American Girls (28 page)

Hannah's image similarly seemed to take a turn for the better when she showed herself to be in a committed relationship with a catch. On Instagram, she started posting pictures of the two of them together—he was a tall, white, handsome football player with a megawatt smile, a defensive tackle for the El Capitan Vaqueros named Dylan Vockrodt. Hannah started dating him about a month after she was rescued, she said on Ask.fm, where she'd gone to tell everyone about it. Dylan didn't seem to mind. “I look ripped,” he commented on one of her pictures. “Those guns,” he said, meaning his muscular biceps.

Hannah posted Instagram pictures of the two of them kissing and cuddling. “You and Dylan are so cute!” an Ask.fm user gushed. Hannah posted pictures of herself in her cheerleading uniform and Dylan in his football uniform, pictures of them hugging and mugging and looking like the perfect high school couple. She posted pictures of them acting silly together and frolicking on the beach—the latter a favorite shot in coverage of famous couples in tabloid media. She posted pictures that suggested she and Dylan had had a sleepover at her grandmother's house; there he was, sweetly cooking her breakfast in the morning. “Awww,” said fans. But Hannah assured Ask.fm users that she and her new boyfriend had slept in separate rooms. She was no longer the party girl giving lap dances on a party bus.

And all of these pictures were accompanied by the sort of breathless commentary that is the language of relationships played out on social media: he was her “one true love,” the “man who saved my life.” “I never thought it would be you.”

Hannah's girl followers loved her new romance. They said: “Well you and Dyl are a match made in heaven huh?” “Relationship goals!” “OTP!” “Such a adorable couple!” Hannah posted pictures of herself and Dylan in their finery at their homecoming dance. And with all this posting, Hannah's hate abated. Her story shifted from one about “the Lakeside Lolita” to one of a girl triumphing in the face of adversity and being rewarded with the love of a strapping young man. It was as if, by presenting an image of herself in an idealized, all-American relationship, she had sanitized her past, even transformed herself into a classic American prom queen. She'd re-created herself as the perfect girlfriend, the perfect girl, on social media.

She very well could have taken as a model the way celebrity couples advertise their relationships online, seen the likes and followers and general goodwill that such posting brings. The broadcasting of bliss is part of what makes people love Kim and Kanye, Beyoncé and Jay Z. When Taylor Swift posted an Instagram shot of herself in a bikini getting a piggyback ride from her new boyfriend, Scottish DJ Calvin Harris, the picture got more than 2.5 million likes and over 76,000 comments: “CUTEST COUPLE EVER!!!!!!!!!” Swift's followers soared in the months after the revelation of her new committed relationship, and she became the most followed person on Instagram, beating Kim Kardashian. (At the end of 2015, Swift had more than 58 million Instagram followers and Kardashian had more than 54 million.) An article in
Billboard,
“Taylor Swift & Calvin Harris: Their Instagram Love Story,” noted that the couple “have very much controlled the narrative of their relationship through Instagram,” evading paparazzi and strategically clueing in fans as to the state of their togetherness through pictures posted on each other's Instagram accounts.

On Kanye's thirty-eighth birthday, Kim posted a photo of the two of them in stylish black-and-white. “Happy Birthday to my best friend in the entire world!” she wrote. “You are the most amazing husband and dad! You inspire me every single day!…You have a heart of gold!” The post got more than a million likes.

On Dylan's eighteenth birthday, Hannah posted a video montage of their romantic moments with a message that sounded almost as if Kim had written it: “Happy 18th birthday to the love of my life, the man that stole my heart almost two years ago! I love you way more then you can imagine and I'm so thankful your mine…Happy birthday love bug. Your legal now.”

But social media fame has its own set of dangers. In the summer of 2015, Hannah posted on Instagram an image of what looked to be a profile page for Dylan Vockrodt. However, Hannah warned her followers: “There is some weird person pretending to be Dylan flirting with girls and trying to get nudes from people…Dylan and I are happy and love each other and not letting anyone come between us.”

When I was in Williamsburg one evening, I met some girls in the Barnes & Noble at the New Town mall. They were all wearing soft sweaters, jeans, and sneakers, except for Dasha, who wore a blue blazer and gold-studded boots. They were black, all with straight shoulder-length brown hair, except for Diandra, who had black and golden braids. Nina wore glasses. They were all sixteen, except for Dasha, Nina's sister, who was fifteen.

