American Girls (29 page)

In other corners of the country, the slut-shaming of girls continued. “We know this girl Ursula that had a list of guys she had given blowjobs to, like forty-five people,” said Sarah. Everyone laughed.

Sarah and her friends Elena, Jeff, and Grace, all teenagers from the Valley, were having dinner in L.A. one night before going to a movie.

Over burgers and fries at an outdoor café, they started talking about the girls at their high school they called “bad.”

“Ava's like that, too,” said Jeff. “She asked me out and then took my head and, like, shoved it in her bra.”

“She gave Richie a handjob in the back of the bus going to band competition,” Sarah said.

They talked about girls who had made sex tapes; girls who had sex with different guys at parties every weekend. “Was that the same weekend she went to the emergency room [for drugs]?” Grace asked.

“Remember when Anita got semen on Maya's jacket?” Jeff said with a smile.

“And then Maya posted it on her [Facebook] wall,” Sarah said, laughing.

“She asked to borrow Maya's jacket and she wore the jacket, and she gave this guy a blowjob at a party while she was wearing the jacket,” Jeff said.

“And then she gave the jacket back to Maya without washing it, so Maya took a picture of the jacket with the stain and posted it on Anita's wall: ‘You didn't wash my jacket,' ” said Sarah.

They laughed.

“Which was so mean, but I love that she did that. I was like, Oh my
God,
” said Jeff.

On a sunny day in L.A., I sat with Emily at a table at the Grove and she showed me how to download Tinder. She'd deleted the app from her phone after her bad experience with the boy she'd met up with who hadn't looked like his picture.

“I realized it was too risky,” she said. “ 'Cause you're never gonna know what they really look like. It's all based on looks. Like, Do I like you from your picture? So it's kind of dumb that people post pictures that don't even look like them in person.”

She logged on to Facebook, and within a matter of seconds she was on Tinder, swiping through the profiles of boys. “They're all ridiculous,” she murmured, swiping. There were pictures of boys smiling and skateboarding and snowboarding, boys holding bottles of beer and smoking bongs. Emily swiped right on every picture, indicating interest, and within minutes she was getting matches. Her picture, now centered in a little circle, came rolling toward a boy's picture in another circle, and collided with it, with a little
ding.
“See,” she said, “it's like a game.”

Within a few more minutes she was getting messages. She scrolled through them, opening them up. Most were simple greetings—“Hey beautiful,” “Hello gorgeous,” “What's up”—and then one of them said, “Body pic?” Meaning that the boy was asking to see a picture of Emily's entire body, that her face was not enough for him to make his assessment of her.

Another message said, “You have nice boobs.”

“Yeah,” Emily said, “that's why I went off it. You get a lot of rude stuff like that.”

She said that she was still “in love” with the boy who had broken her heart: “even though I know it's stupid, I can't make the feelings stop.” She said the boy was still posting pictures of himself on Facebook and Instagram with other girls. “It doesn't make me feel good to see that. It's like a knife in my stomach every time I see that because he really made me think he cared. I told him everything, like even stuff about my family,” while messaging him at night. “I felt like we were in love. He said he loved me.”

I asked her why she didn't just unfollow him.

“Because,” she said, “then he'll know I care.”

She said she'd found out the boy was unfaithful when “my friend saw his chat boxes open on his computer and he was talking to these other girls at the same time as me. I should have known better” than to be with him, she said. “I thought I knew him. But when I think about it, I really only knew him from Facebook. I stalked him.”

She said she was trying not to check Facebook as much, so she wouldn't see the boy's pictures, but being off social media had made her feel “anxious, like I don't know what's going on.” Being on social media also made her feel anxious, she said. “You can lose yourself in all the posting. It's like everything's just always in your face. Sometimes it gets boring, and sometimes you feel jealous and left out, like people post like party pictures and you weren't there. It makes you feel like a loser.

“That's part of why I think I went on Tinder, to be honest,” she said. To feel better about herself, to get matches, to feel wanted.

