Creator and screenwriter Sai Marie Johnson has written about being voluntarily celibate since 2020. She tells WIRED that the choice got here after being married, having kids, and experiencing poisonous relationships with males. She and Ida each establish as intercourse constructive, which means they don’t view having intercourse as shameful, however are cautious of how males can weaponize intercourse and relationships towards them.
“Our local weather proper now has allowed males to be emboldened of their follow of misogyny,” Johnson says, highlighting reproductive coercion (the flexibility for males to manage ladies’s reproductive choices) by means of the lack to entry abortion as a key cause that girls are turning to voluntary celibacy. “Conservatism is making an attempt to foster a extra puritan society after we had performed all this to push intercourse positivity for the previous decade.”
“I feel it additionally has to do with moms like me, who’ve been by means of this stuff, going to our daughters and going, ‘Look, that is what my mother didn’t educate me,’” Johnson continues, including that her 23-year-old daughter is a virgin. “You don’t should be the puritan trad spouse. You could be on OnlyFans if that’s what you need. The issue is that males routinely assume that each single alternative to attach with a girl means they’re going to get to have intercourse.”
However the reverse additionally seems to be true.
Because the contestants on Are You My First? discover a few of these dynamics with one another, it turns into evident that among the males aren’t as snug pursuing ladies, even when the ladies are keen about it. On evening one, Rachael, the lady with vaginismus, makes it clear to Michael, a slapstick comedian, that she’s . He reciprocates—however reveals in a confessional that he’s nonetheless working by means of a worry of intimacy.
It’s ironic that individuals like Michael who’re terrified of intercourse at the moment are inspired to work by means of that worry publicly, on tv, in extremely manipulated social experiments. That contradiction could also be one other root reason behind what common Gen Zers are experiencing—a push to share extra of themselves with the web about how they’re sharing much less of themselves bodily.
“There are loads of different cultural causes that younger individuals are not having intercourse that don’t actually correlate in any respect to conservative politics or faith or a lack of understanding about sexuality,” says Magdalene Taylor, a sexual tradition critic and editor at Playboy. “I feel loads of younger individuals are buying and selling these traditional markers of maturity for a extra digitized life. We’re having fewer in-person social interactions, and intercourse is a pure a part of that.”
After Ida’s TikToks about virginity blew up, she posted about receiving a DM from an individual concerned in actuality TV manufacturing casting. She says she will’t share specifics, however on Sunday, the day earlier than Are You My First? premiered, Ida says, she participated within the filming of a pilot episode. The brand new collection isn’t a contest, she provides. It could present extra private context about her journey.
“My mother, actually each week she calls me, she goes, ‘Are you performed embarrassing your self on the web?’” Ida says. “With TikTok and actuality TV, in case you have the chance to speak about your intercourse life or lack thereof and have it’s the rationale you maybe have a profession, why wouldn’t you do it?”
