If I see one more headline announcing that Gen Z has killed alcohol, I might just order another drink.

According to the internet, my generation doesn’t go to bars anymore. We don’t party. We don’t date. We’re all sitting at home sipping adaptogenic mushroom tonics, journaling our feelings and politely declining invitations to any event after 7 p.m. because we’d rather optimize our sleep scores than take a tequila shot.

There’s just one problem: I have absolutely no idea who these people are.

I was born in 2001, making me squarely Gen Z. My friends split bottles of wine over dinner. Our birthday party of choice is a bar crawl to our favorite hot spots. We can always be convinced to order another round of G&Ts with just a glance at each other. On any given Friday night, the restaurants around me are full of twenty-somethings lingering over drinks long after they’ve paid the check. Or getting in UberXLs to the night’s secondary location (i.e. the local dive bar). Even the sober Gen Zers I know still go out — they’ve just swapped negronis for mocktails.

So after reading what felt like the hundredth article declaring that my generation had abandoned alcohol, nightlife and socializing altogether, I started wondering whether I was missing something.

The statistics behind those stories are real: Younger adults are drinking less than previous generations did at the same age. But somewhere between “Gen Z drinks somewhat less” and “Gen Z is killing the bar industry,” something strange happened. A modest shift in consumer behavior hardened into a cultural stereotype. I wanted to understand what got lost in that translation.

I’m not questioning the data or trying to argue that the numbers are wrong. I’m questioning the story we’ve built around them. And if there’s one person who has spent more time thinking about that disconnect than almost anyone else, it’s Dave Infante.

The Kernel of Truth

Infante, who covers the beverage alcohol industry in his newsletter “Fingers,” has watched that distortion happen in real time. A few years ago, while reporting for VinePair, he interviewed roughly a dozen college students for a series on “the state of the modern keg party.” His findings weren’t especially dramatic.

Keg parties still existed. Students still drank. But packaged beverages — hard seltzers, canned cocktails and drinks like High Noon — were beginning to replace the giant communal keg that had become shorthand for college drinking culture.

At almost the exact same moment, another drinking trend exploded across the internet: BORGs, or “blackout rage gallons,” the customized gallon jugs of vodka, water, electrolytes and flavoring that briefly inspired a miniature moral panic in national media.

If you only followed the headlines, it was difficult to reconcile the two dominant narratives about Gen Z. Depending on the week, we were either frighteningly reckless or hopelessly boring.

Infante remembers watching that contradiction play out in real time.

“If anything,” he told me, “the story is maybe that youth were more interested in customizing the amount of alcohol they were drinking and the flavors they were drinking — or not drinking at all.”

Drinking differently is not the same thing as not drinking.

Infante has a phrase he likes to use when talking about stories like these.

“There’s usually a kernel of truth,” he said. Then that truth gets “wrenched through this…assembly line,” until what comes out on the other side barely resembles where it started.

That’s exactly what seems to have happened here. The original claim — that younger adults, on average, consume somewhat less alcohol than previous generations at the same age — is supported by plenty of evidence. But that’s not the story most people have absorbed.

Instead, we’ve somehow arrived at a version where Gen Z has collectively decided drinking isn’t fun anymore, bars are empty because nobody under 30 leaves the house and nightlife itself is quietly dying. Those are much bigger claims, and they’re far harder to prove.

Alcohol consumption statistics tell us how much alcohol people consume. They don’t tell us how often young adults see their friends. They don’t tell us whether restaurants are full, whether people are dating, whether house parties have disappeared or whether social life has migrated somewhere else entirely.

Every generation seems to inherit one cultural panic after another.

That pattern is something Corey Seemiller has spent years watching unfold.

Seemiller, a professor and one of the leading researchers of Gen Z, sees the pattern as generationally predictable. “Every generation gets blamed for everything,” she said. 

When Baby Boomers were young, they were reckless. When millennials came along, they were entitled. Now Gen Z has become simultaneously too online, too anxious, too health-conscious, too antisocial and, apparently, too sober.

