American Girls (25 page)

But whether or not teenagers are actually using dating apps, they're coming of age in a culture that has already been affected by the attitudes the apps have introduced. “It's like ordering Seamless,” says Dan, a twenty-six-year-old in New York, referring to the online food-delivery service. “But you're ordering a person.” The comparison to online shopping seems apt. Dating apps are the free-market economy come to sex. The innovation of Tinder was the swipe—the flick of a finger on a picture, no more elaborate profiles necessary and no more fear of rejection; users only know whether they've been approved, never when they've been discarded. OkCupid, Happn, Hinge, and other dating apps soon adopted the function.

“Sex has become so easy,” says John, a twenty-six-year-old New Yorker. “I can go on my phone right now and no doubt I can find someone I can have sex with this evening, probably before midnight.” Of course, not every young man or teenage boy is going to have as much success with online dating as John—or want to; but even the possibility of such success through technology seems to be having an impact on not only sex and dating, but gender equality.

“It's rare for a woman of our generation to meet a man who treats her like a priority instead of an option,” wrote Erica Gordon on Elite Daily in 2014.

“Apps like Tinder and OkCupid give people the impression that there are thousands or millions of potential mates out there,” says David Buss, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in the evolution of human sexuality. “One dimension of this is the impact it has on men's psychology. When there is a surplus of women, or a perceived surplus of women, the whole mating system tends to shift toward short-term dating. Marriages become unstable. Divorces increase. Men don't have to commit, so they pursue a short-term mating strategy. Men are making that shift, and women are forced to go along with it in order to mate at all.”

But the opening up of dating options is something girls can avail themselves of as readily as boys; and there are many girls who say they're just as interested in “short-term mating strategies” as boys are. “Not every girl wants a boyfriend,” says Erika, an eighteen-year-old girl in New York. “Sometimes you just want to have sex, and there's nothing wrong with that.” Increased choice would seem to suggest more power in sex, love, and dating, for both girls and women. It's one of the successes of feminism that girls are no longer expected to marry whomever their parents say, for example, or marry at all; and so the fact that they now have a broad spectrum of choices of whom to meet or date or have sex with, through the Internet, would seem, in theory, a good thing for them; and in some ways it must be.

Conversely, we've seen historically that women who are in demand by men have attained more rights and freedoms in societies in which women overall suffer due to gender inequality. In the nineteenth century, white women in the American West had opportunities unavailable to women in eastern states (while women of color in both places were still cruelly disadvantaged)—more liberal divorce laws, equal pay for teachers, and, most important, the right to vote. The West was the first place in America to see women's suffrage. In nearly every western state or territory, women were enfranchised years, sometimes decades, before women won the right to vote in the East. Women in the West experienced more equality because there was a shortage of them; their labor was needed and valued, and so were their bodies, to put it bluntly, for sex and breeding. Historians have theorized that western states “sweetened the deal” in terms of rights in order to attract women's immigration to their lands, as well as to reward the women already there for helping to shoulder the hard work of pioneering. Susan B. Anthony herself was said to have believed that western men were more “chivalrous” than eastern men. Perhaps they had to be.

Online, men often show no signs of feeling the same pressure to be respectful. The behavior of men on social media, in a sexual context, is by now rather notorious. There are websites and Tumblr blogs devoted to it, such as Straight White Boys Texting, TinderLines, and TerribleOkCupidMessages, where contributors post the more outrageous sexts they've received via text and dating apps. There are thousands of examples, one more vulgar and ridiculously offensive than the next. (“Love the hair do you do anal?” “Damn girl is your body an orphanage? Because I wanna abandon my children in you,” and so on.) One of the marked characteristics of such messages is how quickly and even comically they become sexual, an indication of how little sense the sexter seems to have that he is addressing an actual person. (“Hey, how are you?”—woman. “Buttsecks?”—man. “Excuse me?”—woman. “Anal?”—man.) There's been less said about how this type of behavior is seen in boys as well as men, or what effect it is having on girls. “You want to laugh but sometimes you feel sick,” says Yvonna, a sixteen-year-old girl in Louisville.

Online dating is “truly an evolutionarily novel environment,” says David Buss. “But we come to this environment with the same evolved psychologies.” And women and girls may be further along than men and boys in terms of evolving away from sexist attitudes about sex. “Young women's expectations of safety and entitlement to respect have perhaps risen faster than some young men's willingness to respect them,” says Stephanie Coontz, who teaches history and family studies at Evergreen State College and has written about the history of dating. “Exploitative and disrespectful men have always existed. There are many evolved men, but there may be something going on in culture now that is making some more resistant to evolving.”

“Social media is destroying our lives,” said the girl at the Grove.

“So why don't you go off it?” I asked.

