American Girls (11 page)

On another spring day in Montclair, kids from the middle schools were walking along Valley Road on their way home. There were girls and boys, clusters of friends talking and laughing, phones in hands, some looking at their screens. There was a group of boys who started laughing raucously as they catcalled some passing girls:

“Hey, girl, you look good.”

“Yo, you're fine! Let's hang out sometime.”

“Why you not smiling, hottie?”

The girls mostly ignored the boys, some giggling or ducking their heads.

“Oh, she got a
big
booty,” a boy said, loud, stopping in his tracks for effect.

I met Riley, Victoria, and Sophia at Java Love on Bellevue Avenue (Melinda was home sick that day). The coffee shop's in a Tudor-style building not far from the Upper Montclair train station. There were benches outside where you could sit in the shade. The girls got scones and cookies inside the store and joined me there. I told them about the catcalling I'd just seen and asked if they'd ever seen that before.

“It's mostly the popular boys that are like that,” Sophia said, chewing her chocolate-chip cookie.

“It's Danny and the popular guys,” said Riley, breaking apart a scone. “They think they have control over everyone—like, they're powerful, they're attractive.”

“They smoke weed and go to parties,” Sophia said, further describing this type of boy. “They hook up and put pictures of themselves drinking and smoking on Instagram.” She scrolled through the app on her phone and held up photos of boys holding bongs, smoke coming out of their mouths; boys grinning, holding bags of weed; boys standing with their shorts down around their “V-line,” or lower abdominal muscles.

“They call each other ‘faggot' and ‘gay,' ” Riley said. “This guy group, they have a group chat, and they call each other ‘gay' if they don't respond to texts. One of my really close friends, he feels stuck in this friend group with all these guys. He doesn't know how to get out of it 'cause then they'll call him ‘faggot.' ”

In the year when same-sex marriage was legalized, it was disheartening to hear that some boys were still using homophobic slurs. But apparently it wasn't uncommon. In
Dude, You're a Fag,
published in 2007, C. J. Pascoe wrote of the persistent homophobia she saw in a racially diverse, working-class high school—a problem, she said, in her 2012 preface, which only intensified when the behavior moved online, with the proliferation of social media and the “rapidity and replicability of…the fag discourse.”

“What they do to boys is exactly what they do to girls,” Sophia observed. “They put them down for their
sex.
Like they think they're the best 'cause they're the powerful boys and everybody else is, like, lower than them.”

“Some boys are nice,” Victoria said, sipping on a water bottle. “They'll talk to you just normally. But then if you act like you actually want to know them and be friends, they might tell everyone you're thirsty.”

“If a girl is constantly talking to them, they'll be like, Hop off my dick, stop sucking me,” Sophia said.

“That's like
really
disrespectful,” Victoria said. “It's not that we wanna suck your
dicks,
we really just want to talk to you—we just want to be friends.”

They discussed how some girls they knew seemed to play up to boys. “Girls our age feel really strongly about being strong and not caving in to peer pressure from boys,” Victoria said, “but you'll see that girl who will literally change her personality for one boy, or, like, try to look better for a boy.”

The other girls nodded.

It was perplexing to hear that, more than two decades since the “girl power” movement, some American girls still felt this anxious need for male approval. What they were describing was startlingly similar to how girls were advised to ingratiate themselves to boys by a column in the
Ladies' Home Journal
in the 1930s. The column, “designed to teach respectable girls the rules of proper socializing,” wrote Grace Palladino in
Teenagers: An American History,
urged girls “to remember that ‘boys love to run the show and be it.' In fact, if a girl had brains…she would figure out just what a boy liked in a date and adjust her personality accordingly!”

“Completely smart people will act dumb around guys,” Victoria said. “Girls think boys like it when they act dumb. I think they get it from movies and TV. Like when I was eight, I really liked
Wizards of Waverly Place,
” a Disney Channel show which aired from 2007 to 2012. “I thought Selena Gomez”—who starred as a wise-cracking wizard girl who lives in the suburbs—“was perfect and I would just look at a cover of a magazine and think, That's how I should look. And then when I got older I realized Selena Gomez's character was the dumb one and her brother Justin was the smart one. It was so annoying. They were always making fun of her for doing badly in school. Even her dad. But like she had all these cute boyfriends and she wore cute clothes, so I thought she was perfect.”

“Hannah Montana acted really dumb, too,” Sophia said. “But now I like Miley. She rebelled from her good-girl role and turned amazing.”