The labels shift depending on what’s happening in the broader culture.

What doesn’t change is our impulse to explain complicated social and economic changes by assigning a personality to an entire generation.

Because the more Seemiller studies Gen Z, the more she finds a generation responding rationally to the world it inherited — not inventing entirely new values out of thin air.

Take socializing.

One of the most common assumptions underpinning the “Gen Z doesn’t drink” narrative is that young adults simply don’t want to go out anymore. Seemiller doesn’t buy that. Instead, she thinks we’re asking the wrong question.

Instead of asking whether Gen Z drinks less, she suggests: What does social life actually look like now?

“There are a lot of things that are going on all simultaneously,” she told me. Yes, the research consistently finds that Gen Z drinks less than previous generations. But that’s only one piece of a much bigger puzzle. “If they were to drink,” she said, “where are they drinking? Are they going to the grocery store and buying something and drinking at a gathering, or are they going to a bar?”

For decades, the bar occupied an almost uncontested position in American social life. It was where coworkers met after work, where first dates happened, where birthdays spilled into the early morning and where twenty-somethings figured out adulthood over cheap pitchers of beer. Going out and drinking were so tightly intertwined that they became almost interchangeable in the American imagination.

But Seemiller argues that’s no longer the landscape Gen Z inhabits.

Bars today aren’t simply competing with the bar down the street.

“They’re competing with boba tea houses,” she said. “They’re competing with coffee houses. They’re competing with thrift stores. They’re competing with a local park where you can just go sit down and talk to your friends.”

If you meet a friend for an overpriced matcha instead of an overpriced IPA, are you less social? If you spend three hours catching up over dinner instead of hopping between bars, are you participating less in nightlife? If you host friends at your apartment because no one wants to spend $90 before the Uber ride home, have you somehow opted out of social life altogether?

Or have the rituals simply changed?

Those questions kept resurfacing throughout my reporting, particularly when I stopped talking to experts and started talking to people my own age.

One of the first things I noticed was that almost nobody — drinkers or nondrinkers — recognized themselves in the version of Gen Z they’d been reading about.

Miranda Ferrante certainly didn’t.

Ferrante stopped drinking in July 2024 after alcohol began exacerbating her anxiety, stomach issues and sleep problems. The decision wasn’t part of some grand wellness movement. It wasn’t driven by social media. It was simply a realization that drinking no longer made her feel the way she wanted to feel.

But giving up alcohol didn’t mean giving up the rest of her life.

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When I asked whether headlines about Gen Z “killing alcohol” felt accurate, she didn’t hesitate.

“No, sober does not mean ‘not fun,’” she said.

She still goes out with friends. She still celebrates birthdays at restaurants. She still orders drinks — just without alcohol. Her friends make a point of choosing places with thoughtful mocktail menus and are quick to point out alcohol-free options when they’re available.

“I think we are changing the definition of what socialization means,” she told me. “I don’t think drinking or not drinking alcohol should have any impact on the definition of socialization.”

We’ve spent years treating alcohol as a proxy for social connection. Drink less, socialize less. Order fewer beers, have fewer friends. But those equations only work if alcohol is still the primary reason people gather in the first place.

The more people I interviewed, the less convinced I became that it is.

Gabi Bradbury, who has been sober for three years, described much the same life: bars, concerts, festivals and nights out with friends, only without alcohol in her glass. “Why do we need to drink to have fun?” she asked.

Neither spoke like someone opting out of social life. If anything, both described becoming more intentional about it.

That word — intentional — came up so often during my interviews that I eventually started circling it in my notebook.

Intentional about drinking. Intentional about friendships. And then Dave Infante gave me a much more practical explanation.

Money.

The $20 Cocktail

“I think that’s a huge part of it,” Infante said when I asked how much economics has shaped the narrative around Gen Z and alcohol. “I don’t think that’s the whole piece… but I certainly think that’s a substantial piece of the puzzle.”