“Because then we would have no life,” said her friend.

The girls had been celebrating a birthday at the busy L.A. mall and now were on their way home. They carried bags of leftovers from the Cheesecake Factory. There were four of them: Melissa, Zoe, Padma, and Greta. They stopped to sit down and talk awhile at an outdoor table near the Gap. It was a steamy Saturday night and the mall was thronged. A salsa band was playing on a nearby stage; parents watched as little girls twirled around in princess dresses.

The girls were sixteen, with long straight hair, two blond and two brunette. They wore sleeveless summer dresses, flats and sandals. Melissa, Zoe, and Greta were white and Padma was Asian Indian. They all went to the same magnet high school in L.A. Zoe's parents were teachers; Melissa's father was a lawyer and her mother was a stay-at-home mom; Padma's parents were doctors; and Greta's father was in real estate. All the other girls' parents were married.

Greta, they said, was Instafamous, having thousands of followers on Instagram. She showed me a gallery of her Instagram pics; some were of Greta smiling, holding her dog, and some were of her in tank tops and crop tops, doing the duckface. In some of these pictures, Greta stared into the camera with the kind of intense expression seen on the faces of models and Hollywood stars. Some of her followers, Greta said, were people she knew, and some were “random dudes in Italy and Arabia.

“Almost every person I meet comes up to me because I have close to five thousand followers on Instagram,” Greta said breezily. “It's almost like a title people associate me with”—meaning “Instafamous.”

She relayed all this as if she thought it were ridiculous. The other girls listened with slightly strained expressions.

I asked them what social media accounts they were on.

“I have Facebook, a YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat,” Melissa said, “Vine…”

“Path, Skype,” Zoe added.

“Tumblr,” said Padma.

“I have a Twitter, but I don't use it except for stalking other people,” Greta said.

The other girls smiled knowingly.

“I think everyone does it,” said Greta. “Everyone looks through other people's profiles, but especially being teenage girls, we look at the profiles of the males we find attractive and we stalk the females the males find attractive. Like Hunter Hayes,” she added, referring to a twentysomething country singer with boyish good looks. “He's beautiful and going to be my husband someday. I mean it.” She laughed. “I just, like, go on his Twitter and look at what he's saying and pretend he's saying it to me.”

“Stalking isn't really
stalking,
” Melissa explained. “It's just a way to get to know them without them knowing that you're doing it. It's not like you're following them around and finding out where they live and looking in their windows.”

“It's a way to get to know them without the awkward, like, Oh, what do you like to do? You already
know,
” Padma said.

“You can know their likes and dislikes,” said Greta. “Oh, they like this band. So you can, like, casually wear that band's T-shirt and have them, like, fall in love with you or something. Or you can be like, Oh, they listen to
that
music? Ew. Go away.”

I asked how they knew when someone liked them.

“There's a certain etiquette, certain signs, especially when it comes to liking photos,” Greta said.

“When a boy likes your [Facebook] profile pic or almost anything you post, it means that they're stalking you, too. Which means they have an interest,” said Zoe.

“If they like your Instagram pictures or favorite your tweets,” Padma offered.

“But the thing with social media is, if a guy doesn't respond to you or doesn't stalk you back, then you're gonna feel rejected and upset,” Melissa said.

“And rejection hurts,” said Padma.

“On Snapchat,” Melissa went on, “I hate it when you send a picture of your face to a guy, and you say like, Hey, and they obviously see it, and it's like, Did I look ugly? Is that why you didn't respond?”

“What if they were just busy or something?” I asked.

“That's no excuse,” said Melissa. The other girls laughed. “No, really,” she said, “because I feel like sometimes they don't respond because they
know
it'll make us feel insecure.”

“They'll go like two days,” Padma explained. “Like this guy, when I said, Why didn't you respond to my text? He was like, Oh, sorry, I was with my dad. So he clearly read it? And chose to ignore me?” She sounded miffed. “Just, like, why would you spend all that time constantly texting me and then ignore me when I'm the one who texts you first? It causes a lot of relationship issues 'cause girls are like, Why didn't you text me
back
?”

“But then if you ask them that, they say you're needy,” said Melissa.

“Or ‘psycho,' ” said Padma, frowning.

“Well, we
are
kind of needy,” Melissa said after a moment.

“I think social media makes girls more needy,” said Zoe.

Studies have shown that social media use may be contributing to rising anxiety levels in teenage girls; but there hasn't been much attention paid to the question of whether the way girls and boys are interacting on social media is having a similarly negative effect on girls' sense of security and self-esteem.

“I mean we all, like, overanalyze it,” Greta said. “It goes both ways. I love it that, like, if I'm mad at a boy he can see that I've seen his message and he
knows
that I'm ignoring him.”

