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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.
So young adults are having less sex. What are they doing instead? Well, apparently, they’re not masturbating much, either.
This might come as a surprise, given all the media headlines leading us to believe that Gen Z is the “gooning” generation. But the data tells a more nuanced story.
Playboy’s Gen Z Sex Survey found that about one-third of men and close to half of women reported not having masturbated a single time in the last three months.
Breaking the data down by gender, we found that, among men, the number who weren’t fapping at all was almost exactly the same as the number who said they masturbated daily. In other words, for every gooner, there was an abstainer.
So why, then, are so many young adults not masturbating? Is it perhaps because they just don’t have the desire to?
Because they’re also having less sex, an absence of desire initially struck us as the most intuitive answer. There might just be a lack of interest in sexual activity across the board.
But our data didn’t support this idea. In fact, the vast majority of our respondents reported moderate to very high levels of sexual desire, suggesting that low levels of masturbation weren’t necessarily the product of low libido.
So if the desire is still there, why avoid self-pleasure? We don’t yet have a definitive answer to that question, but we do have a few hypotheses.
First, over the last decade or so, self-pleasure has gotten a bum rap on social media. We’ve witnessed the rise of online movements like NoFap and No Nut November. Male fitness and self-improvement influencers are increasingly touting the benefits of “semen retention,” and there are repeated claims of “porn-induced erectile dysfunction” and clitoral desensitization from excessive vibrator usage.
You don’t have to look far to find bold assertions about how self-pleasure may be hazardous to your health. In light of this, it could just be that some of this anti-masturbatory messaging—despite its lack of scientific support—is breaking through.
Another possibility is that Gen Z might not be the generation of sex positivity after all. Although we hear a lot about young adults’ embrace of polyamory, queer identities, and kink, this is the same generation in which we’re seeing the rise of tradwives, the rejection of hookup culture, and a growing discomfort with sex and nudity in mainstream media.
Whatever the explanation, the takeaway is hard to ignore: Gen Z isn’t just having less sex with each other; a lot of them are having less sex with themselves too.
For the full breakdown of The Playboy 2026 Gen Z Sex Survey with the Kinsey Institute and Julie, go to sexsurvey.playboy.com.