American Girls (20 page)

They shook their heads again at the cyclicality of it.

I asked them what the fights were about.

“Oh, she doesn't know how to dress, she's ugly, she's a ho,” Madeline said.

“It will go back and forth,” said Breanna. “People call each other thot, slut, whore.”

“Boys do not get called that,” Madeline said. “If they sleep around, it's like, Oh, yeah, congrats!”

But when girls called one another those words, they said, it could lead to violence.

“Last year, we had like four fights in one day because of gossip on Facebook,” Madeline said. “It starts in seventh grade, when girls finally start getting their body, and they start caring about looks and how people think of them.”

Girls gossiped about one another on Facebook, they said. “ ‘She's cheating on her boyfriend,' ” Madeline said, as an example.

“Sometimes they just say, like, You stink. They pick on any little thing,” said Breanna.

“They go for your insecurity, like what you wear and what shoes you have, what jewelry you have, what kind of hairstyle you have,” Madeline said.

“If you don't have Jordans,” meaning the sneakers, “good luck,” Breanna said. She was wearing a pair herself.

“If you're not wearing the brands in style,” said Madeline, “like True Religion and Adidas, they'll be like, Why are you wearing
that
?”

I asked them where they thought all this focus on brands was coming from.

“Celebrities, TV,” said Madeline. “I just saw a show, it was like the fifty richest celebrities, and it was all about all the stuff they have. They were talking about the rich people like Beyoncé and Jay Z, and their baby, Blue Ivy, and Kanye West's baby, North West. They were talking about who has the most expensive stuff—which
baby.
”

“They said Blue Ivy, Jay Z's baby, had a fifteen-thousand-dollar Swarovski highchair or something like that, all jeweled out, blinged out,” said Breanna.

“And it's like, Oh, they grew up like me, but how do I get to that level, that I can have all those nice things?” asked Madeline.

“And people want that; and so that's what you must have,” said Breanna.

“You want that life,” Madeline said. “TV now is all about competitions. Rivalries. You have all these shows where people are competing against each other for money. And you feel like, if I could fight the best, I could get that money.”

I asked them if they had ever been in fights themselves.

“Once,” said Madeline.

“I try not to get into fights,” Breanna said. “Because of past experiences I've had, I'm always aware of who's around me or what's going on. If someone comes up to me and says they're going to jump me or threaten me, or try and hurt me, I just try and walk away.”

In 2005,
Newsweek
ran a story headlined “Bad Girls Go Wild,” which raised an alarm about an alleged increase in violence among girls. Citing a new study from the FBI, the magazine reported that the number of adolescent girls arrested for aggravated assault had seen a shocking rise over the last twenty years. Though the FBI had given no theories about the reason for this spike in violence,
Newsweek
blamed feminism. “The women's movement,” said the magazine, “which explicitly encourages women to assert themselves like men, has unintentionally opened the door to girls' violent behavior.”

But when the Justice Department looked into
Newsweek
's claims, in 2008, it found them to be based on a faulty analysis of data. Girls weren't becoming more violent, but they were being arrested and incarcerated more frequently for lesser offenses. “There is no burgeoning national crisis of increasing serious violence among adolescent girls,” said the Justice Department's report. It's worth considering whether the women's movement actually may have opened the door to, not more violent behavior among girls, but more policing of girls' behavior, as a form of backlash.

And yet, in 2008,
People
magazine ran a story titled “Mean Girls,” about the alleged rising tide of girl aggression. In 2010, there was another panic about girl violence in the wake of the suicide of Phoebe Prince, a fifteen-year-old South Hadley, Massachusetts, girl who was bullied and harassed by six classmates. Two of these classmates were boys, and both were arrested and charged with statutory rape.