“We are very much squarely in the era of the $20 cocktail,” he said. “$10 beer. $18 glass of wine.”

Infante pointed me toward research by Rabobank senior beverage analyst Bourcard Nesin that complicates one of the most common assumptions about Gen Z drinking habits. Younger adults are spending roughly the same share of their income on alcohol as previous generations did — but in raw dollars, they’re spending dramatically less.

If Gen Z is earning less while simultaneously facing higher housing costs, higher grocery bills and more expensive drinks, declining alcohol purchases start looking a lot less like a cultural rejection of drinking and a lot more like basic math.

“If you boil it down like that,” Infante said, “the intuitive idea that, ‘Oh, zoomers just don’t want to drink,’ becomes very hard to defend.”

I’m hard-pressed to think of a single friend who’s ever said, “I’m not going out because I don’t believe in alcohol anymore.” I can think of dozens who’ve said, “I can’t justify spending $75 tonight.”

Those are not the same conversation, and yet we keep treating them as if they are.

“Young adults respond rationally to inflation and stagnant wages” doesn’t inspire quite the same existential panic as “Gen Z killed nightlife,” but it’s probably closer to the truth.

Infante sees that framing play out even inside the alcohol industry. As part of his reporting, he regularly listens to corporate earnings calls and began noticing a pattern: When publicly traded alcohol companies missed sales targets, executives often reached for the same explanation.

“Guess who’s to blame?” he said. “It’s those darn kids.”

Blaming a mysterious generation that simply doesn’t like alcohol is a much easier story than confronting rising prices, changing consumer behavior or whether people still feel they’re getting enough value from a night out.

“There’s this very strange frame that happens,” Infante said, “whether it was millennials with the avocado toast, or it’s zoomers who are too into weed gummies to do alcohol.”

The implication is always the same: If only young people behaved differently, the industry would be fine.

“But ultimately,” he continued, “that is not a zoomer problem. That’s a beverage alcohol firm problem.”

Consumers don’t owe industries their loyalty. If restaurants, breweries or liquor companies want people to spend money, they have to convince them the experience is worth the cost.

Some bars, Infante noted, are already experimenting with lower-priced cocktails and expanded happy hours after discovering there may simply be a ceiling to what customers will pay for a drink.

But price is only part of what has changed.

Longtime drinks writers Caroline Pardilla and Esther Tseng, who both started covering bars in the early 2000s, remember a pre-COVID nightlife landscape with later hours, more clubs and fewer alternatives competing for young people’s time.

Pardilla remembers bar hopping as a routine weekend activity.

“It was just what our idea of fun was,” she said. “You’re just being social and it made you feel good and you kind of loosened up and everything.”

Tseng remembers going to coffee shops at 10 p.m. and blogging into the early hours of the morning.

“What coffee shop do you know is open that long anymore?” she asked.

It’s a small question that points toward a much larger shift. People talk about Gen Z as though young adults collectively decided to stop going out, when the physical infrastructure of going out has changed around them.

“There were a lot of clubs,” Tseng said. “Stuff used to be open a lot later. People drank a lot more back then, and especially leading up to the pandemic, the hours just kept getting cut shorter.”

Restaurants changed. Hospitality changed. Consumers changed. Even years later, many cities still haven’t fully returned to the schedules they kept before 2020.

If last call happens earlier, if restaurants close sooner and if people got used to gathering in smaller groups during lockdown, of course the texture of nightlife is going to look different than it did in 2018.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s disappearing. It may simply be evolving into something else.

The Gen Z Era

When people describe Gen Z as uninterested in going out, I wonder what exactly they’re looking at. Because I don’t see empty nightlife.

I see neighborhood wine bars packed over one bottle, sold-out tastings and cocktail bars where people wait an hour for a seat. The drink still matters, but increasingly it’s part of something larger: the room, the menu, the DJ, the conversation.

If previous generations often went to bars because that’s simply where people went, Gen Z seems more likely to ask a different question first.

Is this worth leaving the house for?

