Last week I had a bit of a shock when myself and a friend visited the city where we attended university 5 years ago, Newcastle upon Tyne.
The university city that was once notorious for having the wildest nightlife was eerily quiet.
Although the weekends were busy with older tourists on stag and hen parties like the good old days, the weekdays- the nights that used to be brimming with students- were dead. And even in the daytimes, the city seemed quieter than usual. Were Gen Z responsible for this?
Less Parties, More Politics
We interrogated a couple of people about this. The first was a security guard at a club we used to frequent when we lived there. He said that the student nightlife just never really picked back up after Covid and seems to have gotten worse now during the cost of living crisis.
The second person we spoke to was our old university tutor. When we explained how quiet the city seemed, she immediately understood. ’Ah, your year were still part of the partying era’, she said. She when on to say that something shifted and now the students don’t go out anywhere near as much, because many of them don’t drink.
She said that the students today are a lot more tame, but they are also more woke and conscious of politics and climate change. She also said there has also been a staggering decline in the mental healths of students since Covid and that people seem to be more solitary, and uncertain of the future given the current state of the country.
It’s true that there seems to be a shift in which ‘alcohol is the new cigarettes’ and the health conscious younger generation are noticing how reliant we are on it in society. More and more of my friends are going sober, which I had assumed was a mid-20s settling-down-after-the-wild-years thing, but what my tutor said suggests that it’s more of a shift in the 18-25 crowd also.
Gen Z & Sex
What does this mean for Gen Z’s sexual behaviour? So much of drinking and party culture is fuelled with lust and often getting drunk results in an outburst of sexual energy and hookups. Is sex less of an interest to young people today? It has been insinuated that this is the case. In the current, rather dismal climate, sex might not be the first thing on the minds of young people today.
The world is also becoming less and less separated by gender. Things are more fluid and androgynous, and there’s less of that almost aggressive masculine/feminine energy. The young generation, in my opinion, just seem a bit more chill about everything, they have less pent up sexual energy.
So maybe the younger generation are less interested in sex. Or maybe their relationship with sex is just a lot more healthy. Gen Z have been brought up with any sexual content they want readily available at the tap of a screen.
Some might argue that this is the opposite of healthy, but I think this exposure at least makes a generation who are free from repression; repressed desire always eventually leads to it coming out in unhealthy ways.
Societal attitudes today are a lot more open towards sex. The young generation don’t mind talking about it without beating around the bush. It may be true that an increasingly digital world has made the young generation less social, but it seems that they are sexually fulfilled.
Young people seem to get their fill of sexual interaction on the internet with porn, OnlyFans, sexting, and dating apps which made hook-ups easier and more common.
They’re anything but repressed; they can get sex when they need it, they have no shame about casual hookups, and so maybe they don’t feel as much of an urge to go out, get drunk and let all of their repressed sexual energy splurge out before going back to their everyday lives where they’re afraid to talk about sex.
I feel that Gen Z are still interested in sex and having sex, maybe even more than ever, but because of the internet, it’s not as much in the public eye, and because sex has less of a shock factor, there’s less of a need to shout about it.
A Personal Experience
My friend (25f) slept with a 20 year old guy the other week. She told me that she noticed two significant things that stood out as unusual compared to the sex she was used to having with guys her age and older.
The first thing was that during the sex, he asked if she minded him filming it. But let me clarify, she barely knew this guy, it was a casual hookup.
He didn’t ask it in an excited ‘let’s make a sex tape’ sort of way, but in a more blasé, no biggie way- the way you would ask a friend to pose for a picture. He wanted to hold the phone as he fucked her as if he was filming something for his Insta story. She refused and he was fine with it, they moved on.
But whilst she’d made plenty of sex tapes before, my friend thought the way in which he so casually went about it felt like some sort of cultural shift.
We live in a world where we digitally document practically everything we do (most of my friends take at least 20 photos per day), and when we don’t photograph a moment, the moment almost feels invalidated, as though we didn’t really live it. Perhaps taking casual pictures when we’re fucking will start to become way more normalised.
And now that we are becoming more and more sexually open, people might way more willing to consent to this. I don’t feel this is good, nor bad. At least the dude seemed confident and respectful enough to ask whether he could film it, I’ve personally had experiences where older men have filmed me without asking during sex.
The second thing that stood out to my friend was that after they had sex, the guy said in a sort of gentle way ‘remember to go pee, we don’t want you getting a UTI’. Many older men don’t even know what a UTI is, let alone actually remind you to go and pee to make sure you don’t get one!
Even millennials aren’t very educated about female sexual health, but apparently Gen Z (especially the younger ones) are a lot more conscious of this stuff and don’t feel ashamed to talk about it.
The thing is, TikTok (and other platforms like Instagram and Twitter) can be very educational and even though they get hate for over simplifying information and academic theory, they at least make knowledge digestible and capture the attention of young people long enough for them to learn something, even if it is on basic level.
I’m always an advocate for change. Although it was sort of strange to see my old university city so devoid of students, maybe we shouldn’t be so critical to judge the younger generation for doing things differently. Their world might be a lot more digital, but that’s not always bad.
The internet is a wealth of knowledge and it seems that watching TikToks might not always be as vapid as it’s made out to be, as the sexually liberated and respectful younger generation seem to be proving.
Iso
Iso is a writer and filmmaker based in East London. She is passionate about all things erotic and leads a sexy, shame-free life in hope that she can inspire others to do the same. Originally from a Northern seaside town, she is naturally drawn to the best things in life: candyfloss, trashy karaoke bars and heart-shaped sunglasses.