They were students at the same high school, a big bustling school with winning sports teams. Diandra, Dasha, and Chelsea were competitive cheerleaders there. Nina used to be a cheerleader, but now she ran track. The girls said they liked their school, they thought it was “a good place.” Nina and Dasha's mother was an executive assistant and their father a hospital administrator. Chelsea's mother and father were teachers, and Diandra's dad worked in construction, while her mother was a stay-at-home mom. All of their parents were married.

They couldn't talk to me then, they said, because they had to ask their parents. So the next day, at a Starbucks in a shopping plaza off Pocahontas Trail, we met again. All of their mothers accompanied them, as did one of their fathers. One of their grandmothers came. Their family members sat at a table nearby, having coffee.

It would have been like any other day at a coffee store, with the hissing of the espresso machines in the background and patrons at tables tapping at their phones, except for what we were talking about: the arrest of a sixteen-year-old local girl for allegedly putting naked pictures of herself on Twitter (the same girl mentioned earlier).

I asked the girls if they had ever heard of a girl doing that before.

“It's not common for them to put it on Twitter
themselves,
” Diandra said. “But it's common for them to send it to someone else.”

“And then it ends up on there because of that person they send it to,” said Dasha.

“People will send nude pictures confidentially to their boyfriend,” Nina said, “and then when they break up, the boy will be like, Well, I would like to confirm that we are not together anymore. So they just put it out there” on social media. “They send it to someone and that someone puts it on Instagram or Twitter. Like they have—”

“Pages on it,” Diandra said.

“They have pages on it,” Nina said. “They have a page with a whole bunch of nude pictures of every girl that's ever sent out a nude before.”

“There's lots of pages,” Dasha said, “and they put it on there and they ‘at' them”—meaning that girls whose nudes were shared were notified by others with an @ sign with their usernames.

“They ‘at' their names, like they don't care about their feelings,” Nina said. “It will just be up there for everybody to see.”

“And
everybody
sees it,” said Diandra.

I asked them how often this happened.

“A
lot,
” Nina said. “Like every few weeks.”

This was the first time I was hearing of this. Later, I would find out from the girls in Boca and the Bronx and other places about slut pages. I still remember how striking it was to me to hear these four very composed and decent girls talking about something so outrageous as if it were normal, with their parents sitting just a few feet away. I had come to James City County thinking that the arrest of the girl who posted her pictures on Twitter was something remarkable. But it wasn't remarkable, it was only ironic that she had been arrested, when, from what these girls were telling me, boys at their school routinely shared nudes of girls without adults even noticing, much less taking any action. What was remarkable was that it was normal to the girls, and that they spoke of it as if it were something that just was.

“It bothers me though,” Nina said. “What bothers me is you see how you can't trust.”

“A girl will send a naked picture to somebody,” Dasha agreed, “and they trust that they won't send it out.”

“But I don't understand why they think they
can
trust,” said Diandra. “ 'Cause once they've done it, somebody can just be like, Oh, I don't like her anymore, I'm over her. And they can send it to a page.”

“For
everybody
to see,” said Nina, shaking her head.

“And people make rude comments on the pictures,” said Diandra.

“People will say like, Oh, I know whose body that is,” Nina said. “And sometimes they will even add their names.”

I asked them how the girls in the pictures reacted to the exposure.

“Sometimes they try and just delete everything,” Diandra said.

“Some don't care,” said Nina. “They act like they like the attention. Some are just like, Oh, yeah, I know my body looks good, so I don't care if everybody sees it. And some are really shocked that it's even up there. It depends on the girl.”

“But most of them do care,” Diandra said, “because if you have a picture of your body on Instagram, then it will be hard for you to get another relationship, because the boys'll be like, Oh, no, I don't want to be with you because everybody has seen your body; it's not just mine. It's everybody's because everybody already saw it. So it affects a person a lot, not just at that one moment but, like, their whole life.”

It was shocking to hear of all this for the first time, the information conjuring up connections that went back to the Victorian era and Puritan Boston and the Bible: they were talking about a woman, a girl, being “ruined,” something that's not supposed to happen anymore, more than 100 years after the so-called first wave of the feminist movement. In some countries today, “ruined” girls and women are still stoned. It's a horrible reality, not to be diminished. But there's an element to some girls' experience on social media that's not unlike a kind of stoning, a virtual stoning.

The girls said that, while it was mostly boys sharing nudes of girls, there were also boys who put “dick pics” on their accounts, which got forwarded to slut pages as well.