Infante sees that selectiveness reflected in the marketplace.

“The motive is a little different,” he told me. “Zoomer’s interest is less driven by conspicuous consumption than seeking out specific experiences.”

When older generations describe Gen Z as drinking less, they often seem to hear less interested. But those aren’t synonymous. If anything, many of the Gen Z drinkers I interviewed sounded intensely interested in food, wine, cocktails and hospitality. They just weren’t interested in drinking indiscriminately.

Part of the reason that distinction gets lost may be simple nostalgia.

Corey Seemiller told me every generation tends to romanticize the version of young adulthood it experienced while quietly forgetting the parts that weren’t so glamorous.

“It’s how romanticizing works,” she said.

If you survived the reckless decisions, cheap beer and late nights and emerged with nothing worse than embarrassing stories, those stories become legends. The hangovers and genuinely bad decisions tend not to make the highlight reel.

To test how much of that nostalgia reflected an actual historical difference, I called alcohol historian Scott Martin.

Martin confirmed that alcohol really was more central to American social life.

“In terms of sociability, in terms of work cultures, it has been really central to sociability, particularly for men, and increasingly in the 20th century, I think, for women as well,” he said.

Drinking also functioned as a rite of passage, particularly as young adults reached legal drinking age.

But the social world surrounding that drinking was different, too.

“Our society has become much more of a surveillance society,” Martin said. Young people know that if photos or videos of a drunken night end up online, a future employer — or several million strangers — may eventually see them.

It’s one thing to wake up with a hangover. It’s another to wake up viral.

Add pandemic adolescence, expensive housing and stagnant wages, and different choices begin to look less mysterious than inevitable.

Martin described Gen Z as one of the first generations in recent memory to come of age facing markedly tighter economic circumstances.

“They’re just not going to do as well as their parents,” he said. Entry-level jobs pay relatively little, job security is tenuous and the math of going out matters. “If you’re going out and ordering those five drinks, some other bill is not getting paid, and that’s not sustainable.”

We often compare Gen Z’s present to older generations’ memories instead of their reality. That’s an impossible standard to meet.

“For younger people, they’re no longer living in the same kind of possibility that the older generations had,” Martin said. “I think they probably feel that the older generations just simply do not understand that, and perhaps they’re right, perhaps they don’t.”

In many ways, Seemiller told me, it’s more useful to think about the “Gen Z era” than Gen Z itself.

“Gen Z” implies something intrinsic about the people. “The Gen Z era” shifts the focus to the world surrounding them.

This is a generation that entered adulthood during a global pandemic after spending formative years online. We’re navigating historically expensive housing, student debt, inflation, stagnant entry-level wages and a social landscape with more entertainment options than previous generations had.

Spend ten minutes on TikTok and you’ll find creators dissecting natural wines, comparing probiotic sodas, reviewing coffee shops, ranking matcha cafés, explaining amaro, making elaborate cocktails and debating whether dirty martinis have finally replaced Aperol spritzes as the drink of the summer.

The curiosity is still there. It’s simply spread across a much wider landscape than alcohol alone.

When Pardilla was younger, drinking was simply folded into what being social looked like.

“Drinking was a sign of maturity, right?” she said. “That’s why a lot of college kids got wasted because you’re like, I’m able to drink now and you kind of go overboard.”

She thinks that idea has changed.

“I think [Gen Z] can be more selective and they have that opportunity to be more selective,” she said. “They’re more aware of the non-alcoholic options, so it’s not so much the getting wasted, but it’s more just having fun, not necessarily boozy fun. They’re just doing it for themselves.”

There have always been people who drank sparingly or didn’t drink at all. What’s changed, Pardilla said, is how visible and socially acceptable those choices have become.

Bars have responded. Many now treat their nonalcoholic menus not as an afterthought but as another place to show creativity.

“A lot of bars I’ve spoken to, they’re thinking very thoughtfully about how to create non-alcoholic cocktails that have a backbone,” Tseng said. “That have complex flavor profiles, that are not just juice and a splash of soda or a lime or something.”