“This panic is a hoax,” wrote two experts on juvenile justice, Mike Males and Meda Chesney-Lind, in
The
New York Times
in 2010. In their op-ed, “The Myth of Mean Girls,” they said, “We examined every major index of crime on which the authorities rely. None show a recent increase in girls' violence; in fact, every reliable measure shows that violence by girls has been plummeting for years…Why, in an era when slandering a group of people based on the misdeeds of a few has rightly become taboo, does it remain acceptable to use isolated incidents to berate modern teenagers, particularly girls, as ‘mean' and ‘violent' and ‘bullies'? That is, why are we bullying girls?”

Good question. Nowhere in this op-ed did the words “sexism” or “misogyny” appear, but perhaps they were implicit. People seem to like to see girls fight. At least one would think so from the profusion of reality TV shows which center around girl-on-girl aggression. Unfortunately, these are some of the most popular shows among girls themselves. Shows such as
Dance Moms, America's Next Top Model, Jersey Shore,
and
The Hills
all depict women in conflict with one another, gossiping and backstabbing. They rely on those dramatic moments when the women's animosity toward each other erupts in some sort of showdown, the vicious “catfight.” When I asked girls in the Bronx about the favorite shows among girls in their schools, all brought up
Bad Girls Club,
a reality show in which the main draw is scenes of women physically assaulting one another, sometimes hurting each other badly. What's perhaps most disturbing is that these scenes are played partially for comic effect; we are meant to laugh at the women's outrageous inability to control themselves; but many girls also see it as a display of badass power.

Several studies have shown a potential connection among violent behavior, bullying and cyberbullying, and reality TV. A 2011 national survey by the Girl Scout Research Institute on reality TV shows found that girls ages eleven to seventeen were heavily influenced by their viewing of such programs. Seventy-five percent of girls surveyed believed that reality competition shows were “real,” as opposed to scripted. Girls who watched reality shows expected girls in real life to be more aggressive and mean than did girls who didn't view them. An overwhelming majority of young female reality TV viewers believed that gossiping is a “normal part of a relationship,” that “it's in the nature of girls to be catty and competitive,” and that “it's hard to trust other girls.” And 37 percent believed that “being mean earns you more respect than being nice.”

Jeannine Amber says that when she did an investigation for
Essence
on the impact reality TV has on girls, she found that “there is an expected agreement going in with the characters [on the shows] and the producers that there will be a physical altercation at some point because that is going to cause a spike in the ratings. Kids watching it think it's real—they think this is how people behave. If they are low-income kids and their parents are working all the time, the TV is the babysitter; this is their role model.”

There is girl-on-girl violence in and out of schools, and it tends to start on social media. When girls fight, it's often because of some affront online, as the Bronx girls described, and then it turns into a physical confrontation—which in turn is sometimes filmed on cell phones and posted on social media. A search on YouTube for “girl fight at school” turns up more than 20 million results. The videos show girls tearing into each other as crowds of kids watch and cheer them on. On Twitter, Facebook, Vine, and other sites you can find such videos, which typically get lots of views. It's often boys who post them, and their running commentary often sounds amused.

But girls aren't fighting because they're mean or violent by nature. When researchers at the Justice Department examined the social and cultural reasons behind girl violence in 2008, they found them to include poverty, domestic violence, and growing up in “disorganized communities” with “parents who are themselves coping with structurally disadvantaged neighborhoods and poverty.”

In
Violence by Teenage Girls: Trends and Context,
the Justice Department reported that “another factor in girls' violence against other girls involves the contradictory messages girls receive regarding sexuality. For most girls, models and images of healthy sexual desire are rare or nonexistent…Rigid imagery about ‘appropriate' behavior for girls can emphasize being attractive to and desired by boys and at the same time send girls messages that they are valued for abstaining from sexual behavior.

“Girls at risk for engaging in same-sex peer violence,” the report went on, “did not have any sense of themselves or other girls as having their own legitimate sexual desires or being valued. They understood their own sexual value only in relation to how they satisfied males and lived up to idealized standards of femininity. Thus, these girls were quick to strike out at other girls who threatened their view of self or their relationships with valued males.”

