Gen Z men are turning against pornography, a recent study from the American Survey Center has found. The majority of Americans support making internet pornography less accessible, and the majority of young men are in support of this.
The Context
The survey comes at a time of increasing conservative ideology among young people. Data from Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation found that Gen Z teens are twice as likely to identify as conservative than their parents than millennials were some 20 years ago. This cohort is small–14 percent–but it suggests a generational shift.
And there’s a deepening divide when it comes to Gen Z and gender too. A 2024 survey from the Survey Center on American Life, which examined the 2024 election and the gender divide, found that 13 percent of Americans believe the country has gone too far in granting women equal rights to men. The same survey noted a decline in Americans identifying with feminism: 35 percent of Americans identified as feminists, with 42 percent of women and 27 percent of men embracing the label. In 2020, approximately 51 per cent of Americans said the label “feminist” described them at least somewhat well.
What To Know
The American Survey Center found that 69 percent of Americans supported making internet pornography less accessible. Less than one in three oppose these efforts.
The increase in support is modest overall—in 2013, two in three Americans (65 percent) supported policies that limited the availability of pornography online, so the increase overall is only one of four percent.
Where there is a significant increase, however, is among young men. In 2013, young men were divided about restrictions on pornography—around half (51 percent) favored making it more difficult to access pornography online. In 2025, six in 10 young men say that they believe accessing porn online should be more difficult.
Newsweek spoke to Dr. Thomas Keith, a professor of philosophy and gender studies at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He told Newsweek over email: “That Gen Z men are moving away from pornography, or viewing porn as something in need of greater restrictions is not surprising to me. In my work with college-aged men, I have witnessed a pronounced change from past generations.”
Keith cited a number of different factors as reasons behind this shift. Pointing to a difference in media, he said: “If you examine the media of the baby boomers or even Gen X, the films of these generations are highly exploitative of women, whether in action or comedy genres, two genres often aimed at male audiences.”
He added: “Of course, there are online and gamer-culture media that still engages in these forms of exploitative narratives, but they are decreasing.”
Keith also pointed to a shift in gender and cultural studies courses at universities: “When I first taught gender studies courses three decades ago, there were no men in any of the classes. Today, gender classes are close to 50/50 in terms of men and women as students.”
Views on pornography differ by age groups. Almost two thirds (64 percent) of men under the age of 25 say that they favor making it more difficult to access online pornography, according to the American Survey Center. By contrast, slightly under half of men between the ages of 25 and 54 are in support of making online pornography more difficult to access.
Views also differed by gender. For every age group surveyed, women were more supportive if making it more difficult to access pornography online. For the ages of 18 to 24, support was at 72 percent, for ages 35-44, support was at 70 percent, and support increased further with age to 81 percent for the ages of 45 to 54.
The increase in support for porn regulations could be tied to both an increase in conservative ideology, and the fact that Gen Z are, in general, having less sex than previous generations.
On TikTok and Instagram, videos promoting abstinence and waiting until marriage to have sex regularly rack up views by the million. In a 2022 nationally representative U.S. survey of 2,000 adults from the Kinsey Institute and Lovehoney, one in four Gen Z adults said they were yet to have partnered sex.
And there was a gender divide, with men being more likely than women to report never having had partnered sex (one in three men vs. one in five women).
Professor Jessica Ringrose, of UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, told Newsweek over email: “Anti-pornography trends have tended to be steeped in conservative values of shame and blame that merely push issues underground rather than help young people develop their digital sexual literacies in ethical ways.”
Ringrose said that the answer to this from an educational perspective is “greater porn literacy,” as opposed to “conservative trends to ignore pornography in general as bad, which tend to shut down the sexual agency and autonomy of women and girls in particular.”
What People Are Saying
Ringrose added: “Boys and young men are critical consumers of pornography but they do require more support from parents and educators on these difficult issues. We advocate away from shaming boys on these topics towards consent education based in rights to enable young people to develop healthy sexual behaviour based on genuine consent and ethics.”
Keith continued: “Males are turning away from pornography and the old-fashioned thinking that goes with it. The idea of women as ‘Playboy bunnies’ who have no agency or power is beginning to be as repellent to boys and young men as it is to girls and women. It would be a huge mistake to claim that there is not a great deal of work to be done, but in general, boys and young men are not their fathers nor their grandfathers, and this is great news for women and for men.”
What’s Next
A ban on pornography is a key agenda item in Project 2025. Under the second Trump administration, beyond restrictions, a ban on pornography could well become a reality at some point.
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