American Girls (10 page)

At a time when the number one search on the Internet's biggest porn site was for “Teen,” it was disturbing to learn that it had simultaneously become a trend among some teenage girls to style themselves to look even younger than they were as a way of appearing “hot.” The “barely legal” aesthetic is a sort of subset of “aesthetic.” There are posts on Tumblr, Instagram, and other sites with hashtags such as #BabyDoll, #LittleGirl, and #DaddysGirl, tagged to images of girls and young women (whose ages can't always be determined) in photos where they seem to appear as sexualized little girls. Often such images include an older-looking man engaging in some kind of rough sex play with the girls. “I think it's weird,” said Sophia.

Some young feminists have argued that such photos, or any photos by girls of themselves in sexual poses, are a valid expression of female sexuality, and justifiable as the girls' own choice. “Choice feminism” maintains that whatever a woman chooses is inherently a feminist act. Twenty-three-year-old Canadian photographer Petra Collins became celebrated by the fashion industry for her provocative photos of teenage girls, some of them nudes. “I think people aren't comfortable with feminine sexuality,” Collins told
Oyster
magazine in 2012, when she was nineteen. “I find people are uncomfortable when a woman is expressing her sexuality instead of repressing it. In our society, nude or sexually suggestive images of women are automatically seen as negative and objectifying…We need to make room for the female view of sex and accept it. Until then we are going to be uncomfortable with photos like mine.” Interestingly, Collins speaks of “women” here, not girls. She doesn't address questions of exploitation surrounding images of girls who are underage; and then there is the question of who or what exactly defines “the female view of sex.”

And again, the question of what constitutes child porn necessarily presents itself. When kids have easy access to porn and are watching porn, it's not all that surprising that they are also posting what might be identified as porn, child porn. In 2014, The Daily Dot reported that Vine, the video-sharing service on which users share six-second looping clips, banned “sexually explicit material” after reports that children were posting sexually charged videos of themselves on the site.

“One user,” The Daily Dot said, “identified as an 11-year-old girl, posted a series of nude videos in which she performs sexual acts alone. Another, who appeared to be between 9- and 12-years-old, repeatedly exposed herself while describing sexual intercourse in exchanges with someone identifying himself as a 32-year-old male. Another profile, dedicated to aggregating sexual and nonsexual videos of children, contained over 1,700 Vines and was followed by 964 users. The comments sections for the videos were equally troubling, loaded with explicit sexual language and frequented by Vine users who were clearly adults. Many attempted to lure the minors off Vine and into private chat rooms.”

In a horrifying twist, it's the justification of some pedophiles and child pornographers that their victims “want” to perform sexually in front of cameras. In 2015, sixty-six-year-old Ian Wraith was arrested in Fareham, Hants, England, for running a pedophile website with more than 1.6 million pictures and videos of children with “every single indecent image possibly in existence,” he reportedly boasted to investigators. According to the
Daily Mirror,
“He even claimed he didn't believe all of them were indecent—instead saying the abused children were happy to be in front of the camera. During an interview he attempted to defend his actions, telling cops: ‘You wouldn't believe what these kids get up to when they're on their own with a camera.' ”

“Girls think it's cool” to present an underage aesthetic “ 'cause it's supposed to be, like, shocking,” Sophia said.

The girls said they didn't think most girls who posted provocative photos in this style were trying to elicit sexual encounters with adults or even boys.

“They're just trying to get more likes,” Sophia explained. “It's like a cool girl's way of being like the Kardashians.”

It was another essential principle of marketing: sex sells. And so if building a social media presence is similar to building a brand, then it makes a warped kind of sense that girls—exposed from the earliest age to sexualized images of women and girls—are promoting their online selves with sex, following the example of the most successful social media celebrities.

“Some people in our grade post pictures of their butt and boobs in a bikini and you see everything. It's totally common,” Victoria said. She thumbed through her Instagram account, pulling up pictures of girls they knew posing in bikinis, lounging next to pools, Kim Kardashian–style. “This is a girl in seventh grade—she's like twelve,” she added.