It was Saturday, and the three girls had decided to take in the new movie based on a John Green novel,
Paper Towns.
Afterward, they went to a pizza restaurant near the theater to get slices. They were Alex, Hannah, and Zora, friends from an Upper East Side private school. They were white girls with long straight hair in varying shades of blond; they wore sundresses and leggings and dangly necklaces and ankle boots.

Alex carried a Fendi bag, from which she withdrew the money to buy her friends lunch. “I'll be the mom,” she said jokingly, bringing the slices to the table.

Alex was a “Park Avenue princess” by her own description, tall and broad-shouldered, with a commanding presence. Her friends called her a “diva.” She revered the British monarchy and said that she would like to marry Prince Harry someday—“he's only like thirty so it's not impossible”—“or be the editor of
Vogue,
or the CEO of Disney.”

Hannah, who was also tall, with a wide, open face and pea-green eyes, lived in a brownstone in Brooklyn with her parents, both men, and said she wanted to be a doctor so she could join Doctors Without Borders and “help people in wars.” And Zora, a scholarship student who lived on the Lower East Side, was sometimes called “Rory,” for Rory on
Gilmore Girls,
because she was quiet and bookish and had a kooky single mom. She had a book sticking out of her bag,
Romeo and Juliet.

“It's so funny that you brought that,” Alex said.

“I read it on the subway,” said Zora.

“We don't have to read it for like two months,” Alex said with a smirk.

“I already read it,” Hannah said. “My dads make me read all of Shakespeare.”

Alex sniffed. “I
want
Cara Delevingne's eyebrows,” she suddenly exclaimed. “She has such good eyebrow game.”

Delevingne was the twenty-three-year-old British model and actress who had starred in
Paper Towns.
She was known for being part of Taylor Swift's girl squad and for her dry responses to chirpy TV talk show interviewers.

“Have you seen her Instagram?” Hannah asked with a smile.

“Of course I've seen her Instagram,” Alex said. “I live for her Instagram. I am literally sustained by it.” She folded up her pizza and took a bite, New Yorker–style.

Delevingne's Instagram featured shots of her standing around topless with other models; in one, she's touching herself while wearing a pair of Superman underwear. “Don't have sex,” she warns in a joke video, her voice overlaid with the ominous voice of Coach Carr from
Mean Girls.

“Her Instagram is literally perfect,” Hannah agreed.

“I think it's so cute the way Taylor Swift has BFFed Cara,” Alex said. “Like she's trying to make us think she can
be
a Cara. Oh, Taylor, you'll never be La Delevingne.”

“I like Taylor Swift,” said Zora.

“I guess she is a good role model,” Alex said, smirking again.

A couple of boys about their age came into the pizza place. They stood at the counter and ordered slices. They were nice-looking boys in T-shirts and jeans.

Alex snatched up her phone and started texting.

A moment later, Hannah's phone buzzed on the table. “Oh!” said Hannah. Alex had sent her a text with the names of the two boys and where they went to school. Alex knew them. “Of course, they come with their parents to my parents' Christmas party,” she said offhandedly. “My father plays squash with Dylan's dad.”

But they didn't speak to or even acknowledge each other.

“Alexandra knows everyone,” Hannah said, low. “She's Gossip Girl.”

“Not
that
Gossip Girl,” Alex said pointedly.

Hannah said, “Slug word: Nell.”

In whispers they relayed that Nell was a girl who, the previous year, had posed as “Gossip Girl” on Ask.fm and “told people's secrets and said
awful
things—mostly about the really popular girls,” Alex said. “Like the top girls in the private schools, the type of girls who have like seven hundred followers on Instagram.

“It was all very thinly veiled,” she went on, “so you knew exactly who the people were. She would say things implying that the girls were sluts and had multiple boyfriends at one time. It was outrageous the way she posted it, but personally I know that every word of it was accurate.”

“She gossiped about this girl who got kicked out of school for sending around a video of herself masturbating—in eighth grade,” Hannah said.

“Well, we all saw that,” said Alex, shuddering for effect.