I went down an Instagram rabbit hole looking at the work of Austin Hennelly at Kato, a Michelin-starred restaurant whose nonalcoholic drinks include things like a green strawberry daiquiri built with floral aperitif, wildflower honey, whey, oro blanco and lime.

Looking at it, I understood immediately why someone might happily pay cocktail prices for a drink without alcohol.

On the other hand, if your $16 “mocktail” is lemonade with soda and some mint leaves, we need to have a conversation.

Inside the beverage industry, Infante says one of the biggest misconceptions surrounding the explosion of nonalcoholic drinks is that they’re replacing alcohol altogether.

“The biggest buyer of non-alcoholic beverages,” he said, “are people who are drinkers.”

In other words, the people ordering N/A beer, spirit-free cocktails and alcohol-free sparkling wine are often the exact same people ordering IPAs, martinis and Champagne on different occasions.

They’re not abandoning one category. They’re moving fluidly between them.

Infante likes using a word coined by journalist H.L. Mencken nearly a century ago: omnibibulousness.

It essentially means someone who will drink anything: beer, wine, cocktails, coffee, sparkling water, nonalcoholic beer. Whatever fits the moment.

The modern beverage landscape has never offered more options, and consumers are responding accordingly. That isn’t evidence of alcohol’s demise. It’s evidence of abundance.

Gen Z isn’t refusing to socialize. We’re choosing among more ways to do it than previous generations had available.

Sometimes we’re drinking less because cocktails cost $22. Sometimes we’re alternating between alcoholic and nonalcoholic drinks, prioritizing food over booze, training for a marathon or simply staying home because rent is due next week.

The data tells us what changed. The reporting tells us why.

Those aren’t the decisions of a joyless generation. They’re the decisions of people living in 2026.

 

 

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Are you having sex? Do you want to be? 

These days, there are a million different possible answers to either question. Our culture has confused sex — a relatively uncomplicated, biological thing — with desire, which is an entirely different, much more complex can of worms just waiting to be opened. While the two frequently meet one another on the bed, on the floor or in a back alleyway behind that dive bar on Cherry Street after a few well-tequilas, both of these things are their own animals. It’s act versus thought, performance versus feeling. And yet, sex and desire have become irrevocably intertwined in our modern age, like two sweaty bodies, tangled together, realizing halfway through the deed that they don’t actually have as much in common as they initially thought.

In his first feature film in 12 years, “I Want Your Sex,” veteran counterculture director and perennial cool guy Gregg Araki is looking to have some fun in the technicolor midpoint where sex and desire meet. Sex has played a major role throughout Araki’s filmography, but never in quite such explicit terms as this. His characters — impulsive adolescents and young adults, slicing through their disaffection with sharp bursts of hormonal momentum — typically experience sex as a product of their furious youth. In their eyes, it’s an act of heady rebellion, more in line with the drugs and crime that permeate these underground, nihilistic worlds than it is with true romantic intimacy. So for Araki to dispose of all that to home in on sex itself, rather than building his characters and their worlds around it, there must be a good reason. 

In short: There are plenty. The ’90s-era nihilism that threaded so many of Araki’s films has taken a hard slant toward technological despondency. Many young people act as though life begins and ends with the digital ecosystem. And even if that fact might make you depressed, scrolling will deplete one’s cynicism until it’s replaced by another attention-grabbing post. The simple fact of the matter is that, with so much time spent solitary and online, there’s less time for sex — or even the possibility of it. 

And yet, sex (or at least the implication of it) is everywhere. OnlyFans is its own viable economy, with some users raking in millions per year from people who want to live the fantasy through a screen. Manufactured eroticism not only pays the bills but stops the scroll. And, of course, there’s the fact that anyone in the world can access hundreds of terabytes of porn in two measly seconds. It used to be that, if you wanted sex, you had to be forward about it, seek it out to some degree. Now, the proliferation of sex and sexuality has resulted in an ironic prudishness among digital natives, who, as a result of growing up with sex quite literally in the palm of their hands, abstain from intercourse and all the lessons and joy it has to offer. And it’s that reserve that Araki aims at with “I Want Your Sex.” 

