American Girls (30 page)

In her book
Bossypants,
Tina Fey wrote that when she was attending a workshop for women as part of her research for writing the movie
Mean Girls,
the women were asked about the moment when “they knew they were a woman,” and most said it was when they were harassed on the street. “The group of women was racially and economically diverse,” Fey wrote, “but the answers had a very similar theme. Almost everyone first realized they were becoming a grown woman when some dude did something nasty to them. ‘I was walking home from ballet and a guy in a car yelled, Lick me!' ‘I was babysitting my younger cousins when a guy drove by and yelled, Nice ass.' There were pretty much zero examples like ‘I first knew I was a woman when my mother and father took me out to dinner to celebrate my success on the debate team.' It was mostly men yelling shit from cars.”

The psychological effects on girls of street harassment can be profound. A 2008 article in the journal
Social Justice Research
reported that “the present research suggests that stranger harassment…is a frequent experience for young adult women, and that it has negative implications for their well-being…Sexual objectification is a clear component of both sexual harassment and stranger harassment. In both cases, women are treated as objects to be looked at and touched, and not as intelligent human beings.”

“I think [street harassment] makes girls hyperaware of their bodies and at an extremely young age,” says Kathryn Stamoulis, an adjunct professor of psychology at Hunter College and psychologist in New York who specializes in treating adolescents. “A girl's confronted with this idea that a woman's body is an object or a tool for a man's arousal or amusement; she becomes very conscious of ‘how am I appearing to men.' Then her value can get very tied up in that once she starts looking at her body as a means of someone else's pleasure. This is tied to lower self-esteem, anxiety, depression—it's all related to not valuing all the good things a person has to offer and placing all her value on her sexuality or appearance. Teenage girls are already navigating their emerging sexuality with their peers—to then have this unwanted and outside sexuality thrown at them in this one-sided way with street harassment is just really heartbreaking on a lot of levels.”

In 2014, girls all over the world started posting on social media about their experience with street harassment, using the hashtags #catcalling, #streetharassment, and #NotJustHello. The sentiment underlying the posts of many girls was echoed in one, from a teenager with the handle @ankestroobs: “To the guys catcalling me: please don't do that to any woman ever again. It made me feel insecure, scared and uncomfortable.” Social media was a place where girls could protest street harassment; ironically, it was also a kind of virtual street itself where girls were continually being harassed, without much attention being paid to the possible emotional consequences.

I asked the girls how it was in school—did boys respect them in class?

“A lot of the time boys want to be know-it-alls and act like they have something that should be heard and needs to be listened to more than girls,” said Gabby. “If a girl talks up a lot, they want to one-up her.”

“I feel as though I have more equal rights
in
the classroom,” said Zoe. “Outside the classroom, even boys who will treat you as an equal in the classroom will be disrespectful outside of it.”

Gabby said, “Nobody has any idea this is going on.”

I asked them if girls in their school ever talked about feminism.

“They do,” Zoe said, “but a lot of them won't talk about it too much because there are a lot of guys who disagree with feminists. I know guys who think the definition of feminism is being anti-men, which is not true—it's one hundred percent about equality. We're fighting for equal rights for women, not to have more rights than men. I have a guy friend who said that feminists think it's okay for women to hit men. Where is he getting this stuff? Where do guys get this stuff where they think women want more rights than men?”

“They get it off the Internet,” Gabby said. “From like Reddit threads and the meninists,” the antifeminist movement. “And I saw this debate online that said, ‘Do women have more rights than men?' And eighty percent said yes they do.”

They began to laugh.

It was a house party in the Hamptons; it had taken Sydney a month to convince her mother to let her go. Her mother was so overprotective, she hadn't even let Sydney go down to the lobby of their building by herself until she was thirteen. She was always encouraging Sydney to look hot and cute—she made her dress up as Britney Spears for Halloween one year; she said she thought it would be “cool”—but then she wouldn't let her show off how hot and cute she was by letting her go to parties with kids from school. Sydney had to sneak out. She knew it was wrong. But her mother was such a maniac when it came to watching over her. It was all because Sydney had been cyberbullied in eighth grade. But that was another story.

