Off Campus: Are young adult TV shows finally horny again?

In the Twilight movies, vampire Edward and his human forever love Bella have so much yearning for each other. So much staring. So much hand holding. So many sweet nothings whispered.

What they didn’t have, until they are married, was sex.

The films were adapted from books written by Stephenie Meyer, whose Mormon faith views pre-marital sex as a sin, but apparently she was cool with writing a supernatural romance between a 104-year-old vampire and a 17-year-old highschooler.

It’s been almost two decades since the Twilight books framed teen desire as hottest when not touching, and in that time, study after study as drawn the same conclusion: young people are having less sex than their predecessors were at the same age.

There’s even a name for it — “sex recession” — and it’s borne by the stats. In one 2021 survey by the American Center for Disease Control, 30 per cent of Gen Z-ers said they had had sex, which is a 17 percentage points drop from a decade earlier.

Different reasons have been cited for the monumental change: pornography, the rise of men’s rights movements, social media addictions, isolation and home schooling during the pandemic and the resurgence of conservative politics.

The way young people consume messages about sex has morphed dramatically because of the internet, and perhaps in a small way, that also includes what they’re watching in “traditional” media such as movies and TV shows.

It becomes a circle. The cinematic trend shift during the 2010s towards “four-quadrant” blockbuster filmmaking has seen “hot and heavy” almost entirely exorcised from the biggest movie releases.

There are romances but they’re very secondary to saving the world. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, one of the most high-profile screen stars of that decade, famously plays sexless characters who might, at most, give a quick peck to an onscreen love interest.

A UCLA study in 2024 found 59.7 per cent of teens would prefer to watch titles where the central relationship is a friendship, not a romance.

The respondents said they wanted to see reflected back to them storylines and characters that were more like them, and for 54.1 per cent of those teens, apparently that was “people uninterested in romance”.

But maybe it’s finally starting to shift back. Maybe young adult stories are horny again.

There have been a raft of YA TV shows in the past few years that aren’t afraid to put sex back in the conversation and on the screen. The difference now is that these are far from the regressive depictions of, oh, say, 1981 raunch comedy Porky’s.

YA romance TV show Off Campus dropped on Prime at the end of last week and it has already shot up to number one on the platform. It had an existing fan base, having been adapted from a book series, but it’s also on-trend for a general audience.

Off Campus is an ensemble piece but the main characters are Hannah (Ella Bright) and Garrett (Belmont Cameli). She’s a music student struggling to write a pop song and nursing a crush on another student named Justin, and he’s a hockey star with daddy issues.

The tropes of the genre tells you that these two will follow the enemies-become-lovers pathway via the “let’s pretend to be dating” plot to make the other guy jealous. Obviously, Hannah and Garrett are drawn closer together and develop a friendship.

Hannah, the series reveals once it gets over the bump of its first three not-very-good episodes, is a rape survivor. She was roofied in high school and when she went to the police, her hometown called her a liar and turned on her family.

She tells Garrett this before she makes a request of him: she wants to be sexually comfortable with another person before she pursues a physical relationship with Justin. Hannah has trauma lingering from her assault, and she has not been able to orgasm with another person since.

She wants Garrett, a trusted friend by this point, to help her.

Garret has another idea and asks Hannah to masturbate in front of him, so that she can be in full control of her body and her pleasure, but he is still in the room with her.

The scene cuts back-and-forth between the two characters, focused on their faces as they mutually climax (it’s not explicit that he does, although he is clearly aroused) while locked in eye contact. It’s an incredibly intimate and steamy interaction, and there is nothing lascivious about it.

Ditto other sex scenes throughout the series involving the leads and other characters. And even shots of full-frontal male nudity are not framed as salacious.

Off Campus will inevitably be compared to Heated Rivalry on HBO because both stories are set in the world of hockey, but the closer link between them is that these shows aren’t afraid of depicting sex and intimacy.

The opposite of racy and gratuitous sex scenes and nudity is not none, but considered and hot portrayals of human desire where characters are empowered with honesty to step into their sexual passions. And also to have in the mix non-heteronormative ones.

Heated Rivalry prioritised that with repeated depictions of its main characters, hockey players Shane and Ilya, who for a decade keep their sexual relationship a secret, stealing moments in hotel rooms and between games.

The catharsis at the end of the first season of owning their relationship with Shane’s parents, and of another character, Scott, coming out on television, is, if we were being dramatic, like stepping out into the light where sex is not hidden in stories that appeal to a young adult or even teen audience.

There was also the Mindy Kaling-produced HBO comedy with the title you don’t want to be putting into your Google search bar, The Sex Lives of College Girls, which was incredibly sex-forward and non-judgmental about its characters’ hook-ups and relationships.

Netflix British comedy Sex Education also had a lot of cheeky fun with various sexual scenarios while also dispelling myths and misnomers. Its lead character, Otis (Asa Butterfield), was a pseudo-sex therapist to his classmates and through those scenes, the show actually imparted a lot of knowledge about desire and sexual health.

Prime’s The Summer I Turned Pretty, another YA series about a teenage girl choosing between the affections between two brothers could have easily eschewed sex scenes. It was a very wholesome series in tone, but it too wasn’t afraid to show its characters actually engaging in sexual activity.

Morality police panicking about teen sexuality has frequently targeted portrayals of onscreen sex as corrupting the youth or “giving them ideas”.

It’s not perilous to have thoughtful and healthy depictions of sexual desire that still passes the Bechdel test, it’s far more dangerous to have none at all.