Yet, for a film with such a bold, George Michael-ripping title, “I Want Your Sex” is curiously unerotic. The characters have sex, sure, but their coitus is so instantly excessive it veers on silly. But that’s also the kind of frisky fun Araki wants his viewers to remember, the outrageous sexual dynamics that are the byproduct of our wildest adventures — exploits that don’t always begin with carnal intentions. By steeping his film in modern hypersexuality, Araki fashions a humorous how-to guide on finding real, memorable sexual connection in a world where everything is designed to be sexy, but isn’t actually stimulating.

And if anyone knows stimulating, it’s hotshot mixed media artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde, in her second hoot-and-holler role this summer), who’s made a name for herself in the Los Angeles art scene with a dedication to provocation. Her work is suggestive and boundary-pushing, and she’s exactly the kind of person that neurotic Gen Z art scene sycophant Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) would love to work for. After a chemistry-rich interview in her office, Erika hires Elliot on the spot — strange, considering his complete lack of experience and the spate of promising applicants that preceded him in the interview process. But Elliot doesn’t question it. Only later, when he’s tasked with chewing gum to stick onto the outline of a massive portrait of a vulva, does he learn that Erika has a habit of sleeping with her interns.

This piece of gossip soon begins to cloud Elliot’s life and better judgement. His girlfriend, the uptight med student Minerva (Charli xcx, speaking in an accent no one’s ever heard before, with a name no one’s had in 60 years — brilliant), is as cold in the bedroom as she is in the operating room. But Elliot also has no idea how to verbalize his desires. He’s of a generation that overthinks and underperforms. That is, until a wide-ranging chat with Erika in her home results in a proposition: Erika would like to enter into a consensual, primarily physical boss-employee relationship with her inferior, and use their inverse power dynamic to rock Elliot’s world: leashes, S&M, dildos, spanking, the works. But Erika calls the shots. If she says it’s over, it’s over. And there’s nothing like a suspicious, sudden disappearance to pull the plug on a burgeoning sexual connection.

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Araki’s screenplay, written alongside his “Now Apocalypse” series co-writer Karley Sciortino, hops back and forth between the time before Erika’s vanishing and immediately after. Her disappearance is mystifying and arousing — for both Elliot and the police. Elliot is abruptly without his sensual supervisor, and his loss is seismic. Left to his own devices with a new sexual skillset, yet still pining for his boss, Elliot is unsure of how to move forward. And it’s this impasse where Araki fleshes out his clever, if not entirely unique, ideas about the innate limits of the libido.

For as much handwringing as there has been about Gen Z’s attitudes toward sex — and whether they’re having it at all, which is debatable — Araki is careful not to indict the youth. He is, after all, famously still babyfaced at 66, a physical spriteliness mirrored in his bright visual aesthetics and effervescent directorial tone. Araki is very much in touch with what young people enjoy and how they operate. He simply wants more for them. Youth is wasted on the young, after all, and Araki’s mission with “I Want Your Sex” is to make it patently clear that the clock will continue to tick whether they choose to get physical or not. So why not give it a try?

Araki posits that it’s fear holding people back; not just the fear of rejection, but a broader fear of the unknown. As much as I hate to parrot the sentiments of irritable older people who grumble about every kid getting a participation trophy, it is true that we live in a world that caters to our fragile egos. Every possible result for any conceivable situation is spelled out for us via a few quick internet searches. In a time when explainers and how-to guides exist for everything, influencers tell you how to dress and what to buy, and making a phone call has become a Herculean task for many, the margin for error has grown so slim it’s invisible. That also means the potential for surprise has dwindled, too. Humans have adopted an aversion to the casual risks that used to be a part of everyday life. Hazarding heartbreak and embarrassment is too dangerous. But the alternative, as Araki suggests, is an utterly boring existence, where, either way, you’ll always wonder “what if?”

