A survey of 100,000 college students from anonymous platforms Yik Yak and Sidechat asked about their sex lives. The results reveal something fascinating and deeply uncomfortable about what we’ve become. One in three Gen Z adults — 35% — admit they’ve texted or scrolled social media during sex.
Twenty-four students went further: they actually answered texts from their mothers mid-deed. The survey didn’t ask if they finished the conversation or what mom wanted. It just confirmed that for two dozen college students, responding to a parental text took priority over the person they were actively having sex with.
The Roommate Situation Is Equally Revealing
Privacy used to be non-negotiable for intimacy. Among surveyed students, 23% have had sex with a roommate in the room. That’s nearly one in four. The follow-up statistic makes it worse: 8% did so with their roommate awake. Over 8,000 students decided their need for sex outweighed any concern for the conscious person feet away from them.
This isn’t just about desperation or lack of space. It’s about a generation that has fundamentally different boundaries around privacy, attention, and what deserves to be protected from distraction or intrusion. If you can scroll TikTok during sex and have sex while your roommate watches Netflix, what’s actually sacred anymore?
What Happened to Undivided Attention
There’s a specific psychological phenomenon at play here. The compulsion to check your phone during sex isn’t about the sex being bad or the relationship being weak. It’s about your brain being rewired to seek constant stimulation and validation from your device. Research shows that heavy social media users develop patterns of checking their phones hundreds of times per day, creating neural pathways that demand continuous engagement.
When you’re conditioned to check your phone every few minutes throughout your entire waking life, your brain doesn’t make an exception just because you’re naked with another person. The urge to see if someone liked your story or texted you back doesn’t disappear during intimacy — it intensifies because you’re being forced to ignore it.
The students answering mom’s texts aren’t choosing their mothers over their partners in some Freudian nightmare. They’re choosing the dopamine hit of responding to a notification over the discomfort of leaving it unread. Their phones have trained them to prioritize immediate digital engagement over everything else, including physical intimacy.
The Generational Divide in Digital Boundaries
For people over 35, the idea of checking your phone during sex feels fundamentally wrong in ways that are hard to articulate. It’s not just rude — it’s a violation of intimacy, attention, and respect. You wouldn’t stop mid-conversation to take a call from someone else. You certainly wouldn’t pause sex to scroll Instagram.
But Gen Z grew up with smartphones as constant companions. The average Gen Z adult spends 5-6 hours daily on social media. They’ve never known a world where immediate digital response wasn’t expected. Their entire social structure runs through screens. When mom texts, you respond — always, immediately, regardless of context. The idea of waiting, even during sex, creates genuine anxiety.
This isn’t about judgment. It’s about understanding that a generation raised with phones as extensions of their bodies has different instincts about when disconnection is appropriate. What older generations experience as basic courtesy and presence, younger people experience as deprivation and FOMO.
What This Says About Connection
The broader implication extends beyond sex. If one-third of young adults can’t disconnect from their phones during one of the most intimate human experiences, what does that mean for every other interaction? How many conversations happen with phones face-up on the table, one person half-engaged, ready to pivot the moment a notification arrives?
The Yik Yak survey, which draws from 2.23 million quarterly users representing 15% of all U.S. undergraduates, captures patterns that traditional research misses. Anonymity reveals truths people won’t admit in formal studies. These students aren’t outliers — they’re representative of normal behavior in a generation that has never experienced sustained, uninterrupted human connection without digital interference.
The students having sex while their roommates watch Netflix aren’t uniquely shameless. They’re products of an environment where private space is scarce, digital connection is constant, and the boundaries between public and private have dissolved. When you’ve spent your entire adolescence sharing everything online, physical privacy becomes less essential.
The Phone Always Wins
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: for a growing number of people, the phone is winning. Not because they consciously choose it over human connection, but because their nervous systems have been trained to treat digital engagement as urgent and human presence as optional. You can be physically present while being completely absent, and increasingly, that’s the default state.
The 24 students who texted their mothers back during sex represent the extreme end of a spectrum most people exist on. How many times have you checked your phone during dinner with friends? During a movie with your partner? During a work meeting where you’re supposed to be fully engaged? The behavior is the same — just the context shifts.
Gen Z isn’t ruining intimacy by checking their phones during sex. They’re revealing what’s already happened to all of us. They’re just more honest about it and less ashamed. The rest of us pretend we have better boundaries, but we’re checking notifications at stoplights, in bathrooms, and moments after waking up. The phone has already won. College students are just living in the aftermath without pretending otherwise.