“They'll post a picture and say like, Oh, yeah, I'm big,” said Nina. The other girls laughed. “They put it on their Instagram, and then someone will say in the comments like, Oh, no, you ain't even that big”—the other girls giggled—“and then they get their feelings hurt. So this is with everybody. It's not just girls or boys” posting nudes. “It's both.”

Was there a difference in how a girl was seen for sending nudes, versus a boy? I asked.

“Oh,
yes,
” they said. “There really is.”

“A girl who sends naked pictures, she's a slut, but if a boy does it, everyone just laughs,” Nina said.

The same double standard applied to a girl who had sex versus a boy who had sex, they said. If a boy had sex, nothing negative was said about him.

“Nothing at all,” Dasha said. “It's like boys, they get props, but girls, they have a title if they do things.”

“Labels,” said Nina. “Like girls will be called a ho or thot. The boys just wanted to be able to say that they had that person and then they'll go and tell their friends, so they can say they did all these girls.”

The other girls said, “Yep.”

The double standard over having sex was more commonly known; and yet it was still surprising to hear them talk about it as if it were a fact of life, like bad weather, about which nothing could be done. When and how had sexism gotten so bad in the lives of girls?

Sometimes, they said, it was considered “okay” for a girl to have sex, but only in the context of a committed relationship. “Sometimes they judge a girl on how long she's been dating the boy,” Dasha said. “Like if you're dating for like a year and you do it, they don't really call you anything because you've been dating the boy for a year. But if you've just been dating for like a month or so and you have sex with them, you're considered a ho.”

“Just because a girl did it one time they're considered a ho, even though it could have been their first time doing it,” Nina said.

And once the label was there, it stuck for all of a girl's high school years, they said.

“And people keep bringing it up and bringing it up,” said Chelsea.

“It's not fair,” Dasha said.

“But, I mean, I don't think that you
should
have sex with a guy that you've been dating for like two months or so,” Chelsea added gently.

“Yes, to me, there's a time frame that should go by,” Nina said.

“I don't know,” Dasha countered. “Put a label on you?” She cocked her head. “It's just, like, I don't
agree
with you, but I don't agree with them putting a label on you, either. You did it, you did it.” She shrugged.

“But you should
know
them,” Diandra contended. “You should know them, like, really, really well, and you should actually both trust each other.”

“Yeah, okay,” Dasha conceded. “If he's not willing to wait, he is obviously not the right person.”

“Like he can't just, like, force it on you,” Nina said. “If you say no, he has to respect that. If he actually is waiting for your time when you're ready, then that's different than somebody that's pushing it on you and always bringing it up. Then it just shows that that's all they want.”

I asked them if they knew any boys like that.

“A
lot,
” Nina said.

The other girls said, “Yeah.”

“Because they're trying to make themselves seem like they have all the girls,” Nina said.

I asked them to describe the boys in their school.

“Childish,” said Diandra.

They laughed. She giggled.

“It's certain groups,” Diandra said. “There's certain boys who are just like trying to bring up their number [of sex partners] higher than anybody else in their group. And that's when it hurts the girls. It hurts them because they really trust these people—they really trust them with everything they have. And once the trust is gone, they feel like they can't trust anybody ever again.”

“And that's how a lot of girls just feel like they just don't care anymore,” said Nina. “That's why I think some girls just start having sex with a lot of people, because they think that, I mean, regardless, everybody's going to talk about me, so why not just do it?”

They were highly aware of the inequality in girls' lives. Girls could be called sluts, they said, not only for having sex but for how they dressed. “The boys have a
lot
to say about how people dress,” Nina said. “If a girl wears short skirts or something, then the boys will notice them and then try to get something from them,” meaning sexually.

They were aware, too, of how impossible standards of beauty exerted pressure on girls. “Like how you have to wear makeup,” Chelsea said. “Like with models, there's a lot of stuff going on with computers, so they don't even really look like that. But they make you think they do and then you want to look like that, too. I think that's why some girls will show off their bodies, to show off what they have.”

“And like the way they make you think you have to change yourself, like lose weight or gain weight, instead of just being yourself,” said Nina.

“I think it's making us, like, lower,” Diandra said. “It's bringing us down as females…Like, just be you. Because every day it's like you have to wake up and put on a mask and try to be somebody else instead of being yourself. And you can't ever be happy.”