“There's this girl in our school,” Riley said with a smile, “she dyed her hair for a guy.” Pastel hair dye was a popular trend. “He said he thought it was cool, so she dyed her hair blue.” They laughed.

“Sometimes I feel like all the posting” on social media “is just for guys and it's so dumb to do something just to impress a guy,” Riley said. “Like showing who you're with in your photos—you just post that so the guys will think you're friends with certain people, like pretty girls or guys
they're
friends with.”

“And girls post pictures of themselves kissing other girls even though they're straight,” Sophia said. Why? “They do it because it's hot for guys.”

I asked them why girls cared so much about what boys thought.

“Because everybody wants a boyfriend,” Riley said. “It makes you popular. You're more popular if you even have guys as
friends.
”

“Girls think a lot about boys, to be honest,” Sophia said. “A lot of girls consider having a boyfriend a really important part of teenagers' lives. I don't want to be the only person without a boyfriend,” she added. “I wanna have my first kiss. It's what a lot of people are thinking about around this time. First kiss is a big, big deal.”

“Everyone wants their first kiss over with so they're not considered, like, a prude,” Riley said. “You have to have your first kiss over by high school or you're a prude.”

“Apparently,” said Sophia. “That's what everyone aims for, is to kiss or hook up. The new thing is, like, having ‘a thing.' You don't say, Me and John are dating—that sounds thirsty. It's, Me and John, we have a thing. It means you go to other people's houses and hook up and post stuff together on social media.”

I asked them if boys and girls ever went out on dates, like to a movie.

They laughed. “Nooooo.”

“That's too awkward,” Victoria said.

“Dating is just for other people to
know
that you're dating,” said Sophia. “People post about it all the time. Like kissing photos.”

“People put pictures of themselves with their boyfriend on Snapchat,” Riley said.

“Pictures of, like, a couple kissing, hugging, posing with each other on Instagram,” said Sophia. “And other people will comment, like, ‘relationships goals!' and ‘OTP' ”—meaning “one true pairing,” or an idolized couple.

“Dating now is just to hook up and take selfies,” said Riley.

I asked Riley if her relationship with Danny had been like that.

“Yeah, kind of,” she said. “And we hung out. We went over to each other's houses. I had sleepovers at Danny's house,” she added with a shy smile. “His parents made us breakfast and brought it up to his room.”

The other girls were silent.

Riley laughed, embarrassed.

“I heard some moms at a bat mitzvah talking about their kids having a boy-girl sleepover,” Victoria said. “And they were acting like it was so cute. My mom and dad would never let me. Not that I am dating anyone,” she added. The girls all said they had heard of parents who allowed their daughters to have a sleepover with a boyfriend.

“It's the parents that say they ‘trust' their daughters to ‘make their own decisions,' ” Sophia said, doing lots of air quotes. “They say it's being ‘feminist.' They think their kids will think they're cool. But a lot of parents don't get that it's putting a lot of pressure on their children. It's like a lot of pressure to be allowed to make all your own decisions, you know? And we're just kids, and we don't always know what's the right thing to do.”

Riley was silent.

I asked her if she had decided how to respond to the boy who had asked for nudes.

“I don't know,” she said, shrugging. “I just don't want him to think he won.”

Sophia made a face. “No, you really don't.”

The girls went off together, smiling and chatting, down Valley Road.

She felt the most real when she was being filmed. Alone in her bedroom, sitting in front of the camera, talking to her fans, this was when she became the real Amanda. “People like it when you're real and raw,” she said, perched on a kitchen stool at her family's house in Huntington Beach. Raw, she said, like in her “TMI” video when she admitted to never having had a boyfriend, and revealed that her OTP was Chuck and Blair from
Gossip Girl,
and she confessed to being afraid of death and spiders; but she would never reveal her weight. “It's amazing how u don't answer the ‘how much you weight' question,” commented one of her YouTube fans; “it's really respectful to the over-weighted people. She doesn't want anyone to feel insecure.” “Yeah I agree,” another commenter said, “she's just so considerate and sweet.”