“It causes stress, though, when it's you,” Melissa said.

“And depression,” Padma concurred. “When they ignore your texts, and then you're like, Well, why am I even
alive
?”

“And so then you're just gonna go and, like, look for another person to fill that void and you're gonna move on to stalking someone else,” Melissa said.

“That's how men become such whores,” Greta said.

They didn't seem to need an evolutionary psychologist to tell them that an increased array of options was affecting boys' behavior—as well as their own.

“When somebody doesn't answer back you're like, Okay, well,
he
doesn't like me, but who does?” Melissa said, elaborating the point.

I asked them how they made the transition from social media interaction to face-to-face communication. How did you go from liking a Facebook profile pic to having a conversation?

They blinked.

“You talk to them on Facebook, you do chat with them,” Melissa said.

“You start texting,” said Zoe.

“Boys never start anything in person,” Melissa said. “They just always text you.”

Who made the first online overtures, girls or boys, or was it equal? I asked.

“It's mostly boys,” said Greta.

“But sometimes if a guy's too shy, then you have to start it,” Padma said. “It's always this panic moment when you're like, Should I? Shouldn't I? So you type it,” a message or text, “and it just sits there for a while and you debate it and then the second you hit send—” She clutched her chest to illustrate panic.

“Or you make your friend hit send for you,” Zoe said.

They smiled again.

“ 'Cause once you send one message it kind of starts it all,” Padma said.

Starts what? I asked.

“Texting,” they said.

“There's this boy, Seth,” Greta said, “and when he liked my profile picture, I knew it was like, Hey, 'sup, you cute. Then we sat next to each other at a party and he held my hand. We were cute. And we ended up exchanging numbers, and then we texted continuously for about two weeks about pygmy elephants.”

But through all their texting about this curious subject—“it was just something funny and random to talk about,” Greta said—they never talked on the phone, never again met in person. And then it petered out.

“I'm not sure why,” said Greta. “But then I found out he stalked my YouTube channel, so, like, that's a plus. But the one thing I didn't like about him,” she added, “was he didn't follow me back on Instagram. Social media causes
soooooo
much anxiety.”

The other girls nodded.

I asked if they thought communicating on social media made it harder to connect with someone emotionally.

“Yes,”
they said.

“One hundred percent,” said Greta.

“You can't truly tell someone's emotions over text,” said Zoe.

“The term ‘texting relationship' is used a lot,” Greta said. That was a relationship that took place entirely over text—a kind of online dating that existed only online. They said there were girls who had online “boyfriends” they had never met.

“Dating online is a joke, I think,” said Zoe.

I asked them if they thought boys were as focused on social media as girls.

“Maybe not
as
much,” Melissa said. “But they definitely are on it a lot 'cause they know we're on it and it's how they can talk to girls.”

“Guys actually take the Facebook-talking situation way too far,” Zoe said.

“They can get
very
aggressive,” said Melissa.

“Like when guys start a Facebook thing, they want too much,” said Padma. “They want to get some. They try with different girls to see who would give more of themselves.”

“It leads to major man-whoring,” Greta said.

“They're definitely more forward to us online than in person,” Zoe said. “Because they're not saying it to our faces.”

“Boys can be more confident online,” said Greta.

“That's completely true,” Padma said. “If they tried to say the same things to us in person, there's a high possibility of them getting kicked in the balls!”

Her eyes flashed.

“This guy Seth, who is normally timid in real life, sends girls messages asking for nudes,” Greta said.

She held up a text exchange on her phone in which Seth had asked her to “send pics”—meaning nudes, a request Seth had punctuated with a smiley face. Greta had responded “Lololol” and “Hahahaha” and “Nope.”

“It wasn't THAT funny,” Seth had texted back.

“My friend, she was VC-ing”—or video chatting—“this guy she was kind of dating,” Melissa said. “He sent so many nudes to her, but she wasn't trusting that he wouldn't show the pictures to other people. So she Skyped him and showed him nudes that way. He took a screenshot without her knowing it. He sent it to so many people and the entire baseball team. She was whispered about and called names. It's never gone away. He still has it and won't delete it.”

I asked them why they thought girls sent nudes, or even posted provocative pictures of themselves, if they knew they could be spread around.

“More provocative equals more likes,” Greta said offhandedly.

“It attracts more guys and then it makes other girls think about doing it just for the attention,” said Padma. “They're attention whores.”

“My father thinks all my photos are provocative,” Greta mused.

“I think some girls post slutty pictures of themselves to show guys the side to them that guys want to see,” Zoe said. “It's annoying.”

“Girls call them sluts. Boys call it hot,” Padma said.

Greta shrugged. “I call it hilarious.”