Last year was a bleak one for human sexuality. The last 12 months have been marked by gooners and AI — not great signs for human connection. Many might look at our hyper-online, hyper-fake, hyper-disconnected, dopamine-addled sexual reality and see an end. It’s so over. We’re so cooked.
But late last year, Politico wrote that 2025 was the year that AI exhaustion set in. There were dozens of stories from major outlets about a rising sense of digital fatigue, be it social media or dating apps or just the general reality that our days are mediated by our phones. And as every trend forecaster released their predictions for the year to come, the common sentiment was that 2026 will be the year of the “offline renaissance.” This must, then, translate to our sexual lives.
Don’t get me wrong, the gooners and the AI porn lovers will still have plenty of fuel. But the rest of us, those of us who crave some sense of real human interaction and the good feelings that come from it, have grown jaded by what the Internet has offered us romantically and sexually. In a time when being online is no longer as fun as it used to be, when we can’t tell the difference between a real photo and an AI-generated one, when we’re all feeling the pinch of our multi-hour screen times, there’s really only one solution. It’s time to start prioritizing the real world, and the strange and explorative possibilities that come with it — especially for sex.
Sex has indeed been pretty bizarre over the last several years, thanks to the Internet itself. The basic principle of “Rule 34,” or “If it exists, there is porn of it” has made that abundantly clear. The limit of weird sexuality online is only our imagination. But a flatness has come with that, too. Yes, people are reading orc smut and watching porn that involves swallowing your partner whole, but are they actually having more real-life sex because of it? The data suggests they’re not. In fact, recent studies suggest we’re having less sex than any point in recorded history — including during the pandemic. To top it off, just under half of adult Gen Z-ers have never had sex, at all.
There is, perhaps, some good reason as to why. The separation between public and private has all but entirely collapsed. In her recent Playboy Advisor column, sex educator Shan Boodram explained this has become a heightened source of anxiety for Gen Z in particular, who reached sexual maturity in a time defined by the airing of our personal lives on social media, #MeToo and general scrutiny over what ought to be intimate moments and desires. Citing writer Carter Sherman’s 2025 book The Second Coming, Boodram wrote that “Gen Z’s sexual landscape is shaped not by a lack of desire, but by uncertainty, anxiety, and confusion around sex, power, and consent. One of her key findings is that many men are deeply concerned about doing harm or being misread. And in a world where people share more and more of their lives online, that concern now also extends to reputation, context collapse, and how a private sexual dynamic might be perceived if it ever becomes public.”
This aforementioned exhaustion with the Internet suggests that perhaps a change is upon us, though.
What all this suggests is that people (young adults, especially) are craving a depth of intimacy that evades the public eye. It’s in this dynamic that some of our most glorious eccentricities can blossom. With the comfort of a trusted partner, without fear of embarrassment, we can truly let our freak flag fly.
So how will that manifest, specifically? That’ll be for you to figure out, but there have been a few hints. “Dating app for the curious” Feeld has reported that straight men are increasingly interested in being pegged in 2026, for example. It’s also possible that the boom in fantasy romance novels will trickle into the real world: as Elizabeth Neumann, a qualified sexologist at sex toy company Lovehoney told DailyMail, we’re witnessing a rise in adult products with “cute designs and mythical vibes.” Thanks to shows like Heated Rivalry, I anticipate we might see more sports-themed toys, too, like this “hockey puck on a stick” for BDSM impact play.
But none of this is to say that sex in 2026 inherently has to include anything fresh or kinky. It doesn’t even actually need to be weird. It doesn’t even actually need to be sex! The point instead is that we should take a look at our routines and our complacencies, the spots in our life where we’ve traded the richness of human contact for quick dopamine. And with that, too, maybe we can reassess what sex and connection and intimacy actually mean to us. Maybe it has nothing to do with heterosexual intercourse, at all. Maybe instead it’s just about getting in touch both with one another and our own desires without the intervention or all-seeing-eye of the Internet. Isn’t it hotter that way?