“Sixth-graders have more mature Instagrams than we did in sixth grade,” Riley said. “Sixth-graders are posing sexy now—it evolved, it's getting younger.”

“This girl, she's really popular,” said Sophia, pulling up another girl's Instagram page. “See how her butt is all perfect? It's all editing. People edit their butts on Instagram and do all these thot,” or slut, “poses. There's a butt app, a skinny app, a face app—”

“She
obviously
edits herself so her side looks way skinnier,” Melinda said. “And her pictures are…well. I don't even
know
her—she seems like a
perfectly
nice person—but what I notice about her is that she posts selfies of her butt.”

“But sometimes I think girls post those kind of pictures because they're proud of their bodies,” Victoria countered. “Body-shaming is a big issue. A lot of people will do, like, the ‘confident body challenge.' ”

“Body-shaming” refers to the way the bodies of girls and women, especially, are judged for not conforming to an ideal, usually a thin ideal; but women seen as overly thin don't escape body-shaming, either. The fact that famous women's bodies are scrutinized so intensely in the media and on social media has been much discussed in the media and online. Celebrities such as Selena Gomez, Lena Dunham, and Demi Lovato have all spoken out against body-shaming.

And it has been a central theme in the new wave of feminism that has ignited among girls and young women. Rejecting the pressure to be unrealistically thin and the demands of “thigh gap”—a trend which says that in order to be considered attractive you have to have a space between your thighs; and now there is “thighbrow,” which judges the amount of definition a woman has in the crease that appears at her leg and hipbone when she sits, kneels, or squats—they've been drawn to the “body positive” movement which arose in the 2010s and is committed to redefining standards of beauty and physical worthiness in response to a rigid, Western ideal of a white, thin body type. (It's a grandchild of the similar, albeit clumsily named, “fat acceptance movement” of the 1960s.)

The “body confidence challenge,” a social media “challenge” which appeared in the 2010s, encourages girls and women to post pictures of themselves which show off their bodies as a way of expressing their confidence and pride in their size and shape. #fatkini became a hashtag for photos of curvy girls posting pictures of themselves in bikinis.

“I remember one picture where people were a little bit alarmed by it,” Victoria said. “It was a girl we know on Instagram, she had a bra on but she wasn't wearing a shirt. She wrote in her caption how she was beginning to feel more confident about her body and learning to not care about what people think. I guess I did like the message. I'm happy she's accepting herself—and she should, she's pretty; and even if she isn't pretty, she should still feel confident about herself. I don't think anyone should feel ashamed of their body or posting a picture.”

Sophia scoffed. “Girls post pictures of their bodies and say they're body positive and everyone's like, You're so beautiful,” she said. “But they're
not
body confident—they're Photoshopping their bodies and editing their pictures. They
say
they're confident in their bodies, which is totally ironic—if you have to post a picture of yourself on Instagram to feel confident, then you're
not.
”

Victoria considered that a moment. “Well, it's supposed to show you're confident,” she said. And then: “But actually it makes me feel less confident when I see those girls. I'm like, Oh, I'm not as skinny as that, oh my God, she's so pretty. It makes me compare myself sometimes if it's a really skinny girl. I wish I looked like her.”

“It's like, Oh, look at me, I love food, I'm body confident,” Riley said, “and here I am eating this hamburger and I look really skinny doing it.”

They laughed.

“I think it's just so
boys
can look at it—it's all for boys,” Sophia said.

“I don't think it's always
consciously
for guys,” said Riley. “But if guys weren't on Instagram I don't think I'd care that much about it. A like from a guy is definitely bigger than a like from a girl.”