Her fans knew who she really was. “Amanda is my idol!” said one of her 1.5 million YouTube followers. “AMANDA IS MY QUEEN,” said one of her 1 million followers on Instagram. “AND THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO STOP IT.” The people on the other side of the screen saw the true Amanda Steele (her real name, which I use with permission), the fourteen-year-old beauty guru behind MakeupbyMandy24. When she traveled from this side of the lens to the other, it was as if through palace doors, to a place where she was no longer a child, but a queen. “SHE IS EVERYTHING.” From here, where things could be drab and dull and tedious, to there, where it was permanently bright and as colorful as the set of a Disney show, she became the girl she always wanted to be—that everybody wanted to be—that cute and upbeat, bouncy, sassy, little bit awkward, little bit goofy girl, always meticulously groomed and stylish and funny and sweet, and thin; but not
too
funny, not in an off-putting way. She was the “perfect” American girl, at least in one version embodied by the stars of social media.

“Be yourself,” Amanda answered a fan who asked about her favorite quote.

It wasn't an easy journey, crossing over into the LED-lit Promised Land on the other side of the lens. It was every bit as grueling as a trek into outer space—becoming famous, Internet famous, just for being “you.” It required preparation and planning and hours of practice and implementation—the perfection of the art of selfies, among other things—and something else; something a little bit special, something even she couldn't understand, and didn't want to analyze, lest it slip away. “I don't even like to call it fame,” she said. “I just like to upload cool pictures. I'm just, like, a normal girl.”

Kids started having their own cameras, en masse, in the 1960s. Kodak Instamatics, which came out in 1963, were inexpensive ($16) and easy to use, durable and small, the perfect size to fit in a child's pocket or the upper tray of a footlocker on its way to summer camp. The Instagram logo, in a conscious nod, echoes the look of the early Instamatics—a dark stripe on top, metallic on the bottom, with a round flat lens and viewfinder in the middle. The logo was nostalgic, also a confident announcement of how this new mobile app would continue to popularize photography as successfully as its symbolic predecessor. More than 50 million Instamatics were sold between 1963 and 1970, making it then the best-selling camera of all time. Between its launch in 2010, by two male Silicon Valley software engineers who met at Stanford, and 2015, Instagram gained over 400 million active users worldwide, more people than live in America, according to its own statistics.

Instamatics were also one of the first cameras marketed directly to girls. In 1932, Kodak had come out with a camera for boys, its Boy Scout Brownie (a variation on its popular Brownie camera, introduced in 1900), appealing to male youths who fancied themselves living adventurous lives as campers and explorers, near heroic lives which deserved documentation. With the Instamatic, Kodak realized it had a vast new demographic to target: teen girls. But the pitch was very different. It said that girls could use cameras to become popular.

Teenagers of both sexes were experiencing the rapid cultural changes under way in the '60s, but the lives of girls especially were transforming. They were more sexually liberated than girls in the past, as well as more sexualized by the media and advertising, and they were more independent. More of them either worked part-time or had access to their parents' disposable incomes in a strong economy—they had money to spend, with which they were buying more of the clothes and makeup that were relentlessly marketed to them. You can almost hear the unrepentant sexist Don Draper, of
Mad Men,
working up the Kodak pitch: “Why do girls want cameras? They're sentimental, they're vain, they want to be popular, they want to show off their pretty clothes and who they're friends with. They want to make memories. And they want to look good in those memories.”

Kodak sold its Instamatics to girls in ads infused with an aura of nostalgia (which Draper once described as “delicate, but potent”). An ad in
Seventeen
in 1968 urged girls to buy Instamatics before they returned to high school after summer vacation:
“What you're going back to deserves a great camera,”
said the tagline. “You can just imagine what's coming up,” read the copy. “Homecoming parade. Games. Dances. Old friends and new faces. It makes sense to have a great camera. And it makes sense for it to be one of our Kodak Instamatic cameras…It's one back-to-school outfit you really ought to have.” It was as if a girl could relate to a technological device only if it offered the same advantages as a miniskirt.

The layout for the ad was accompanied by two candid-looking shots, one of a pretty blond girl dressed as a cheerleader; she's surrounded by five basketball-player boys after a championship game. Their proud coach wields a trophy; they won. The girl is kissing one of the boys on the cheek; he seems to be the team's cute captain. The other photo shows the girl with this same boy; now it's prom night and she's wearing a virginal white dress and gloves. Her hair is in ringlets, a corsage is pinned to the strap of her gown; she's beaming. The boy, standing beside her, is looking suave in a white tux.

The message: cameras were tools for creating an idealized self, and pictures were a kind of self-promotion. And the ideal girl (in Kodak's view, a pretty, blond white girl) would have the attention of boys. If only everybody could see how popular she was.