“Everybody's always gotta post,” she continued. “We went to breakfast a few days ago, me and my friends, and when we got there my one friend was like, Okay, I call Instagramming this breakfast. I call the Instagram shot. We were literally just going out for breakfast and she wanted to Instagram the moment. And then we had a plan to go to the museum later, and this other girl was like, I call Instagramming a picture of us at the museum.”

Why couldn't you all just post pictures at the museum? I asked.

“Because you all have some of the same followers and if you all post the same pictures you look stupid,” Emily said.

“There's so much pressure to be on social media,” she said. “Like if you're not, it's like you don't exist. Or people feel like you're judging them for being on it. Like, what, are you looking down on this generation? But I think somewhere deep inside they know it's weird to be on it all the time.”

Her phone dinged and she saw she had another match on Tinder. She checked her phone. She stared at it a moment. “Oh, wow,” she said. “I actually know this person. He is actually kind of cute. I might message him. I don't know.”

Zoe lived in a suburban neighborhood in west L.A. full of oaks and evergreen trees and Spanish Colonial Revival bungalows built in the 1920s. When I went to see her almost a year after our first meeting, Zoe was still sixteen, now almost seventeen. After just this short space of time, she seemed older and more grown up than when I'd met her with her friends at the Grove.

She was barefoot, wearing a purple flowered romper. She had a friend over, Gabby, an Asian girl the same age as she. Gabby had long dark hair and bright dark eyes and wore a romper, too, a black one with flowers. Gabby's parents did marketing for a large corporation.

They sat on the porch and talked about how, even since they had been in middle school, it seemed like there was more focus on social media. Zoe said, “It increases every single day. We're passing down our technology to even younger kids. Girls our age live on their phones. We feel like our social lives are in our phones, and as long as we feel that way, people will keep making apps to make us rely on it even more.

“It's changed even since we were thirteen,” she said. “Now you pretty much can get anything from your phone. It can be anything, like ordering a pizza; you don't have to talk to anyone anymore. You don't have to write anymore. We're typing pretty much everything on our phones. My parents talk about how when they were teenagers they would have to go and actually have a conversation to hang out with someone; now you just pick up your phones and have a conversation online.”

“I find most of the time I'm with my friends I feel so disconnected with them because of technology,” Gabby said. “They're always on their phones to play a game or see what someone is doing somewhere else. A phone is almost becoming like a person—like you can tell Siri anything, you can ask the Internet anything you want.”

“Apple is even adding human characteristics to your phone to make you feel closer to it,” said Zoe. “We've been watching movies about robots for years, but now we've actually created a robot that we all have a connection to—and now we have to include that ‘person' in our lives or we feel like we can't be ourselves.”

“I hate it,” Gabby said.

I asked them how many minutes or hours a day they were on their phones.

“Too much,” Zoe said with a laugh.

Gabby said, “It's hard to say, because it's kind of normal to be on your phone so often. I think I probably check my phone every five minutes?”

“I cannot imagine counting my texts,” Zoe said. “I'm texting when I don't even realize I'm texting. I'll read something and reply and I'll have no idea what I said, it's almost unconscious.”

“And yet when you have a conversation with someone you tend to remember everything about it,” Gabby said, “even the way that they said everything.”

They both said they got their phones in sixth grade and had immediately run up their parents' accounts with texts. “I got a navy Razr,” Zoe said with a smile. “I thought I was so cool. But now I babysit for a girl who is seven years old and she just showed me she got an iPhone.”

“That's like normal to them now,” said Gabby.

It was funny to hear that, at age sixteen, they sounded so appalled at the speed with which younger kids were adopting cellular technology; they sounded like parents.

“My mom used to always tell me to write letters to people,” said Gabby, “and now she's like, Just text them, so she's kind of affected by it, too; it's not just teenagers, it's everyone.”

“My parents always talk about how they never talk on the phone anymore,” Zoe said. “They can't believe it.”

I asked them why they thought social media was proving so addictive.

“It's the ease and the speed of everything,” Zoe said.

“And like on Instagram,” said Gabby, “it's really easy to see how many likes and followers you have, and I think a big part of social media is competition for likes and followers.”

“We've transferred high school popularity into social media measurements,” Zoe agreed. “The popularity contest—it's never been a good thing, and now that we have the actual numbers, we've become greedy. We want more attention. I think people have become obsessed with this attention. It's become an addiction to gain as much as we can. It's depressing how self-conscious we are about these things.”

