This story is from the summer 2025 issue of VICE magazine: THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. To subscribe to four print issues each year, click here—or buy the summer issue on its own here.
Gen Z hates sex.
They don’t have it, they don’t care to see it treated flippantly, and they find its presence in films and TV shows unnecessary. For years, this has been the dominant narrative. But is it actually true? Deep down, we know that it isn’t, just as in their cold, dying hearts, every clickfarm writer knows tectonic plates don’t shift whenever some Brandy Melville enthusiast announces their “celibacy era” on TikTok. By which I mean to say that Gen Z is actually, and undeniably, the most sexed-up generation the world has ever seen—and the rest of us locked in here with them ain’t much different.
Look at the facts. We watch more porn than anyone in human history. Sex parties have gone from being the preserve of Rothschildian occultists to things that happen after Tuesday night run club. Despite strict adult content censors, TikTok and Reels are rammed with videos of juggy “homemaking” influencers whisking eggs in a vest, while on X, you’ll find a carnival of oily OnlyFans arses beneath every Reuters news post about a Mexican city mayor getting his head blown off. Even citizen review sites aren’t safe: on my latest visit to Letterboxd, I unearthed a trove of five-year-old fanfic screeds priapic for Paul Mescal’s butt dimples.
Our relationship to sex may be more passive than experiential—playing out predominantly in the gap between our eyes and our screens—but we’re not against it, per se. At a time when the cultural atmosphere is more flagrantly pornographic than ever before (even the mid-2000s, when Paris Hilton deep-throated a cheeseburger on the hood of Bentley in a Carl’s Jr. advert), we have tended to respond accordingly: by dreaming up a relentless onslaught of absurd niche fetishes and micro-kinks, then posting them into existence on the internet for everyone to masturbate to.
Don’t believe us? Read on for the proof.
E-GIRLS
We’re all familiar with these legends of the game: Sentient anime characters with rosy noses and septum piercings that live on the computer. Their role in society is to make men horny and irritated at the same time, and occasionally stimulate the economy by selling their bath water or inventing make-up trends that make you look like a sexy baby. We know including them here is like putting ‘sleep’ on a list of ideas for things to do at night. Yet the mixture of outrage and lust they inspire makes them true emblems of our times, and this list would not be complete without them.
MILITARY E-GIRLS
A subgenre of the e-girl representing the UwU-ification of the military-industrial complex, their role in society is to make men horny and conscripted at the same time. As well as a thriving middle-class of second amendment enthusiasts on Instagram who combine NRA propaganda with Brazzers aesthetics, there are a number of high profile influencers like Hailey Lujan (a self-described “psychological operations specialist” for the U.S. Army) and IDF soldier Natalia Fadeev (aka Gun Waifu) who pepper ‘Get Ready With Me’ videos with assault rifles and #pewpew hashtags. These ones are more nefarious because they’re directly plugged into global affairs, hitting penthouse parties in Vegas with members of the Trump extended universe and accusing Palestinians of faking funerals. There is a non-zero percent chance that one of them will end up appearing at the International Criminal Court, denying their complicity in war crimes on the grounds of being “too cute.” Trial to be streamed live on Chaturbate.
MILITARY FETISHISM IN GENERAL
Uniform fetishism is older than ritualized animal abuse, but it has been enjoying a renaissance in recent years. According to Pornhub, “uniforms” was the fourth most searched term in 2023, up 243 percent from 2022 and often combined with distinct military preferences—“soldier roleplay,” “gay soldier,” “military homemade”—that have seen “maid” usurped as the go-to uniform of choice. This trend is internet-wide, visible in endless Pinterest boards of girls in ballet flats and frilly socks balancing atop combat boots, Instagrams dedicated to hench men in balaclavas, and the fandom around Ghost—the British special forces operator in Call of Duty, whose deep voice and masked face has inspired a booming cottage industry of male cosplayers.
CORPSE HUSBAND (AKA CORPSE) FANS
Speaking of gravelly voices and masked faces: this fucking guy. Originally a YouTuber who cut his teeth playing Among Us, he’s now a mumble rapper with a small arsenal of songs called things like “E-GIRLS ARE RUINING MY LIFE!” and “HOT DEMON B!TCHES NEAR U.” But CORPSE is most famous for 1) having a very deep voice and 2) only posting photos of his hands. Both cultivate a mystique that has turned him into an object of sexual fantasy and sends his tracks viral, with the audio traveling predominantly via thirst traps, anime graphics, and dominatrix content on TikTok. It’s a contemporary instance of the thrill of anonymity (the millennial equivalent was pretending to be older than you were to get groomed by 56-year-olds in p2p chat rooms). No one actually knows what CORPSE looks like, but based on the info he’s personally given, he is a half-Mexican, half-Irish goth with fibromyalgia gastroesophageal reflux disease who wears an eyepatch due to blue light strain. So do with that what you will.