Instagram gave girls that opportunity. The way many girls use the app is not so different from how girls have been taught to use photography for decades. The difference now lies in the chance to show the whole world one's beauty, boyfriends, special moments, and clothes, not just the other kids in school. And with that broadcasting power comes an enormous thrill: the chance to become not just popular, but actually famous. Famous for just being you.

“I think it's more of a challenge for you to go on a reality show and get people to fall in love with you for being you,” Kim Kardashian told Barbara Walters on her
10 Most Fascinating People
special. Walters didn't point out that reality shows are actually scripted entertainment, and Kim didn't mention it, either.

In the year between when I met Amanda Steele in Huntington Beach and when I sat down to write about her, she had become a bona fide social media star. When I spoke to her in 2014, she had a solid online following as a YouTube beauty guru and up-and-coming Instagram “It” girl; cosmetic and clothing companies were asking her to do endorsements on her YouTube channel. A year later, she was walking the red carpet at the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards in the company of Miley Cyrus, Kim Kardashian, and Nicki Minaj. Amanda was there as the “social media correspondent” for CoverGirl makeup.

It was in 2014 that the mainstream media seemed to catch up to the fact that teenagers were creating their own celebrities, and no longer looking solely to Hollywood or the music industry for people to admire and emulate; they were finding them in their phones. In 2014,
Variety
ran an eye-opening headline: “Survey: YouTube Stars More Popular Than Mainstream Celebs Among U.S. Teens.” The top five most influential figures in the survey among American teenagers, ages thirteen to eighteen, did not include Jennifer Lawrence or Taylor Swift or, for that matter, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, but were YouTubers.

Teenagers surveyed cited the relatability and accessibility of social media personalities as the main reason for their appeal, as well as their lack of filter. “You feel like you know them,” said Sophia, the Montclair girl, “ 'cause they're doing the same thing we're doing”—that is, using social media in a way that adults and most celebrities did not: like teenagers. “Celebrities are on their own little pedestal,” said Victoria, her friend. “They're not taking a vlogging camera and being like, Hi, guys, I'm gonna get a smoothie.” When I told them I had interviewed Amanda Steele, Sophia became giddy: “She's my
idol.
”

It became clear it was not only clueless but rather dangerous for the media to dismiss the relevance of these new teen idols, in 2015, when an editor for Eonline.com, Seija Rankin, posted a story in which she joked about how she had never heard of many of the nominees at that year's Teen Choice Awards, all Internet celebrities. “Eva Gutowski? Lele Pans? Joey Graceffa? Felix Kjellberg? Are those even real people?” Rankin wrote (unfortunately spelling Vine star Lele Pons's name incorrectly).

The reaction on social media was swift and fierce. “If this ‘article' is representative of @eonline, I fear for the brand's future,” tweeted Tyler Oakley, YouTuber, LGBTQ rights activist, and unofficial grand pooh-bah of all things teen social media. “Hi @eonline! My name is Joey Graceffa, YouTube creator and
New York Times
best-selling author, so nice to meet you!” tweeted Graceffa, whose 2015 memoir,
In Real Life: My Journey to a Pixelated World,
told of his journey from bullying victim to social media celebrity (a recurring theme among Internet stars). And then there were the fans who came out in droves in support of their online gods, with all the acerbity teenagers can summon. “@seijawrites [Rankin's Twitter handle] I doubt anyone actually knows and likes you? These YouTubers have millions of subscribers and you have 486 followers,” tweeted @likelionz.

I'd heard from girls how important social media personalities were in their world, so I wanted to meet one and ask her how she had pulled off this coveted feat, and why: What had inspired her to try for Internet fame, and what effect was it having on her young life? I contacted Amanda Steele after seeing her on Instagram, and one summer day found myself driving to her house in Huntington Beach.

Huntington Beach is a town of some 200,000 people, about thirty-five miles south of Los Angeles. It sits on a magnificent 9.5-mile stretch of beach against which the waves of the Pacific ceaselessly beat, famously making it a great place to surf. The town, which trademarked the moniker “Surf City USA,” hosts the annual U.S. Open of Surfing, the largest surfing competition in the world. People in Huntington Beach wear flip-flops year-round; it has a laid-back beach town feel.