But just depicting the pleasures of sex wouldn’t be enough to quell all that fear. Members of Gen Z might just fast forward through those scenes anyway, given that they want to see less sex onscreen as it is. Though Erika and Elliot’s intercourse is raucous and sultry, it’s their unpredictable relationship outside of the bedroom that keeps their fire — and the film’s madcap pacing — fueled. Elliot runs around LA doing Erika’s menial tasks until he drops everything at her beck and call. He upends his relationship with Minerva and screws up his best friendship with his roommate, Apple (Chase Sui Wonders). And he demolishes his own ego by throwing himself into something wild and capricious headfirst. He’s chasing the spark and expanding his horizons in the process. Great sex is no longer the goal, but rather a nice bonus.

To some, it may feel like Araki is flattening complex social mores and misunderstanding the anxieties behind this era of semi-celibacy. And at times, “I Want Your Sex” does sorely miss the sharp, scrappy bite of Araki’s early films, which had far more to say than his one-track-minded latest. But there’s an amiable flair to the way Araki conveys an old adage in a new way. It’s not the destination; it’s the journey — and if anyone knows this, it’s someone whose youth was spent pursuing sex, art and feeling at risk of mistake and failure. Sex is great, but what we remember most is what led up to it. We recall the excitement of shared energy, the potency of possibility, the spark so palpable it culminated in something intimate and naked. That’s the kind of animal electricity that points us toward our purest selves. When we fear the act of sex, we don’t experience the desire that leads up to it. And when we don’t have desire, we don’t truly live.

The post “I Want Your Sex” is deliberately unsexy appeared first on Salon.com.

Somewhere in the halcyon years of internet writing, I read — or, at least, I remember reading — a piece titled “Holden Caulfield was the first millennial dipsh*t.” I’m almost positive this piece existed, and the fact that I couldn’t find any mention of it in the sad, hollowed-out husk of the 2026 internet offers no proof that it didn’t. What did turn up are a newer generation’s takes on Holden, many of them unexpectedly harsh: He’s “the most insufferable character ever written,” “an entitled brat,” the “original ‘needs to touch grass’ guy,” a “clueless rich kid who’s never had to try,” a “self-important, spoiled and worthless little sh*t,” and “an emo narcissist with an inflated sense of his own self-worth.” 

Millennials were the first generation to anoint old Holden as “problematic” — a 2009 New York Times piece titled “Get a life, Holden Caulfield,” quoted educators who still taught “The Catcher in the Rye,” a book that turns 75 this year, and was once a standard in the English curriculum for grades 9–11. One educator said that, when she taught at a public charter school, “I had a lot of students comment, ‘I can’t really feel bad for this rich kid with a weekend free in New York City.’” A teacher who taught the book over 3 decades noted that “Holden’s passivity is especially galling and perplexing to many present-day students . . . “[T]hey do not have much sympathy for alienated antiheroes.” And one recalled a boy telling her, “We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’”

Reddit threads and Goodreads reviews suggest that Gen Z has similar smoke for Holden, which makes sense when you consider that for these kids, active-shooter drills are as much a part of grade school as multiplication tables, and creepy full-grown adults are sliding into their DMs asking for nudes. You can’t really blame them if their response to the self-absorbed internal monologues of an unreliable narrator is, Oh, boo hoo. Get some real problems. 

But they’ve got another bone to pick with Holden Caulfield: He is being used as a prop by performative men to impress those around him. “Among Gen Z, books have become a symbol not of intelligence but of ‘hotness,’ an accessory to be worn with a good outfit, wedged in the bottom of a designer bag or pretentious tote,” wrote one young woman in a piece for the Times of London. And she has some pitiless words for the callow young men toting “The Catcher in the Rye” pretentiously around: The book, she writes, “has become a go-to summer read for incel types who overly identify with the petulant protagonist Holden Caulfield . . . [W]henever [my friend] sees a man with J. D. Salinger in hand, she assumes he must still be at school: ‘It screams English literature A-level.’” Another piece, this one written by two Gen-Z women, posits that Holden himself is “the ultimate performative male.” 

