American Girls (19 page)

“You've done that?” said Dara.

“Well, not to you!” said Carrie.

“Social media lets you make a lot of impulsive decisions,” said Kayla.

“And the younger you get a phone”—all of them said they had gotten smartphones in the sixth and seventh grades—“the more impulsive your decisions are, and then you get older and you just keep doing the same things from there,” said Carrie.

When I talked to Paul Roberts, the author of
The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification,
he spoke of the lowered impulse control teenagers have due to the stage of their brain development. Teenagers have highly reactive limbic systems—the brain's complex set of cortical and subcortical structures that influence emotional response—and so are thought to be more emotional and bigger risk-takers than either adults or children. They're less able to control their actions in regard to their sense of right and wrong, according to studies, especially if it has anything to do with winning the admiration of peers. “They have a kind of future blindness,” Roberts said. “It's, What will doing this get me now? Not, What are the consequences?”

But this depiction of teenagers' lack of impulse control could also describe what Roberts believes has happened to American society overall, as seen in everything from the culture of Wall Street (“short-term performance” focus and collateralized debt obligations) to Washington's failure to take serious action on the threat of global warming. As I read his book, it occurred to me that it's as if we've become a nation of teenagers, from the limbic point of view. And this also could be said to be true of our collective behavior online—for it's not only kids who are mean to each other on social media, not just kids who slight one another and get into fights; uncivil discourse has become a hallmark of online behavior for everyone. Adults, too, are gossiping about one another and stalking and surveilling each other online at a time when gossip drives our media and entertainment news, and our government is openly engaging in mass surveillance.

In an interview on WNYC in 2015, William Arkin, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, national security expert, and the author of
Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare,
compared the military's compulsive data-collecting with unmanned drones to our collective addiction to our smartphones. “You just can't stop yourself from checking your e-mail or texting,” Arkin said. “And that's the world of drones in a nutshell.” Are we using our phones like drones? Compulsively checking on one another? And when we don't like what someone has to say, or perhaps how they look, dropping destructive speech bombs whose after-effects we never have to see in person?

“I really wonder what's going to happen to our generation,” Kayla said. “We're not learning how to communicate well or deal with our problems with each other.”

I met Janie and her mother at the Williamsburg Indoor Sports Complex on a drizzly gray afternoon. Janie was attending the fifteenth birthday party of a friend. The girls were playing laser tag in a small, darkened arena. The room was swirling with fog and glowing with black lights, techno music blaring. The girls were shrieking, jumping out from behind walls, and firing their lasers, flashing pink and yellow beams. “I got you!” they called. “No, you ain't!”

“Which one is Janie?” I asked her mother, Betty. “She's the one making all the hits!” Betty said. Janie came out of the room when it was over, flushed with excitement, pink-cheeked.

She was an athletic girl with honey-blond hair, which she wore in a ponytail, and liquid brown eyes. She was white. She changed into her street clothes—a purple Adidas sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers. She had a matching purple Adidas headband.

We drove along the woodsy Colonial Parkway and went and sat in the book-lined library of a nearby hotel. Janie sat on a leather couch next to her mother. Betty, who was in her forties, had puffy shoulder-length hair and glasses. She said she was a stay-at-home mom, and Janie's stepfather was a government official. Betty said she wanted to sit in on our conversation, as the story Janie had to tell was “difficult.” Betty looked tired from worry.

Janie was gay, which she had known since sixth grade, she said. “I kind of started figuring it out because I got involved with one of my best friends. Bad idea,” she added with a little laugh. Her voice was deep and she had a southern accent. If you closed your eyes, you might think it was a boy talking. She later explained that this was something that had evolved after she started getting bullied, and she pitched her voice lower, to sound tough, as self-protection.

She said she never officially came out at school. “They kind of just figured it out, by how me and the girl I was with at the time interacted. Nobody accepted it,” she said. “It was not okay. It was not okay at all. This is a very conservative area.”

Virginia legalized same-sex marriage in 2014 following a Supreme Court ruling; but according to opinion polls, only about 50 percent of voters supported it. Virginia is a battleground state, with both Democrats and Republicans winning major elections, and it has its share of right-wing conservatives. In 2012, then governor Bob McDonnell signed into law a controversial bill requiring women to undergo an ultrasound procedure prior to having an abortion (it was repealed in 2014). Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network is headquartered in Virginia Beach, about an hour down the coast from Williamsburg. Until 2014, there were sodomy laws on Virginia's books.

