You’d be forgiven for thinking every living soul on Madonna’s good green earth is getting a little freakier. This year alone, A24 put a gay Dom/sub relationship replete with pet play, bootlicking, and public sex at the center of Pillion. Olivia Wilde got wild with knife play and threesomes in I Want Your Sex.
And even the motion picture based on a book Emily Brontë wrote in the 1840s, Wuthering Heights, had some very 21st-century coded mouth spitting. For kinksters and the kink-curious, that increased visibility offers the invaluable gift of shame reduction, she says. But some people are experiencing a darker flipside to that visibility, too.
That feeling can become especially potent for doomscrollers who find themselves on #FreakTok and #SpicyBookTok. On top of that, social media moderation can create its own strange visibility gap. While algorithms are well-set up to censor so-called “traditional” sexual content, decidedly kinky acts like foot and armpit play can be harder to detect and therefore easier to disseminate, as sex educator Topher Cusumano, co-founder and creative director of queer-owned production company Daddy TV, previously told Cosmopolitan.
The result is that the kink deep-dives, which once required a visit to a sex shop or particularly niche corner of Reddit, are now just a screen away. See enough of them on your television or tiny phone feeds, and it can start to seem like everyone but you, has a leather, latex, or flogger collection. But zoom out from these screens, however, and the picture of what people are actually doing sexually isn’t quite so… saucy.
A Fall 2026 survey from The Kinsey Institute and Playboy reports that the so-called sex recession is, in fact, real. Of the more than 2,300 Americans ages 18 to 29 surveyed, 29 percent hadn’t had a sexual partner in the previous three months, while 19 percent reported never having had one. And partnered play isn’t the only thing some young people are opting out of, either.
More than half (55 percent) of Gen Z have masturbated zero to three times in the last month, confirming previous findings that Millennials get down with themselves far more than younger generations. Further, a recent report found that one-third of Gen Z said they don’t like seeing other couples make out, compared to less than twenty percent of millennials. Altogether, the data reveals a pretty bizarre disconnect wherein the sex in film and at the top of our feeds is getting freakier at the same time that plenty of people are having run-of-the-mill sex—or none at all.
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