GOONERS
A digital community of men who are doing for masturbation what Full Custom Garage does for cars, these guys spend their lives building bespoke “caves” designed to optimize the jacking off experience in order to edge themselves into a state of transcendence. Could be a McDonald’s-sized extension in Texas, could be an effective broom closet in Shibuya. Doesn’t really matter. What does is the quantity of monitors, speaker quality, wall art, fleshlight positioning, lube access: the details. In addition to straight up jorking it 24/7, they also share photos of their setup—hard dick front and center, naturally—with fellow gooners for feedback. In May 2024, their stinky base r/GoonCaves was banned for an unspecific “violation of Reddit’s rules against non-consensual media,” creating a masturbatory diaspora unlike any humanity has seen before.
CRINGE GOONERS
They are gooners but they only use “cringe” material, like JOI (jerk-off instruction) videos where the cammers refer to their lips as “smelly plumpers” or elder millennial-style memes of bouncing boobs covered by emojis and block text that says shit like “REAL WOMEN R TOO SCAWY!!!” You win this time, Quirk Chungus.
CATBOYS
Boys dressed as cats. Not much more to it, really.
SOAKERS
A Mormon cheat code for premarital sex, “soaking” is the practice of sticking your dick in someone and just sort of… leaving it there, like a coat belt accidentally dangling in the toilet. It’s a similar attitude to the one some fundamentalist religions have towards anal or scissoring: doesn’t count because it’s usually done by gay people, who aren’t covered in the texts because they either don’t exist or are to be stoned to death regardless.
RUBBERS
If you frequent free tube sites like me, a pig, you’ve probably seen one of the many accounts that post POV videos of a guy trying to fuck a girl through her knickers, like he’s wearing a horrible condom made of 100 percent polyester, or just sort of fucking the space between her pussy and the knickers. This is “rubbing” (though you could more accurately call it wet humping). It leans heavily into the “Oh no, we can’t have sex, you’re my step-brother!” genre, and requires industrial quantities of that ultra-realistic cum lube that looks like CeraVe.
TRADWIVES
Just because something doesn’t claim to be sexual, doesn’t mean it isn’t intended to be sexual. Almost every glute workout video on Instagram is softcore porn in disguise; the same goes for all those clips of tattoo artists working on a girl’s crotch only to get “unexpectedly” blasted in the face with squirt. A lot of tradwife content is similarly disingenuous. A tradwife is a woman who believes in traditional gender roles and the nuclear family. Some of them are definitely real people who live in Utah and lobby to get certain haircuts banned in schools. However, there’s also a scourge of bad-faith tradwife influencers who cynically sell the housewife archetype as a fetish, cosplaying a post-war fantasy of submission and domesticity in POV videos where they bake cookies in a sundress.
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH’S ANIME MASCOT
Back in October 2024, the Vatican unveiled a new cartoon mascot for the Catholic Church. Designed by Simone Legno, the founder of Japanese-style lifestyle brand tokidoki, Luce (“light” in Italian) is a little girl with blue hair, a yellow raincoat, and a multicolored world mission rosary around her neck. Legno said he hoped that “Luce can represent the sentiments that resonate in the hearts of the younger generations.” Naturally, she was immediately fed into AI-generators and spat back out in stacks of hardcore pornographic images.
KAMALA HARRIS HYENA PORN
If you thought you would get through this life without hearing the words “Kamala Harris furry NSFW,” I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you. There are currently over 6,000 people in a subreddit dedicated to imagery of anthropomorphic hyenas with Kamala Harris’ haircut and a huge human penis. (They recently discovered that female spotted hyenas have a “pseudopenis,” which is sort of like a thin fleshy drumstick, so they’re doing that now as well. Are you glad you know all of this? I, personally, plan on killing myself.) All credit to the group: very little of it is AI generated. There are some impressive original artworks in there of the former presidential candidate nutting behind a podium and doing Donald Trump up the arse, for example. Kamala may have lost the White House, but at least she won the Goon Cave.