I asked them if kids they knew ever talked about all this—did they ever say, Hey, this is really strange what we're doing, being on social media all the time?

“I feel like we know it,” Gabby said, “it's there; but we don't have conversations about it, like, Am I doing this too much? We all do it, so we don't question it. That would mean you might have to stop, and no one wants to stop. Also I think the temptation of being able to self-promote, where it doesn't show who you really are as a person, is just too strong—you can be whoever you want to be on social media. You can promote the good things about your reputation, and be this amazing person, and nobody's ever gonna know what's underneath all of that. And that's very appealing to people.”

“It's giving everybody a cover image of who they really are,” said Zoe. “Sometimes the people with thousands of followers can be the complete opposite of who you think they are. But some people still believe in the image and take it way too seriously; they think they know people from the image they put out; but you only really understand a person if you have actual conversations with them.”

They said it was common now for kids who had never met to know one another from social media; to be at a party, for example, and recognize a girl from another school from following her on Instagram; also to know things about her from what she had posted; even to have gossiped about her, had opinions about her, or maybe judged her.

“It's kinda scary,” Gabby said, “it'll be like, Oh, did you see what she posted? Did you see this person's Snapchat Story?”

“If you bring up any person's Snapchat Story, most likely someone will know what you're talking about,” said Zoe.

“Everything just revolves around these Internet people we create,” Gabby said.

“And everyone is super-aware of everyone's ranking on these sites,” Zoe said. “I don't think we would be so addicted to it unless everybody else was—if everyone wasn't talking about it all the time. It's become so normal to talk about Instagram.”

The talk turned to girls who posted provocative pictures, as it almost always did when talking to girls about social media and girls.

“It was really eye-opening this summer to see all the girls in bikinis and all this stuff,” Gabby said. “They want people to notice them, and they do everything they can to get people to like them.

“It's really hard to see that,” she added. “But it's just so normal. Everyone says, Wow, look at her. It really takes away from wanting to know about people and their personality and wanting to get to know someone.”

“People have become caught up in how much attention they're getting,” Zoe said, “and it doesn't have to be good attention, it can be bad attention; but it feels like girls have become more absorbed with getting attention through these networks for some reason. We see how an icon like Miley Cyrus changed her look dramatically and got so much attention for it. We look up to a person who receives attention like that. We're trying to clone ourselves in a certain way; and some girls figure, Oh, by showing my ass on Facebook I'm getting attention, I'm getting talked about, people are noticing me and in some way that's good. We position ourselves to look the best that we can look by propping up our boobs or doing whatever it will take.”

I asked them how the boys they knew thought about girls who posted provocative pictures.

“I have a lot of guy friends,” Zoe said, “and someone will mention the name of a girl, and the first thing they say is, Oh, like that girl with the big ass.”

“That's what they recognize someone for,” Gabby said with a frown.

“It's depressing,” said Zoe, “because guys have come to recognize women from images on the Internet. Guys look at this as like a different kind of porn, almost. It's self-generated porn.”

I asked if the guys they knew watched porn.

“Oh, yeah, definitely,” Zoe said. “They talk about looking at porn; it's just the thing you expect from a guy, it's like normal, nobody questions it or looks down upon it.”

“But looking at porn, you view women as something that they're not,” Gabby said. “It's the way that they're ‘supposed' to look and it just makes everyone have these high expectations of people.”

“I think it's exhilarating for boys to see a girl they actually know looking porny” on social media, Zoe said. “Guys even seem to enjoy it better than porn when they see girls they recognize or they know in real life—they seem more interested in it. It's like a feeling of power, maybe? Like they think these girls are doing it for them? And a lot of guys now are interested in girls based completely on what they look like on social media,” she said. “No one is actually liking anyone for who they are, they're just interested in them for their image or how many likes they have.”

They said there was a lot of sharing of nudes in their school. “All the time,” said Gabby. “And it always spreads.”

“You hear story after story of people taking a picture that was meant for one person and that picture being spread,” said Zoe. “It's a drastic amount of people.”