“Nell's parents sent her to a wilderness school,” Hannah sighed. That was a type of boarding school/rehab facility, usually set in a remote, rural location. Such schools, also known as “therapeutic boarding schools,” have been a burgeoning business since the '80s, notorious as places where wealthy parents send their troubled children.

“There's a rumor that she bought a phone for a boy with her parents' credit card,” Hannah said. The girls tsk-tskd. “She was having substance abuse issues.”

“Her mother had serious Botox issues,” Alex said.

They started talking about how some girls' mothers had “issues” and were “mean.” “Like some of them are really mean”—“not
mine
”—“no, not mine, either, but like some girls' moms seem like they're mad at their daughters”—“like totally, they're in competition with them and they put pictures of themselves on Facebook in bathing suits and it's so embarrassing”—“oh, I know, I feel so sorry for their daughters”—“like, Please put on some clothes, you're not a teenager—”

“You need your mom to be your best friend,” Zora said earnestly. “So what would you do if you didn't have her as your best friend?”

“I wouldn't know,” Alex said dryly. “My mother's best friends are the girls in her bridge club.”

They brought up the name of another girl they knew and said, “Her mother swears at her,” “I think she takes pills,” “I know, and it's just sad for her—the
mom
—because her daughter hates her and she can, like, never get these years back—”

“I think the reason Nell was the way she was, it was because she was lonely,” said Zora.

“She watched too much
Gossip Girl,
” Hannah said. “I think
Gossip Girl
had a huge influence on our grade. It was a big deal at one point, remember?”

Gossip Girl,
which aired from 2007 to 2012, was about students at the fictional Constance Billard School for Girls, Park Avenue princesses with limitless shopping power at the height of the Great Recession. They shopped, and they fought and backstabbed one another, all while dressed in an endless selection of dazzling luxury brands, often microminis, cutout dresses, and blouses with plunging necklines. The girls on the show, based on the best-selling book series by Cecily von Ziegesar, were as mean to one another as they were sexualized. And their sex lives—all the subject of a scandalous blog by an anonymous mean girl in their midst who called herself “Gossip Girl,” and was voiced by actress Kristen Bell—were as active as their adult counterparts on
Sex and the City.

But the girls on
Gossip Girl
didn't just have a lot of sex, they used sex as a weapon, to manipulate or take revenge. As on
Sex and the City,
there was a lot of drinking, although the girls were underage. The Parents Television Council repeatedly warned against the potentially damaging effects of this material on young viewers, admonitions which were depicted as hopelessly unhip by the makers of
Gossip Girl,
who included these criticisms and others—“Mind-Blowingly Inappropriate,” “Every Parent's Nightmare,” “A Nasty Piece of Work”—in their 2008 “OMFG” ad campaign.
New York
magazine called
Gossip Girl
“The Greatest Teen Drama of All Time.” “All girls love
Gossip Girl,
” a New York girl, age fifteen, told me.

“I
lived
for
Gossip Girl,
” Alex said. “When it went off the air, I had a wake—just for the shoes.”

“ ‘X-O-X-O Gossip Girl,' ” Hannah said, quoting the show's tagline.

Alex's phone buzzed. A text.

Alex's eyes grew wide. It was from one of the boys who had come into the pizza place. The boys were sitting at another table. Everyone looked over at them. They were both on their phones, neither giving any indication that he was texting Alex.

“What'd he say?” Hannah asked.

“Oh,” Alex said dismissively, dropping her phone on the table, “he just wants to know when my brother's coming back from Spain. I hate boys.”

“Um, I didn't really know how to say this,” Hannah began after a moment. “So I guess I should just say it—I have a boyfriend!”

She looked gleeful and expectant.

Alex and Zora stared.

“Oh, Hannah, that's so great!” said Zora.

“You have a
boyfriend
?” Alex said. “How'd you get a boyfriend?”

“What do you mean?” said Hannah. “That doesn't sound very nice.”

“I just mean—well, what school does he go to?” Alex demanded.

