{"id":206947,"date":"2026-03-16T16:01:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-16T16:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/206947\/"},"modified":"2026-03-16T16:01:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-16T16:01:08","slug":"sxsw-panel-explores-texas-role-in-the-gen-z-sex-recession-the-austin-chronicle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/206947\/","title":{"rendered":"SXSW Panel Explores Texas\u2019 Role in the Gen Z Sex Recession \u2022 The Austin Chronicle"},"content":{"rendered":"

Politics are often an unwelcome bedfellow, but the impacts of sexually conservative legislation<\/a> in recent years have been particularly marked. The so-called sex recession has been the topic of much research and reporting in the past seven years, as more of Gen Z, and now some of Gen Alpha, have aged into sexual maturity and sexual activity continues to falter at a historical low among the youngest Americans.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s certainly no one single explanation,\u201d said Carter Sherman, reporter and author of The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation\u2019s Fight Over Its Future. In the time she\u2019s spent covering the issue for the Guardian and other publications, Sherman has noted the role that three political topics have played in generating anxiety surrounding sex for young people, all of which have found their legal and legislative testing ground in Texas: sexual education, age verification laws, and reproductive rights.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In a South by Southwest panel discussion on Sunday, Sherman brought Texas Tribune reporter Eleanor Klibanoff onstage to accessibly summarize her reporting with \u201cGen Z correspondent\u201d Paxton Smith, a young board member of the Women\u2019s Reproductive Rights Assistance Project who spoke out against Texas\u2019 six-week abortion ban in her 2021 high school valedictorian speech<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cTexas, of course, is its own idiosyncratic place, but much of what happens in Texas paves the way for other red states in particular,\u201d said Klibanoff. \u201cTexas is known as a laboratory for sexually conservative policies.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of these policies took effect in 2022, when Texas legislators changed the public school system\u2019s sex education method from opt-out to opt-in, meaning parents now have to proactively sign a form requesting in-school sex education for their child. This system quickly put what little valuable information is included in the state\u2019s \u201cabstinence-plus\u201d curriculum behind further barriers for Texan teens, especially those who need it most. Smith, who received a limited, abstinence-plus sex education in middle school before the opt-in system was implemented, walked away from the minimal instruction she received filled with guilt and confusion, eventually turning to the internet, and women\u2019s magazine Cosmopolitan in particular, for the neutral, in-depth information about puberty and sexuality that she\u2019d craved.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt really improved and really impacted my experience with sex,\u201d said Smith. \u201cI carried the shame from the initial sex education I got [at school] literally for years, and battled with that for years.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOften, we really demonize the internet when it comes to young people and sex, and the thing about the internet is it actually can fix some of these gaps in sex ed,\u201d Sherman agreed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

More recently, when the Supreme Court upheld Texas\u2019 legislation mandating age verification on porn websites, Klibanoff saw a door open to future internet censorship that would impact minors and adults alike, as the age verification law already has in regards to porn, pushing major \u201ctax-paying porn websites\u201d out of the state. Under the new SCOTUS ruling, individual states have the power to determine what counts as sexually explicit content that can then be subjected to age verification. States like Kansas, she said, have already adopted language broadening the scope of that content.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cMany of those definitions of explicitness include information about LGBTQ+ rights, people, and identities,\u201d the reporter said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Focusing sexually conservative policies on youth as a pathway to broader legal change has been a part of the conservative playbook in other areas, Klibanoff pointed out, especially when it comes to reproductive healthcare.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt sounds more palatable to say: \u2018What adults want to do, adults want to do, that\u2019s your business \u2013\u00a0but we do think that if you\u2019re under 18, there should be these restrictions on how you access abortion,\u2019\u201d she explained. Even before Roe v. Wade was overturned, Texas state legislators had begun to weaken its power by requiring parental consent for minors seeking abortions and, now, birth control, chipping away at nationwide progress lowering teen pregnancy rates.<\/p>\n

Survey data shows that lack of abortion access has had a chilling impact on dating and sex among single adults, contributing to the recession just as a lack of education surrounding safe, consensual sex has \u2013 as well as an increasingly gendered ideological polarization. Though some concern about the sex recession has found bipartisan appeal, conservative Texan policies continue to ripple through red and blue states alike, these writers said, shaping the future of dating culture, sex, and generations to come.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A note to readers:\u00a0Bold and uncensored,\u00a0The Austin Chronicle\u00a0has been Austin\u2019s independent news source for over 40 years, expressing the community\u2019s political and environmental concerns and supporting its active cultural scene. Now more than ever, we need your support to continue supplying Austin with independent, free press. If real news is important to you, please consider making a donation of $5, $10 or whatever you can afford, to help keep our journalism on stands. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Politics are often an unwelcome bedfellow, but the impacts of sexually conservative legislation in recent years have been…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":206948,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133,1551,58141,81223,2970,79338],"class_list":["post-206947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news","tag-feature","tag-roe-v-wade","tag-sex-recession","tag-sxsw-2026","tag-sxsw-innovation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206947\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/206948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}