The neighborhood where Amanda lived was full of streets lined with tall, skinny palms and modest homes with dry, dry lawns, casualties of the California drought. There were boats in the driveways and more American flags flying than you see at a Republican fund-raiser. Overhead the air was crisscrossed with telephone wires. It was surprising to learn that this was where she lived, when her Instagram pictures seemed to depict something more glamorous. She often appeared beside a backyard pool, dressed in the latest fashions, wearing cool sunglasses. “We're failing at life,” lamented a commenter under one such picture, full of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). “MY OBSESSION WITH HER IS SO UNHEALTHY HELP ME,” said another. “House tour!” begged others.

Amanda lived in a white one-story house with an interior which resembled the homes on sitcoms like
Everybody Loves Raymond;
it was a comfortable American home in a lot of brown and beige, with a tiny round swimming pool on the bright back patio. Her father, Gerry Steele, answered the door. He was barefoot, wearing a T-shirt and cargo shorts. He looked like Mark Harmon, the actor who played the befuddled stepfather in
Freaky Friday
(the 2003 version, starring Lindsay Lohan). He was a high school history teacher, he said, and Amanda's mother, who was at work, was an attorney.

“She's always had that drive,” he said of Amanda, “even when she was a little girl.” He took from the wall a framed photograph of Amanda at about age eight, proudly showing it off; she was wearing a team uniform and hurling a softball, her face full of determination, grease streaks under her eyes. “This is my favorite picture of her,” said her father.

“Now,” he said, carefully putting the picture back, “I mean, you have no idea of the extent of her empire. Everything she touches turns to gold. I tell you, her fans even recognize
me.
They want
my
autograph. They'll say, ‘There goes Amanda's dad.' ” He chuckled.

Amanda was waiting for her father to finish talking. She wore a curling smile. She was a slender girl with shiny, shoulder-length dark hair and pale blue eyes. She wore short black shorts, a black crop top, and a dark, patterned kimono, like butterfly wings. Her nails were long and cobalt blue. She had creamy white skin (“Here's How to Get Flawless Skin Like Amanda Steele,” said a post on MTV.com) and was wearing a lot of makeup. She had none of the bounciness seen in her YouTube videos; she seemed preternaturally poised.

“Disney,” her father went on, “paid her
significantly
more to upload her interstitial,” a kind of ad, “onto her YouTube channel than to play it on TV—which shows you that they feel they get more bang for the buck on social media. You know, there are TV-star kids out there that are trying to break into social media. I see a whole paradigm shift—
everything's
moving toward social media,” he said. He spoke with the enthusiasm of someone who was excited by the vicissitudes of history.

“When you're a YouTuber,” Amanda said, trying to break in, “it's a different kind of connection with the fans—”

“It's interactive,” her father interjected, “ 'cause they can
comment
—”

“They also feel like they're your best friend,” Amanda explained. “I think that's why so many people come to the meet-ups”—meaning events where fans can come to meet online stars, typically at shopping malls. “They feel like they know me.”

I asked her when it all took off.

“A little bit over a year ago,” she said. “I signed with Big Frame, my network,” a multichannel YouTube network which brings together YouTubers and advertisers for mutual business opportunities; in 2014 it was acquired by the digital media division of DreamWorks Animation. Big Frame manages Tyler Oakley and other online megacelebrities.

Amanda said, “I have a manager there—”

“Here's what happened,” said her father, interrupting. “When she started with this agency about a year ago, she had about a hundred thousand YouTube subscribers—now she has one-point-five million.” By the end of 2015, she would have 2.7 million. “That's all hers. All the other deals—the Invisalign, the Disney, Kohl's—the agency gets a percentage. There are agents now just for YouTube stuff. I think her success comes from a multifaceted thing—she's very smart, she's pretty, and she comes off very good in front of the camera. Her timing was good—the stars just aligned for her. You know, girls her age can be very
nasty,
but for the most part she's well liked. She knows what to say and what not to say. And it just snowballed—this thing is growing
exponentially.
”

Gerry showed me a video on his phone of a throng of girls standing in line at a California shopping mall, all waiting to meet Amanda. He watched it with an excited yet puzzled expression.

“All the advertisers want a piece of her,” he said. “We get two or three boxes of stuff a
day
—companies sending her stuff, hoping she'll mention it in one of her videos or on her Instagram. I always say she has every teenage girl's dream, all the clothes and makeup you could want…”

Amanda pursed her lips. Her father kept talking.

“Can you come here?” she said, beckoning for him to come outside.

Her voice through the door: “You don't even know what you're talking about. You're not a part of this…Can you stop talking?”