How Gatekeepers Misrepresent Public Opinion: Gen Z Edition
What youngins really think about on-screen sex, romance, and heteronormative relationships
In my household, romantic comedies are serious business.
I’ve never been a connoisseur of the genre, but my wife and I have just completed the most intense period of romcom binging either of us has ever experienced.
Want to talk new romcoms, classic or French ones? Bring it on.
Want some recommendations? Here you go: I Want You Back, The Five-Year Engagement, and About Time (which includes one of the most inventive and poignant scenes I’ve ever witnessed).
Today I stand before you as a man who can speak somewhat competently about this polarizing genre.
Why all the meet cute madness?
My wife has been commissioned to write a Gen Z romcom. So you can bet I take it personally when a highly-publicized UCLA report suggests that Gen Zers have soured on these sweet stories.
It’s rare that Jimmy Kimmel and Fox News speak with one voice, but they both tout the apparent fact that Gen Zers prefer their movies and shows sans sex and romance. From NPR to Variety, many other outlets touted the same revelation.
And the UCLA report goes even further.
It implies a growing interest in asexuality. It even busts out a term that you hipsters may have heard of, but was new to me: aroace. The term describes someone who is aromantic and asexual.
But does the media coverage accurately reflect the UCLA report and does the report accurately reflect the views of the Gen Zers it surveyed?
The media misrepresenting an academic report is nothing new. What’s less common is an academic report that misrepresents its own findings.
The UCLA report did include newsworthy findings, but the authors chose to bury the lede—maybe because they didn’t like what they found.
What Do Gen Zers Really Want?
UCLA’s “Teens & Screens” report surveyed 1,500 respondents between the ages of 10 and 24 about their thoughts on entertainment and social media content. Some of the findings are unsurprising: Gen Zers like to binge content. They like streaming services, but love social media, especially TikTok, which they regard as the most authentic.
In some cases, the “main findings” highlighted by the report's authors don’t seem to be quite as straightforward as they make them out to be. We’re told that Gen Zers prefer original content to franchises, remakes, and sequels.
But then, further down the report, we learn that respondents really dig action-packed superhero fare. Those preferences seem to point to franchises, remakes, and sequels. But maybe what Gen Zers really want are new superheroes. Either way, it’s not a big deal.
It becomes a bigger deal when the report veers into sexuality.
Yes, there is a lot of evidence that points to Gen Zers being less sexually active than previous generations. So it wouldn’t be surprising if younger Americans didn’t want to see much sex in their movies and shows.
The UCLA authors frame the report to make it easy to jump to that conclusion. The report comes with the trendy “let’s coin a new term!” subtitle: “Romance or Nomance?”
Eesh. I hope “nomance” doesn’t become a thing. I don’t even like how “a thing” has become a thing.
But let’s examine whether or not we should believe that Gen Zers really are on Team Nomance.
The supporting evidence the UCLA report gives the most prominence to is this: “The majority of adolescents (51.5%) expressed a desire for more content centered around friendship and platonic relationships.”
OK, but a slim majority of young people expressing a desire for more friendship stories doesn’t necessarily mean they want less sex. Maybe they want more friendship and more sex or more friendship and roughly the same amount of sex.
Nearly half (47.5%) of respondents said that “sex isn’t needed for the plot of most TV shows and movies.” Again, you could regard that as tepid support for “nomance,” but it’s hard to know how much weight to give it because the report does not reveal the share of respondents who disagreed or had no opinion.
Here’s where things get more suspicious.
Team Nomance
The report declares that “A near majority felt that romance in media is overused (44.3%).” You don’t have to be a math nerd to furrow your brow at the authors’ use of the term “near majority” to describe a number that is so far from being an actual majority.
A footnote provides something of an explanation: respondents gave three responses—agree, disagree, and neutral. But without seeing all three slices of that pie, how are we supposed to know if even a plurality of young people are fed up with on-screen romance?
Maybe it’s the authors who are on Team Nomance!
And here’s where my conspiracy theory picks up some steam.
The report notes that “a surprising 39% want to see more aromantic and/or asexual characters on screen.” Then the authors slip in this FYI and an image of what seems to be “aroace” pride flags:
If the authors mean to suggest that Gen Zers are increasingly identifying as aroace, there just isn’t much there there. The survey respondents are merely reacting to a novel term the authors injected into the survey.
“Aroace” is a term so cutting-edge progressive that even Google Docs, which seems to update its lexicon on the hour, doesn’t recognize it. It’s not a stretch to assume many survey respondents were similarly unfamiliar with the word.
Moreover, the “and/or” framing leaves us with no way to know how much respondents are favoring aromance versus asexuality. My guess is that many respondents are expressing a desire for more platonic storylines, which again, isn’t quite the same as wanting less romance.
Be Careful What You Ask For
If the authors want to frame Gen Z as being “anti sex and romance,” maybe they should have done more to highlight how respondents ranked the topics they want to see on screens. Rankings are often more useful than open-ended questions that ask survey takers if they want more of this or that.
That’s because with rankings respondents must respond, at least tacitly, to that important question, “Compared to what?” They must prioritize their preferences, and that process of prioritization offers useful context.
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But the rankings don’t reveal that respondents are especially passionate about sex and romance free content. You won’t find those topics at the top or bottom of the rankings. Instead they appear at number 7 and number 13.
That middling ranking doesn’t seem newsworthy enough to include in a monologue, and it doesn’t do much to support the “romance or nomance” framing the authors employ.
The authors go on to assert that “adolescents are also rejecting the dominating portrayal of traditional heteronormative relationships, and are calling for more diverse types of relationships in media” (emphasis in original).
Various news outlets quoted those words verbatim, but you really have to squint at the data to come to that conclusion. In fact, the most newsworthy findings are probably found at the top and bottom of the rankings.
They don’t have anything to do with romance or sex, and they reveal preferences that the report’s authors might not have been too thrilled about. The topic that Gen Zers are least interested in is “Nonbinary and LGBTQIA+ identities.” It joins climate change, social issues, and other monoculture-approved topics near the bottom of the Gen Z wish list.
I was selfishly rooting for romance to be higher on the list—I want my wife’s movie to reach as wide an audience as possible. But it turns out what Gen Zers really want are uplifting action-packed movies about superheroes who are just like them.
Oh well, we all have to deal with reality as it is, not as we wish it would be.
Ted Balaker is a filmmaker, and former network newser and think tanker. His recent work includes Little Pink House starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn, Can We Take a Joke? featuring Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette, and a soon-to-be-released feature documentary based on the bestselling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.