Young people to Hollywood: Enough sex already

LOS ANGELES – The last thing we want to do is watch movies and television shows about rich people. And skip the sex: We prefer content that focuses on platonic relationships. (There’s enough porn on the internet as it is.) As a species, we’re increasingly loving fantasy. But please, please, fix how you incorporate social media into stories. Shameful.

This is what teens ages 10 to 24 think about movies, television shows, video games and social media, according to a study published Oct. 24.

The Teens & Screens study, conducted by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), found that 63.5 percent of respondents said they wanted content depicting platonic relationships rather than romance and sex. This rate increased compared to 51.5 percent in 2023. (Questions involving romance and sex were not shown to participants ages 10 to 13.)

Of course, what research participants say and what they actually do can differ greatly. There is plenty of evidence to suggest the opposite among shows popular with younger audiences; these include the raunchy comedy The Sex Lives Of College Girls (2021-present); Emily In Paris, a steamy romance novel (2020-present); and Tell Me Lies (2022-present), a steamy soap.

Movies like Poor Things (2023), which follows insatiable American actress Emma Stone wandering through a Paris brothel, and the sexually frank All of Us Strangers (2023) will appeal to a surprisingly wide audience of viewers in their early 20s, box office analysts say. It caught his attention. .

The study in 2024 was conducted in August and included 1,644 young people.

D., founder and executive director of the UCLA-based Center for Scholars and Storytellers. “We are trying to change the culture by giving storytellers better information,” Yalda Uhls said. “The problem is often that Hollywood storytellers use their own memories of their teenage years or what their kids did in Los Angeles, and that doesn’t even remotely represent what young people really want.”

Dr Uhls acknowledged the possibility of participants saying one thing and doing another, but thought this was not common.

“The programs currently offered are based on what adults think they want, and young people will have to choose if they have no other choice,” he said.

Dr Uhls left a career in film and television, working at studios such as Sony and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, to obtain her doctorate in developmental psychology and found the centre. As part of her job, she brings groups of young people into entertainment companies to talk about ways to represent them authentically.

For the report in 2024, Dr. Uhls and his team also asked teens how they decide which movies and television shows to watch. The two most important factors were plot and ease of access.

Interestingly, given the way Hollywood marketers have embraced TikTok and Instagram influencers, the study’s participants rated “influencer recommendations” as one of the worst ways to persuade them to follow.

Dr Uhls noted that 36 per cent of respondents listed fantasy as their favorite genre, up from 16 per cent in 2023.

“This shows me how much teenagers want to escape,” he said. “The real world is overwhelming.” NYTIMES