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Welcome to Playboy’s Gen Z Sex Survey. In partnership with The Kinsey Institute and the sexual health brand Julie, we talked to 2,373 adults ages 18 to 29 about their sex lives to get to the bottom of the so-called sex recession, and to get more insight on what’s really going on in the bedroom. Check out the full survey results here. This survey also appears in our Fall 2026 print issue. To have Playboy delivered to your door, subscribe here.
Ballet slipper–pink nails, a cozy sweater, a sweet pink drink, and flats to match, Alex Clark’s Instagram post is the picture of girlhood. It’s a soft life, coquette dream aesthetic, the kind that easily goes viral online. But over the cloying image is a message: stop taking birth control!
Clark is a right-wing, tradwife-adjacent podcaster who runs the show Culture Apothecary, a Make America Healthy Again–fueled mix of Christian gender roles, anti–prescription medication messaging, and misinformation backed by Turning Point USA. Clark is a loud voice in a field of influencers sharing red-pill content to sway young women away from hormonal birth control—and it’s working.
Forty percent of women who responded to Playboy‘s 2026 Gen Z Sex Survey said they have concerns about the risks or side effects of hormonal birth control that discourage them from using it. And 33 percent of women named social media content as the reason they don’t want to use it.
A scroll through anti–birth control content makes it easy to see why. “Birth control is poison for your body and mind,” Katie Miller, wife of Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff for policy, posted on X in January. “When I tell girls that birth control is the problem,” one TikToker wrote over a video of her lip-syncing to Justin Bieber’s viral “It’s not clocking to you” audio. Many of these posts make vague claims, such as calling birth control “poison.” Others link birth control to infertility, personality changes, and even cancer.
According to Dr. Jennifer Lincoln, an ob-gyn, OB hospitalist, and author of The Birth Book: An Ob-Gyn’s Guide to Demystifying Labor and Delivery, it’s no coincidence that these posts are ramping up under a presidential administration that has restricted reproductive freedom and rallied around increasing the birth rate.
“When you have the vice president of the United States saying that he wants more babies and those of us who don’t have kids are childless cat ladies,” Lincoln says, “that’s not normal.“
But that’s just one piece of the puzzle. There’s the erosion of trust in science that was seeded during the pandemic, and there’s how hard it is to get an appointment with a doctor if you do trust them. And there’s the anti-birth control content that spans political ideology, repackaging once-conservative messaging for a wider audience, from tradwives to the manosphere. Then comes the final blow: What really allows birth control misinformation to thrive, Lincoln says, is baked into our very understanding of women’s health.
“Women’s health and reproductive healthcare is unique in that it is often dismissed, it is underfunded, and it is uniquely different in that there is specific legislation limiting it,” Lincoln says. “It’s the perfect storm.“
Birth control does have risks, and it isn’t right for everyone. It might marginally increase the risk of breast cancer—it may also reduce the risk of endometrial cancer. It might cause unwanted symptoms in some people, or it might clear up unwanted symptoms in others. That nuance is what the influencers usually leave out, according to Lincoln. “They’re playing with people’s lives,” she says. “And they don’t seem to care or realize it.”
But Lincoln says it could be worse: “That only 33 percent of people said social media is the reason [they don’t want to take birth control] makes me feel a little better.” Judging by the amount of red-pilled anti–birth control content online, she thought it would be much more
For the full breakdown of The Playboy 2026 Gen Z Sex Survey with the Kinsey Institute and Julie, go to sexsurvey.playboy.com.