This take is ungenerous but not surprising, given that one of the timeworn accusations against Holden Caulfield is hypocrisy: This guy calls everyone else phony, but he’s just as phony! It did make me wonder, though, whether Gen-Z readers who are assigned “The Catcher in the Rye” still get the same decontextualized introduction to the book as I and the rest of Gen X did. I don’t remember how old I was the first time I read the book, but each time I’ve returned to it as an adult, and there have been a few, I reach the end thoroughly baffled. Are students still introduced to “Catcher” as a novel about disaffection and anomie rather than one about grief, trauma and other things that were absolutely not talked about in Salinger’s day and rarely talked about in mine? And if so, why? 

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The idea that the art can be separated from the artist has never made sense to me — and the way it was foregrounded within the cultural discourse of #MeToo too often felt like a disingenuous avoidance of the clear reality that great art has been made by people who cause profound harm to others. “The Catcher in the Rye” is a text that is flatly impossible to decouple from its author: A book about trauma written in the midst of trauma by a traumatized man. This doesn’t mean that anyone reading the book needs to know Salinger’s whole deal, but both its creation (much of it was written during World War II, when Salinger served as a counterintelligence agent and was one of the first G.I.s to see the human toll at Dachau) and its wild commercial success (which repelled the author and led to his withdrawal from public life.)

As Mikki Halpin noted in these virtual pages following his death in 2010 at the age of 91, Salinger’s quasi-hermithood, among other things, gave cover to his relationships with inappropriately young women; his desire for privacy was inflated into mythology by a “literary establishment,” Halpin wrote, whose collective investment “in the fictional, reclusive Salinger . . . is a convenient cudgel with which to silence any discussion of Salinger’s personal life, particularly any revelation of unsavory truths.”

I would add that the Salinger myth also delayed a reckoning with his most famous character’s mental health. Gen Z men are not the first to use “The Catcher in the Rye” as a prop, after all: Years before I read it, I knew it only as the book Mark David Chapman was carrying when he assassinated John Lennon in 1980 and that, in 1981, was left in the hotel room of John Hinckley Jr. shortly before he attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan. (In 1989, it resurfaced in another high-profile shooting when Robert John Bardo murdered actor Rebecca Schaeffer, dropping his copy as he fled her Hollywood home.) There’s been plenty of skepticism about whether the latter two were Chapman copycats rather than murders actually inspired by the book. Either way, reluctance to associate either Salinger or his most indelible creation with crazed murderers meant keeping their own wounds at arms’ length. 

This is, in part, why I’m surprised at Gen Z’s dismissal of Holden Caulfield as a whiny white rich-kid hypocrite. This cohort has come of age having open conversations about mental health that were unthinkable as recently as 4 decades ago; they understand the way formative traumas burrow into the minds and bodies of those affected and eventually grow unmanageable. I can definitely understand why there might not be, let’s say, a surplus of empathy for a privileged young man carelessly and repeatedly squandering his expensive education. But brushing by consequential facts of Holden’s life — parents who treat him as an out-of-sight-out-of-mind problem, the death of his brother, the suicide of his classmate, a history of being molested by older men — to call him performative feels awfully heartless for a generation this conversant with how trauma works. 

Listen, I don’t know anyone who liked Holden Caulfield the first time they read the book, probably because he is not supposed to be particularly likable; Salinger wrote the book for adults, not teens. But reading “The Catcher in the Rye” as an adult, and again as the parent of a Holden-aged boy, has made me realize that if the circumstances in which young readers meet the character have been slow to change, and the lens on him informed largely by a calcified reputation of youth in revolt, that’s on the adults in the room who, like the adults in his life, can’t hear everything he’s telling us.   

The post How Holden Caulfield became a performative male appeared first on Salon.com.