Author and screenwriter Sai Marie Johnson has written about being voluntarily celibate since 2020. She tells WIRED that the decision came after being married, having children, and experiencing toxic relationships with men. She and Ida both identify as sex positive, meaning they don’t view having sex as shameful, but are wary of how men can weaponize sex and relationships against them.
“Our climate right now has allowed men to be emboldened in their practice of misogyny,” Johnson says, highlighting reproductive coercion (the ability for men to control women’s reproductive decisions) through the inability to access abortion as a key reason that women are turning to voluntary celibacy. “Conservatism is trying to foster a more puritan society after we had done all this to push sex positivity for the past decade.”
“I think it also has to do with mothers like me, who’ve been through these things, going to our daughters and going, ‘Look, this is what my mom didn’t teach me,’” Johnson continues, adding that her 23-year-old daughter is a virgin. “You don’t have to be the puritan trad wife. You can be on OnlyFans if that’s what you want. The problem is that men automatically assume that every single opportunity to connect with a woman means they’re going to get to have sex.”
But the opposite also appears to be true.
As the contestants on Are You My First? explore some of these dynamics with each other, it becomes evident that some of the men aren’t as comfortable pursuing women, even when the women are enthusiastic about it. On night one, Rachael, the woman with vaginismus, makes it clear to Michael, a stand-up comedian, that she’s interested. He reciprocates—but reveals in a confessional that he is still working through a fear of intimacy.
It’s ironic that people like Michael who are fearful of sex are now encouraged to work through that fear publicly, on television, in highly manipulated social experiments. That contradiction may be another root cause of what average Gen Zers are experiencing—a push to share more of themselves with the internet about how they’re sharing less of themselves physically.
“There are a lot of other cultural reasons that young people are not having sex that don’t really correlate at all to conservative politics or religion or a lack of awareness about sexuality,” says Magdalene Taylor, a sexual culture critic and editor at Playboy. “I think a lot of young people are trading these usual markers of adulthood for a more digitized life. We’re having fewer in-person social interactions, and sex is a natural part of that.”
After Ida’s TikToks about virginity blew up, she posted about receiving a DM from a person involved in reality TV production casting. She says she can’t share specifics, but on Sunday, the day before Are You My First? premiered, Ida says, she participated in the filming of a pilot episode. The new series isn’t a competition, she adds. It would provide more personal context about her journey.
“My mom, literally every week she calls me, she goes, ‘Are you done embarrassing yourself on the internet?’” Ida says. “With TikTok and reality TV, if you have the opportunity to talk about your sex life or lack thereof and have it be the reason you perhaps have a career, why wouldn’t you do it?”