Teens to Hollywood: Enough sex, already

LOS ANGELES – Movies and television shows about rich people are the last thing we want to watch. And skip the sex: We prefer content that focuses on platonic relationships. We do like fantasy as a genre, increasingly so. But please, pretty please, fix how you incorporate social media into storylines. It is cringe.

That is what young people – those aged 10 to 24 – think about movies, television shows, video games and social media, according to a study released on Oct 24.

The study, Teens & Screens, conducted by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), found that 63.5 per cent of participants wanted content that depicted platonic relationships, as opposed to romance and sex. That is up from 51.5 per cent in 2023. (Questions involving romance and sex were not shown to participants aged 10 to 13.)

Of course, what study participants say and what they actually do can vary wildly. There is ample evidence to the contrary among shows that are popular with younger audiences, including The Sex Lives Of College Girls (2021 to present), a raunchy comedy; Emily In Paris (2020 to present), an impassioned romance; and Tell Me Lies (2022 to present), a steamy soap.

Movies like Poor Things (2023), which found an insatiable American actress Emma Stone romping through a Paris brothel, and the sexually frank All Of Us Strangers (2023) attracted a surprisingly large audience of people in their early 20s, said box-office analysts.

The study in 2024 was conducted in August and included 1,644 young people.

“We’re trying to shift the culture by giving storytellers better information,” said Dr Yalda Uhls, founder and chief executive of the Centre for Scholars & Storytellers, which is based at UCLA. “The problem is often that Hollywood storytellers use their own memories of their teenage years or what their children in Los Angeles are doing, and that does not remotely represent what young people really want.”

Dr Uhls acknowledged the possibility that participants were saying one thing while doing another, but she thinks that is not common.

“The programming currently being offered is based on what adults think they want, and if they have no other choice, teens will have to choose that,” she said.

Dr Uhls left a career in movies and television – she worked at studios like Sony and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer – to get her doctorate in developmental psychology and start the centre. As part of her work, she takes groups of teenagers to entertainment companies to talk about ways to authentically represent them.

For the report in 2024, she and her team also asked young people how they decide which movies and television shows to watch. The two most important factors were plot and ease of access.

Interestingly, given the manner in which Hollywood marketeers have embraced TikTok and Instagram influencers, the study’s participants ranked “influencer recommendations” as one of the worst ways to convince them to watch.

Dr Uhls noted that 36 per cent of participants ranked fantasy as their favourite genre, up from 16 per cent in 2023. “That tells me how badly adolescents want escape,” she said. “The real world is overwhelming.” NYTIMES