MACROPHILES
Sexual fantasies of giants, particularly giant women, is another fetish that’s been around for decades and is only coming on leaps and bounds with the advancement of technology. There’s a prominent YouTube channel called Giantess Hug that has a bountiful archive of massive women holding people between their fingers like snails, or stomping around a major metropolitan area in a mini skirt. There’s examples of it everywhere in pop culture, from the 1958 camp sci-fi classic Attack of the 50 Foot Woman to Lana Del Rey’s 2019 video for her cover of Sublime’s “Doin’ Time,” but the Resident Evil gaming franchise is really leading the charge for macrophilia in the mainstream. Their heroine Jill Valentine fights off zombies while ballooning in size in 2020’s Resident Evil 3, but Lady Dimitrescu, the colossal antagonist from 2021’s Resident Evil Village, is the real fan favorite. Much like the ladies themselves, the appeal of macrophilia is growing: there’s a wellspring of the stuff on 4chan’s /d/ board, and “giantess” was found to be the most popular search term on the amateur fetish site Clips4Sale in 2023.
ANAL VOREPHILES
Like vore, the fetish of being swallowed, but with arseholes. So, just to recap, this fetish involves getting swallowed by arseholes. Hugely popular on Reddit, where users are making some very creative imagery of, say, Mario getting slurped up by a giant arsehole with a speech bubble above his hat (yes, his hat is still on) that says “Mama Mia.”
#PISSTOK
In recent years, watersports have hit TikTok. The videos are overwhelmingly centered on girls concocting elaborate fictional scenarios for the benefit of piss freaks, like pretending to get stung by a jellyfish at the beach, or “accidentally” losing a staring contest where the loser gets pissed on, or putting the caption “look me straight in the eyes and tell me you don’t have a raging piss kink” over a cross-eyed selfie. Some of it’s a laugh, some of it’s engagement bait, but one thing’s for sure: The line between kinks and memes is growing thinner by the minute.
GHOSTFACE
Mask fetishes feature multiple times on this list and that’s because they 1) carry the implication of physical danger and 2) flatter the feminine desire to be observed. (After all, he could be anyone, anywhere!) When Scream came out in 1996, the number of people getting drilled down in a Ghostface mask must have been astronomical, but now the internet is here we get to see its appeal in full swing. Happily, it’s a trend that seems to have been picked up by those who feel like its most natural custodians and inheritors—by which I mean the masks are mostly worn these days by heavily tattooed internet celebrities and goth strippers.
OTAKUSEXUALS
According to most eminent statisticians of our time (porn website traffic analysts), Gen Z’s favorite thing to do is: watch three vertically split videos of cartoon tit jobs at the same time.
CUMTRIBUTORS
The act of busting over your own phone screen with a photo of someone pulled up on it, as a form of “tribute” to them. You could also count “hot gluing” anime figurines in this same category. Both are ritualistic, both result in a sad and inelegant clean-up process.
LOOKALIKE COMPETITION ENTHUSIASTS
While they mostly involve groups of young men gathering in a public square to be observed and judged on a set of criteria, like Crufts for boys, there’s a libidinal thrust to lookalike competitions. They revolve around this generation’s most prominent male sex symbols—Timothée Chalamet, Harry Styles, Jeremy Allen White, Paul Mescal, Luigi Mangione—and act as controlled outlets for our displaced desires by taking the guys we go absolutely mental over online and luring their clones out in public with the promise of attention and a €20 Lidl voucher.
AMPUTEE FETISHISTS
If I must elaborate, I’d say this one is being propelled by the increasing popularity of sex doll torsos that are, as one retailer describes, “deficient in arms, legs, and head.”
MONSTER TRUCKS WITH BOOBS
I’ve made this one up. I even invented a subreddit for it, seeding it in the popular consciousness. (Go look it up if you don’t believe me.) There hasn’t been much takeup yet, but just you wait. In a few years’ time, when you’re wondering what the kids at the bus stop are talking about, the awful penny will suddenly drop—and you will know that Monster Trucks With Boobs all began here. Wasn’t it more fun when it was just you and me?
Follow Emma Garland on X @emmaggarland
This story is from the summer 2025 issue of VICE magazine: THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. To subscribe to four print issues each year, click here—or buy the summer issue on its own here.
The post The VICE Guide to the Sex Tribes of 2025 appeared first on VICE.