And so it took a month of coaxing and cajoling to get her mother to say okay. It wasn't like Sydney to whine or demand. She knew how to convince her mother of something. Every girl did, if she was a girl. Her mother liked to hang out with her, so she would do that, to soften her up. They would snuggle in bed together and watch reruns of
Sex and the City
and laugh. Sydney liked Carrie the best, and her mother liked Samantha. Her mother confessed, “That was me,” when she was younger. But she told Sydney, Don't be like that; don't be like me. Dating lots of guys, it won't make you happy, she said, looking at Sydney with her worried eyes. “Oh, Mommy, can I just go to the party?” Sydney said, repeating how it was at a very nice girl's house and the parents would be there and they were very rich people, so it was likely to be a nice place and lots of nice kids were going.

It was Sydney's first time on the Hampton Jitney, the bus to Long Island, and all the way she imagined how it would be. There was a boy from another school going, named Tim, who she kind of had her eye on. He seemed nice, he was quiet and calm, and he kind of gave her “the look.” All the way out to the Hamptons Sydney ignored Clara and Stacy, who were drinking vodka from a flask and acting like it was so cool. It was Clara's grandfather's flask or something, and she kept acting like that made it special because it was made of silver, but Sydney would never want to drink vodka out of that old thing, and anyway, she didn't like vodka. She didn't like to drink. She didn't like a lot of things her friends liked to do; she just knew she might like this boy named Tim.

Would they talk? Would they kiss? Would they walk along the beach—such a cliché. But it might actually happen. Would he hold her hand? No, that was silly. Nobody held hands. Did they?

When they got to Megan's house, it quickly became clear that her parents were not home and weren't going to be there all weekend. “Oops,” said Megan. “Yay!” said Stacy. Megan was drunk, but this was not unusual. There were already about thirty kids there—it was an enormous house on the beach. There was a big porch where people were standing around with red Solo cups in hand and drinking. There were a lot of boys. A lot of attractive boys. Senior boys.

But she didn't see Tim.

Some senior boys were talking about college. “Yo, I'm in early decision at Columbia,” Sydney heard one boy say. “Ya, dude, I'm on the waitlist. Fuck, I don't want to go to fucking Duke.” “I wanna join”—the first boy said the name of a Columbia fraternity. “It's so sick. When you join you have to show how much you're worth by buying a new Rolex and throwing it in the East River.” “Sick!” They laughed.

Sydney looked around for Tim.

Finally she spied him inside by the fireplace, talking to some girl. But that was okay. He didn't know she was there. She'd seen the girl on Facebook. She was just a rando. She had only like 300 followers. Sydney walked past them, pretending to be on her way to the kitchen. She paused beside them, pretending to look at Megan's baby pictures above the fireplace; but she didn't know if Tim had noticed her. He kept on talking to the rando.

In the kitchen there was a boy lying on the floor, having a molly moment, his face all red; he was perspiring and twitching. “I feel like I'm on fire,” he told the girls crouched beside him, the type of girls who always take care of boys. “You're gonna be okay,” said one of the girls, stroking his hair.

Tim, Tim, Tim.

And then suddenly there he was in the kitchen, getting some ice from the freezer. Sydney felt paralyzed. He was coming over. “Hey,” he said. She said, “Hey.”

She wasn't exactly sure how it happened, but then suddenly there they were, making out in the kitchen. Just like that, right there. They'd never really had a conversation, just seen each other at parties, just given each other that look. And now here they were, kissing, as if they'd been doing it forever. As if they'd been married for several years and just suddenly saw each other in the kitchen and thought, I have to kiss her, I have to kiss him, this wonderful woman, this man, that I'm married to. It felt so intimate.

A little while later, Sydney saw Tim on the porch making out with the rando. His hands all up in her shirt. Sydney went and sat on the beach and looked at the waves. When she was on her way home from the party on the Jitney the next day, she got a text from Tim. “Yo, I'll get you next time,” it said.

