ultimately, sex work and porn shore up complicated questions around consent, safety, power and control – questions which it can be tempting to seek absolutist answers for.
However, whatever your views on sex work itself, it’s important to listen to the demands made by sex workers and porn performers – specifically those who are currently working in the industry. Their demands for respect and safety ultimately trump any perceived, theoretical moral issues to their work.
For more information about sex work in the UK, follow organisations such as English Collective of Prostitutes, Scotland for Decrim, and National Ugly Mugs – all of which centre sex workers’ voices.