Hannah said, “He goes to public school in Brooklyn. I met him in Prospect Park. He's Mexican.”

“He's
Mexican
? Can he talk right?” Alex said.

Hannah's mouth opened.

Zora said,
“Alex.”

“Oh—I didn't mean it like
that,
” Alex recovered. “I just wanted to know if you meant he was an immigrant.”

“No, he's American,” Hannah said firmly.

“Alex,”
said Zora.

“I just meant—I mean,” Alex said, flustered. And then her tone became outraged. “Well, why didn't you tell me about this before? I thought I was your friend. This is not girl code. You have to tell your friends about your boyfriend. You have to tell your friends about all the gossip and the drama going on in your life.”

“Well, I wasn't really sure if he
was
my boyfriend until yesterday,” Hannah said. “It just happened yesterday. We were at his house—”

“At his house? You go to his house?” Alex asked.

Hannah said, “Yes.”

“Are there other Mexican people there?” Alex asked.

“Alex,” Zora said, “you're actually being horrible.”

“Well, this isn't the first time she's done something like this,” Alex said, looking wounded.

“What? What have I done to you?” Hannah asked.

Alex launched into a litany of alleged offenses, including accusations that Hannah did not pay proper attention to Alex's activity on social media: “You never like my pictures or make any comments on my pictures.”

“Yes, I do!” said Hannah.

“You don't even follow me on Tumblr,” Alex said.

“I didn't even know you had a Tumblr!” said Hannah.

“I do,” Alex said. “I post pictures of handbags I like. I post pictures of beautiful Birkins.”

Hannah and Zora gave each other a look.

“Are you going to change your status on Facebook?” Alex said in a mocking tone.

“I don't
know,
” said Hannah. “He hardly ever goes on Facebook.”

“Well, duh, no boys go on Facebook unless they want to hit on you,” Alex said.

“Which you know 'cause that happens to you all the time,” said Hannah.

Zora blanched.

“Oh,” said Alex, shaken, “now you're being mean. That was really uncalled-for.”

“Well, you were being racist!” Hannah exclaimed.

“I was not!” said Alex. “Mexican is not a race!”

“I think we need to dial this down,” Zora said. “We're friends—”

“You're right,” Alex said. And to Hannah: “I'm sorry. I just was shocked, that's all. I'm sorry.”

Hannah shrugged. “It's okay.”

“Can we see a picture of him?” Alex asked.

Hannah picked up her phone and eagerly started thumbing and scrolling. “Well, I haven't taken any pictures
with
him,” she said, “because I didn't want him to think I was rushing things, like doing selfies together, you know? But here's his Facebook.” She held it up, proud. It showed a Facebook profile picture of a smiling dark-haired boy in a green soccer jersey.

“Oh my God, he's so cute!” said Zora.

“He is really cute,” Alex said, examining the photo like a coroner poring over a dead body.

Hannah smiled. “I know.”

“Well, why does he like you?” Alex said.

“Alex,”
Zora said.

“I just mean, like, how did you two get together?” said Alex, putting her face on her folded hands and fluttering her eyes.

Hannah started telling the story: she was walking her dog along Prospect Park one day when the boy had come out of the park with a soccer ball. They started walking together, talking together, and now they were talking all the time. “It's just so easy to talk to him,” she said breathlessly, “it's like we've known each other forever. He's just so—oh, he's just so sweet and I love the way he does all these stupid things to try and make me laugh, like he sends me funny texts and funny emojis…”

Zora listened, eyes shining.

Alex was scrolling through Facebook on her phone. She had found the boy's page. “I'm going to friend him,” she said.

Hannah started up from her seat. “Alex, no! You can't friend him! Then he'll know I've been talking about him!”

“Don't you want to know what he says about you?” Alex grinned.

Hannah said, “No!”

Zora said, “Alex, no!”

“I'm going to tell him I think he's hot,” Alex said, fingers poised over her phone.

“Alex!” Hannah whimpered.