When people realized Janie was gay, she said, “they just didn't talk to me anymore and they talked about me behind my back.” She was twelve at the time. “It was a very country school,” meaning intolerant, she said, “and [being gay] was not accepted. So there were comments. Basically all of the country people would make comments about how I had made my preference and that wasn't okay and I wasn't accepted. I had a hard enough time accepting it
myself
at first,” she said. “I struggled with it.”

She said she came out to her mother and stepfather when she was twelve, and they had a hard time “accepting” it, too; her biological father, whom she saw on the weekends, was still not always “totally accepting.” Seeing she was not going to get the support she sought from family and friends, she decided that first she needed to have “acceptance in herself.” She worked to become someone “who doesn't need anybody to support her.” She developed her tough exterior. She tried her best never to betray her emotions, never to react to comments.

“Everybody would always say that I looked like a very strong, tough person, but on the inside, no,” said Janie. “I would keep everything in so I wouldn't show anybody that I was hurt or upset or angry because I didn't want to look weak.”

By the seventh grade, the atmosphere in school had become “a little more tolerant,” she said, “because I got more friends. I got more people to accept me, just a little bit. The band kids accepted me”—she played the tuba—“and a few of their friends, so it got a little better.”

It was that same year that she started dating a girl, a girl who in time, she said, would “ruin my life.” They played together on the field hockey team. They stared at each other during practice, noticing each other; and then they started to like each other, and then they were together.

The girl was popular, emotional; “a southern belle,” Janie's mother said with a frown. She was sensitive; she cried, and Janie became the shoulder she would cry on. Sometimes the pull of her neediness felt like too much for Janie and she wanted to break away. The girl wanted all her attention. She was always texting, texting, seeking reassurance and wanting to chat. “Sometimes she would text me like a hundred times a day,” Janie said. “It was just too much. And if I didn't text her back right away, she would start a fight about it and say I didn't care about her. And she wanted to put everything we did on social media,” she added, “and I just didn't want to reveal that much of myself to the public.”

Janie didn't always feel that she could live up to the girl's demands, she said. There was so much to do already, with homework, band, and sports. On top of field hockey, Janie played soccer and ran track. She felt she didn't have time to always be texting and going on social media and updating everyone on her relationship. Still, she said, she and the girl managed to stay together for more than a year. “It was pretty serious.”

And then at the end of seventh grade, the girl “cheated” on her, “going with” someone else, a boy. “She lied and said she didn't, but I knew it was true,” Janie said. She heard about it from friends. It was hard to keep anything a secret at their school. It was gossiped about in texts and talked about on Facebook.

So Janie broke up with the girl. It was a middle school breakup, the kind of thing that has happened since there have been middle-schoolers falling in and out of love—somebody gets jilted, someone's feelings get hurt, someone lies on her bed listening to music and thinking about what was and what might have been. And then it goes away. But with social media, it took a different turn.

When Janie broke up with the girl, “she didn't really like it,” she said. “So she decided to go on Instagram and post a picture of me and her”—it was a picture of the two of them standing close together—“and she posted like, I'm glad this is officially over.

“And my friend saw it and she showed it to me and I was like, There's no need for that.” Janie confronted the girl; they had words. “And she said, It just needed to go out. And I said, Nobody needs to know about this. And then she started getting really angry with me, and I told her that she just needed to leave me alone. I told her that we were finally over, and then she told me that I could go kill myself and she wouldn't care and she would give me the gun to do it.”

For a moment Janie looked as if she was going to cry.

“It kind of made me feel really bad,” she said.

Then she regained her composure, her controlled demeanor.

“You could kill yourself & I wouldn't shed a single tear from my eyes,” said the girl's text, which Janie's mother sent me later. “Actually that's a good idea ill give you the damn gun to do it with it'd make my damn life easier I'm so glad I moved on because I would be hurt as fuck.”

They both were hurt. And when people get hurt, they sometimes turn to social media as a place to vent. In venting, they seek the support of online friends to help them through their emotions; and emotions on social media can be contagious, according to studies. A “massive…experiment on Facebook” published in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
in 2014 found that “emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness”; “emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people,” the study found, “and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues,” as on social media.

The girl got “everyone” involved in their problem, Janie said, over the summer and into the next school year—the “entire school,” as well as some parents and teachers. The girl ranted about how Janie had hurt her emotionally, portraying Janie's treatment of her as abusive and cruel.

“And then everybody decided to take her side,” Janie said. “Even friends that were really close to me decided to take her side and say it was all my fault. She was harassing me and her friends started harassing me and then some of my friends started harassing her and her friends.” It was social media war.