“This crazy thing happened in our school,” Gabby said. “There was this guy that got hold of all these pictures of girls and made an Instagram account and posted all these girls' nudes”—it was another slut page. “It got flagged and taken down,” she added.

I asked them what happened to the boy who posted the account. Did any girls ever confront him about it? Did he ever get called out?

“It's unfortunate,” Gabby said, “but something girls have to deal with is we get jealous of each other and feel the need to judge each other. It's much easier to pick on a girl who sent nudes and say, Oh, why did she do that, or, She's a slut, than to stand up to the guy who posted the pictures of her. She seems to be so vulnerable and easy to take advantage of, and no girl wants to be in that position. So girls don't really stand up for each other or themselves as much as they should. We're scared of standing up for girls in general even though we know how that feels and we know how that hurts, and we'd give anything to know someone's standing up for us, but sometimes girls aren't that brave and they don't want to be picked on as well.”

“When you see a naked picture of someone in your class,” Zoe said, “I know a lot of girls that judge; people who say it's all their fault; but people don't consider how these things are being spread around and how cruel people are actually being to each other. It's bullying; it's sexual assault, almost. It is sexual assault. But no one will say that or act like that's what it is.

“I have a friend, a guy, who has a friend I'm not a fan of,” she went on, “and every time a girl's name will come up he'll say, Oh, I have nudes of her. That's the first thing he'll say about a girl.”

And how did she respond to that? I asked.

“I don't say anything,” Zoe said. “Even though I know I should.”

“When guys share these things,” or nudes, “there's no shame in it for them,” Gabby said. “They don't think about how it could shame a girl or hurt a girl or affect them even in really terrible ways. And nobody blames the guy—they blame the girl for even sharing nudes in the first place. The boy doesn't get blamed for sharing. In our school it happens all the time. It's just so normal now—so guys don't think about these things; they don't even care to question what they're saying or doing.”

“Yeah, guys, honestly,” Zoe said, “will not even know a girl at all and assume she's a complete slut because she wears short shorts, for instance. Guys don't really consider how much girls actually go through, especially in our teenage years. Guys really aren't aware or thinking about how we as women are being harassed or how often we are being mistreated by guys all over.”

“I think girls want to be seen as a great person to guys,” Gabby said, “so when a guy calls her a slut or a whore it really hurts them 'cause they feel like it's coming from someone who's important or who they want to impress. Girls just have to realize they're just words—guys don't know what they're saying when they say those things.”

I asked if boys ever stood up for girls who were harassed or slut-shamed.

“I've never met a guy who's stood up for any girl who's been in any situation where she's being sexually harassed in any way,” Zoe said. “They're almost blind to it; they just assume it's always the girl's issues and for her to deal with.”

“I think boys definitely care more about their reputation than they do about saving someone's feelings,” Gabby said. “They won't stand up for someone in fear of them being the one who's picked on or who's hurt.”

“And it's not just at school,” Zoe said, “it's out in the street. I've been catcalled and men are standing there and they say nothing. I'll walk down a busy street and I'll be honked at, I'll be whistled at by random guys—they don't even consider us as human beings, even though in our society we're supposed to be equals. I certainly do not feel like an equal even though in our society we're supposed to be equals. I feel like I am looked down upon in that I can be misused and mistreated in any way, shape, or form. But I definitely feel like I deserve a voice in how I wish to be treated and how unfair it is to be looked down upon because of being a girl.”

In 2014, the issue of catcalling became a subject of national concern with the release of a controversial video, “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman” by Hollaback, an organization dedicated to raising awareness about street harassment. The Hollaback video showed a young woman walking around Manhattan for ten hours as she was catcalled and harassed more than 100 times. The video was widely criticized for showing harassment by mostly men of color—an awful mistake on the part of the organization, which served to distract attention from a widespread problem. In 2014, a national study by the organization Stop Street Harassment found that 65 percent of women said they had experienced some form of street harassment. Fifty-seven percent said they had experienced verbal harassment, and 41 percent said they had experienced physically aggressive forms, such as being groped or followed. Half of all women reported experiencing street harassment by the age of seventeen.