“How you look is all anybody cares about anymore,” Sophia insisted, becoming a bit agitated. “Being beautiful nowadays is seen as way better than being smart. It's terrible. Like if you're a supermodel on Instagram, everyone loves you. Like I do this, too, so I can't judge: if I find a supermodel on Instagram, I'll comment like, I love you so much. Even though they haven't done anything to help the world and they're literally just standing there looking pretty. People love them just 'cause they're beautiful. And like, being smart—no one cares about that. If people aren't pretty nowadays, they're done with their life. Like, Oh my God, I'm not pretty, I can't live life.

“The new word is ‘goals,' ” Sophia went on. “Everyone says ‘goals.' You find a really pretty girl on Instagram and you're like,
‘Goals.'
Goals to have my eyebrows like hers, goals to have my lips like hers, goals to have my hair like hers. You'll see on Instagram comments like, ‘My goal is to look like her.' Think about it. That's a
goal
? No one cares about being smart anymore. If you're beautiful everyone will love you.”

The other girls had stopped eating the brownies.

“But it's fun to post really hot pictures of yourself even though you don't look like that in real life,” Sophia said with a toss of her head. “ 'Cause when I take a really pretty selfie, people will be like, Oh, gorgeous.”

“I think, before the digital age,” says Michael Harris, the author of
The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection,
“girls had more opportunities to develop a rich interior life. At some point they were experiencing solitude. They had time to daydream or write in diaries or just think. Now, they're online most of the time and a lot of what they're doing there is comparing themselves or being compared. Online life is a toxic enabler of the desire to compare.

“And girls are asked to compare themselves in a way boys just aren't,” Harris says. “They compare the way they look, they compare who has more likes and followers. Teen girls that I talked to,” while doing research for his book in Toronto, “they were often obsessed with whether someone had followed them back on Facebook or Twitter, whereas boys could not care less.”

“The idea that girls are putting pictures of themselves up on Instagram, Photoshopping and comparing themselves to celebrities and models and other idealized images of women, is very sad to me,” says the writer and filmmaker Jean Kilbourne. “This was something I was talking about in 1979 with
Killing Us Softly,
but social media has only helped make it worse than it was forty years ago.”
Killing Us Softly,
Kilbourne's groundbreaking documentary series, explored how media and advertising establish standards of beauty to which women feel pressured into conforming.

“Social media creates a heightened sense of competition and inferiority,” Kilbourne says. “Girls are bombarded with images all day long and end up feeling, I'm never going to look like that. I think that now girls end up comparing themselves to idealized images of their peers as well. If it's your peers, then there's an even bigger sense of shame of not being able to look like that girl I actually know—even if it's a Photoshopped version of that girl.

“The biggest problem is that girls are only being given one way of thinking about what is beautiful and sexy and it's a very porn-star, clichéd way,” Kilbourne says. “There's a much wider, broader variety of choices of how to be sexy than the Victoria's Secret way. To say ‘I'm liberated, I'm empowered'—but not really if it's simply following a stereotypical conception of sexiness. It's hardly an authentic choice. I think a lot of it has to do with porn,” she adds. “The Internet has brought us ready access to pornography—very brutal, misogynistic, violent porn is a lot of girls' main form of sex education.”

“Sex is everywhere. Everything is sexualized,” says Kim Goldman, the director of the Santa Clarita Valley Youth Project, a counseling service for teens that reaches about 23,000 kids in fourteen schools in its district. “Of course girls want to emulate this stuff. Girls talk about feeling like they have to be like what they see on TV. They talk about body-image issues and not having any role models. They all want to be like the Kardashians. Kendall Jenner posts bikini shots when she's sixteen and gets ten thousand likes, and girls see that's what you do to get attention. We're seeing depression, anxiety, feelings of isolation.

“We had girls selling oral sex for ten and fifteen dollars in the bathroom at a school,” Goldman says. “We have kids who've had sex with people they meet on Chatroulette,” an online site where users can video chat with strangers. “At one of the junior highs we work with, we found out there were a few kids having an online orgy. They all signed in to a video chat room.” One of their parents walked in on it.