“They all went onto social media, onto Instagram, and they followed me on Twitter and Facebook,” Janie said. People posted nasty comments. And some of the comments were about Janie being gay.

“They tried to message me and say that they were glad I was finally out of her life and that I was the problem. Two teachers, they would give me nasty looks in the hallway. The teachers got involved and said it was all my fault and that they didn't agree with any of it and they didn't approve of me.”

The comments were almost never in person, almost always on social media. “They wouldn't say it if it was in person,” Janie said. “They think they're protected by a computer screen.

“Her mom even tried to follow me” on Twitter, she said. “Her mom harassed me and texted me.”

There's been debate around the question of whether parents should, or have the right to, monitor their children's activity online; there's less awareness of how parents and other adults sometimes insert themselves into kids' online drama or make comments about children on social media. Over the past few years there's been a steady trickle of news reports; for example, in 2015 a Colorado teacher was fired after posting a picture of a student on her Instagram account with the comment “I don't know him, but I hate him,” and the hashtag #pothead. In Montclair, the mother of a middle school girl told me that some other mothers who had been monitoring their daughters' texts became involved in ostracizing one of the girls in their daughters' group chat. “They told their daughters to stay away from this girl, she was bad news. It led to an incident where a girl was saying she was going to punch this girl in the face in Watchung Plaza.”

When Janie texted her ex and asked her to stop harassing her, the girl fired back: “I don't think about you I don't feel anything for you, nothing you're a fucking worthless stranger to me you can go to hell…Out of my life bitch I never want to see your ugly-ass face again.”

Madeline had just had her
quinceañera,
“like a Sweet Sixteen except for fifteen-year-olds,” in San Martín Texmelucan de Labastida, the Mexican town where her grandparents lived. She showed me the pictures of the party she kept in an album decorated with ribbons. She'd worn a sea-blue gown, a tiara, and white flowers in her hair; the theme was “Under the Sea.” She'd choreographed a reggae dance for the event with a local choreographer. Madeline wanted to be a dancer someday. “It was the best experience of my life,” she said. “If only I could live it over again.” It was a day when “you felt like a princess, and all your family is around you saying they care about you and now you are a young woman.”

Madeline and her friend Breanna, both fifteen, were eating pizza at the kitchen table of a woman I know who lives in Crotona Park East. Madeline was wearing hoop earrings and jeans and an off-the-shoulder blouse; she had a merry, convivial air. She was Latina and Asian. Her mother was a single mom who worked three jobs, one at a delivery service and two at superstores.

Breanna was wearing jeans, a T-shirt and a hoodie, and hoop earrings, too. She was black and Latina, tall, with shoulder-length hair and braces. She seemed thoughtful. She wanted to be a writer, she said, and was part of an online writing club. Her dad worked in computers and her mother at a hospital. The two girls went to different schools. Their parents were friends.

Madeline talked some more about her
quinceañera
and her ex-boyfriend, her first boyfriend, who had been there. They had known each other “since we were babies” in Mexico, she said. At her seventh birthday party, “I was in a really pretty dress. It was a princess theme, so I was dressed up like Belle,” from
Beauty and the Beast.
“And somebody asked, Are you guys going out? And he said, Yes,” she said, her face softening at the memory. “And after that, we were girlfriend and boyfriend. I go to Mexico every year, so I would see him. We talked on Facebook. We were texting. We'd text all afternoon. We'd text until we fell asleep.

“He was my main escort at my
quinceañera,
” she said. “We said we were going to live happily ever after. But we ended up breaking up. My friend in Mexico told me that he cheated on me.”

She seemed sad about it.

The girls said that cheating was common in relationships these days. “I think it's social media,” Madeline said. “Because on social media he could seem like he loved me. But I couldn't see his face. And he was doing something completely different in real life.”

Breanna said that she had also had a boyfriend she found out had been cheating on her on Facebook. “As soon as we broke up I could see him messaging some other girl,” she said. “And I was like, Oh, okay. So this must have been happening for a while.”

Cheating on social media has become a problem in modern relationships, a factor increasingly cited in American divorce filings. Psychologists point to the ready access people now have to others, friends and strangers, in whom they might have interest or to whom they turn when they're feeling dissatisfied in their relationships. “There's never been another moment in history when we've had instant access to anyone who crosses our minds,” Jaclyn Cravens, an assistant professor of community, family, and addiction sciences at Texas Tech University, who specializes in Facebook infidelity, told
Redbook.
Her 2013 study found that even when infidelity is manifested only online, the partner who is cheated on experiences emotions as painful as if it were a physical encounter.

The increased accessibility of potential sex and dating partners has also affected the relationships of teens, who are on social media throughout the day and night, often looking for people to date or sext with or just talk to, out of loneliness or horniness or boredom. “I dated a guy that cheated on me eight different times,” said Jill, a nineteen-year-old sophomore at the University of Detroit Mercy. “Everybody cheats,” said her friend Mirella, also nineteen. “Everybody thinks that you're
gonna
cheat—like, cheating is a part of how things are now. If you haven't been cheated on it's like, Oh, you haven't? Oh, that's weird.” “If your girlfriend-slash-boyfriend asks to check your phone, you could just have deleted everything the night before and she could not see it,” said a fourteen-year-old girl in San Diego, California. “It's so easy to just hide everything.”

“Like your boyfriend could have been talking to somebody for months behind your back and you'll never find out,” Madeline said.

They said it destroyed their sense of trust.

“There is no trust,” Madeline said.

“In our generation,” Breanna agreed.

“Love is just a word, it has no meaning,” Madeline said. “It's very rare you will ever find someone who really likes you for who you are—for yourself, your originality. And it doesn't matter what you look like, if you have a big butt or whatever. Rarely, ever, do you find someone who really cares.”

A big butt? I asked. It wasn't the first time I'd heard girls talk about the importance placed on having a “big butt.”

“You're supposed to have a big butt, big boobs, and if you don't have both, you're nothing,” Madeline said. “You better have a pretty face.”

In 2014,
Vogue
announced, “We're Officially in the Era of the Big Booty.” With “today's most popular celebrities, the measure of sex appeal is inextricably linked to the prominence of a woman's behind,” said the magazine. According to
Vogue,
the “booty movement” had its most “prominent” representative in Kim Kardashian, who used Instagram “to inundate followers with a steady stream of portraits” of her rear end, “slowly redefining the Hollywood body.”

Kardashian's behind had actually appeared on screens after more than two decades of hip-hop videos showing beautiful, curvy women of color dancing in hypersexualized scenes. Sir Mix-a-Lot rapped that he
“liked big butts”
back in 1992. But 2014 did seem to be the year when “big booties” went fully mainstream, à la
Vogue
and other media outlets, which finally seemed to acknowledge the existence of an appreciation for bodies shaped more like Beyoncé's than Gwyneth Paltrow's. It was a reversal from the 1980s, when women were advised that they had to mold their butts into compact “buns of steel,” and if they had a backside any larger than Jane Fonda's, it was seen as a sign of laziness and even moral decrepitude. In the late '90s, Jennifer Lopez's curvaceous behind became a locus of national fascination. In 1999 I wrote a piece for
New York
wondering if, hoping that, the celebration of a female star with a different body type than the standard ideal heralded a new acceptance of the bodies of many women of color by mainstream pop culture.

In 2014, in a review of Nicki Minaj's “Anaconda” in
Grantland,
Molly Lambert wrote, “Nicki's body is the modern ideal.” And while it was great to see that Minaj's voluptuous form was being admired, it was also discouraging to realize that it was just one ideal exchanged for another, and that some women were still being made to feel lesser-than if they didn't resemble the newly imposed standard. “What alarms me,” says Jeannine Amber, the writer, “is that there are black women who've hailed this obsession with big asses as a great step forward. They see this as a move toward cultural ‘acceptance' of black women's naturally curvy physiques. I can't tell you how many stories I've heard of young black women risking their lives with back-alley butt injections hoping for a Nicki Minaj silhouette.” In 2012,
Essence
ran a piece about how “silicone butt injections” had caused one woman to lose limbs, while others had lost their lives.

And why does the size of a woman's behind allegedly matter? Meghan Trainor's 2014 hit, “All About That Bass,” is a body-positivity anthem many girls found inspiring; and yet its self-acceptance message seems clouded by how triumphant Trainor is about the power a big booty has over “boys.” She exults in the song over having
“that boom boom that all the boys chase.”
Her mother, she says, has encouraged her in having this view of her body as beautiful because of how it will be sexually desired by “boys”:
“boys like a little more booty to hold at night.”
She also voices disdain for
“skinny bitches,”
mocking them:
“I know you think you're fat.”

In 2014, Jennifer Lopez released “Booty,” featuring Iggy Azalea, with a video that's basically a four-and-a-half-minute close-up of the two women's behinds undulating and rubbing together.
“Big, big booty,”
Lopez sings.
“It's his birthday / Give him what he asks for,”
suggesting that “booty” is for men. Meanwhile, in 2014, the top gaining search on Pornhub was “big booty,” with a 486 percent increase from the previous year, underscoring an impression you can get that there doesn't seem to be anything that happens in the world of women that isn't fetishized in porn.

“Girls put pictures on Facebook in booty shorts sitting in a certain pose where their butt looks big,” Madeline said.

“The famous sink shot,” said Breanna.

Sink shot? I asked.

They explained that this was “when a girl takes a selfie in the bathroom, like wearing a thong,” “with her butt pushed up on the sink to make it look bigger. And you can see all of her butt up on the sink like in the mirror.” It was a variation on a genre of selfie popularized by Kim Kardashian, also known as a “belfie,” or a selfie of a butt, repeatedly seen in the Instagram shots of the derriere-endowed fitness model Jen Selter.

“You have to have a perfect body and big butt,” Breanna said. “For a girl, you have to be that certain way to get the boys' attention. Boys say, I want a bad chick.”

“Which is, like, big butt, big boobs,” Madeline said.

“A girl who has everything,” said Breanna.

“Skinny waist, perfect figure, nice hair, all of that,” Madeline said. “If you go on Facebook, there are pictures of hundreds and thousands of girls that are pretty and have, like, the hourglass figure—big boobs, big butt—and have the blond hair or the red hair with the pretty eyes and the piercings that go with the dimples and everything. And, if you look down, you'll see she has like a thousand likes and hundreds of comments with the boys saying, Oh, she's pretty. Oh, I would want her to be my girlfriend.”

Facebook was still the social media site where most kids in their schools interacted, said the girls. It was on Facebook that they talked to their friends and family members who lived far away. “Everyone is on it,” said Madeline. “Me, personally, I'm on it every day, school hours, after school. So I'm on it twenty-four/seven.”

Facebook was also the place where boys would like a girl's picture and then ask if they could “see more of you.”

“They'll message you on Facebook,” Madeline said. “They'll be like, Oh, I saw that picture. You're looking really nice.”

“And they'll go from there,” Breanna said. “They'll play the nice guy, and all of a sudden it's like, Yeah, I'm feeling some type of way,” meaning horny. “You want to send me pictures?”

“After a five-minute conversation,” Madeline said.

“Some girls will do it! They'll be like, Okay, I'll send you pictures,” said Breanna.

“Girls send nudes, to show what they have.”

“To be approachable.”

“They think that's how they attract the boys' attention.”

They talked about a girl they knew who had become “Facebook famous” after posting provocative pictures of herself online; but then her fame had backfired on her.

“She went on Facebook and started posting herself in revealing clothing,” Madeline said, “and people started paying more attention to her, and then she thought she was a bad ‘b' and wouldn't talk to you anymore. But then she got mad because they created a fake page of her,” meaning a slut page. “They used her pictures with posts that had explicit statuses that said things like, Oh, come to my house with thirty bucks and I'll do this and that.

“So she was frustrated about that,” Madeline went on. “She told everybody, I would never do something like that. I don't know who this person is,” meaning the person who had created the page.

Slut pages on Facebook appeared in their school often, they said.

“People will do it to embarrass a girl, to expose her in some way,” said Breanna.

They talked about another girl they knew who “sent a boy a naked picture, like full-on.” “He broke up with her the next day,” Madeline said. “And then he posted the picture all over Facebook. But she didn't worry about it. She just put up another picture of herself.”

“In a thong,” Breanna said. “But then the next thing, she went to the hospital. She started cutting herself.”

“They say it takes the pain away,” Madeline said.

They shook their heads.

But the worst thing about Facebook, said the girls, was that “fights always start on Facebook.” Sometimes physical fights between girls. “It starts on a thread,” they said, “and they take it to the street.”

“Someone will say, Oh, I'll hurt you, I'll hurt someone in your family,” Breanna said. “They'll start threatening to hurt your family members just to scare you.”

“And then somebody says something about somebody,” a rumor or insult, Madeline said, “and then it just escalates and then it's, Okay, I'm going to fight you right now. Meet me tomorrow at this place, wait for me at this spot.”

“And then people hear about it and people post about it and they're like, Oh, there's going to be a fight tomorrow. And sometimes they film it,” Breanna said.

“And then they put
that
on Facebook,” said Madeline.