“Hooking up” wasn't invented by millennials, or American college kids, or Tinder. It's been a long, lusty road since the 1848 founding of the Oneida Community, the utopian religious commune in Oneida, New York, which practiced “free love.” Its founder, John Humphrey Noyes, a socialist preacher credited with coming up with the term, rejected conventional marriages “in which men exerted rights of ownership over women.”

The history of free love in America is intertwined with feminism. Some nineteenth-century feminists questioned whether women could ever be free in the context of marriage as it was practiced at the time, when most men had control over their spouses financially and socially, and often were afforded license to physically discipline them. Mary Gove Nichols (1810–1884), a free love advocate, saw traditional marriage as antithetical to women's rights. And so the answer, for some, was intimate relationships outside of marriage, or marriages which allowed for the free choice of other sexual partners. But “free love,” for these feminists, was never intended to mean sex without a sense of responsibility or a consideration of consequences. In 1870, Noyes repudiated the term for how it was being misinterpreted to mean, basically, what we now know as “hooking up.” “Free Love with us does not mean freedom to love today and leave tomorrow,” Noyes wrote.

“He fucked me and left,” said a 2015 Yik Yak post in New York.

In 2000, Tom Wolfe wrote that “ ‘hooking up' was a term known…to almost every American child over the age of nine, but to only a relatively small percentage of their parents, who, even if they heard it, thought it was being used in the old sense of ‘meeting' someone. Among the children, hooking up was always a sexual experience, but the nature and extent of what they did could vary widely.” Today it's understood among kids and virtually everyone else that “hooking up” means having a sexual encounter without any expectation of a relationship. But through all of the hooking up that's been going on in American life for centuries, it was only in the 2000s that the phrase “hookup culture” came into use, concurrent with the spread of social media and online pornography.

“Hookup culture” is not a phrase that's used to describe a blissful state of free love in which men and women enjoy each other sexually in an atmosphere of mutual respect. It's not free love as envisioned by utopians and feminists of the past. The term has acquired a negative connotation, based on reports from young people experiencing hookup culture themselves, as well as many studies of its effects. For years, especially since the mid-2000s, with the emergence of websites and blogs, young women have been voicing their dissatisfaction. (“Really fuckin hate this hookup culture,” said a Yik Yak post in New York.) Young women talk about bad sex and a lack of intimacy, about the scarcity of relationships, and the persistent double standard in which women who hook up are judged while men who do the same have scored. When it comes to women's sexuality, we still seem to be locked in a struggle between the Victorian and the modern eras, seeing women as modest or promiscuous, often accommodating no middle ground. (“Guys: liking casual sex doesn't make a girl a slut,” said another Yik Yak post.)

In 2013, blogger Mackenzie Newcomb penned a letter to “Mr. Last Weekend,” which lambasted a hookup partner who had apparently called her a “slut.” “When I was younger I used to think of the word as nothing but a tribute to sexual liberation,” Newcomb wrote. “I can tell you this, with the exception of a few nights on vodka that probably weren't in my best interest, I assure you I always hoped that
and I would have an arrangement that lasted longer than the next morning…I didn't want to feel like something someone could just throw away the next day.”

In 2014, Charlotte Lieberman, then a recent Harvard grad, wrote a piece for
Cosmopolitan
in which she relayed an experience with another type of guy often seen in young women's tales of hookup culture—one less openly hostile but passively aggressive in his refusal to commit to even a basic plan. “We were at a party,” Lieberman wrote, “when he approached me and said, ‘Hey, Charlotte. Maybe we'll cross paths tomorrow night? I'll text you.' I assumed the
maybe
and his general passivity were just ways to avoid feeling insecure about showing interest. After all, we are millennials and old-fashioned courtship no longer exists.”

When “Nate” never texted, Lieberman texted him; but he didn't answer. “When I saw him in class,” she went on, “he glanced away whenever we made eye contact. The avoidance—and occasional tight-lipped smiles—continued through the fall semester.” Eventually Nate told her, she said, that “he just hadn't been interested in dating me.
Wait, who said anything about dating?!
But I didn't have the energy to tell Nate that I was sick of his (and many other guys') assumption that women spend their days plotting to pin down a man and that ignoring me wasn't the kindest way to tell me he didn't want to lead me on. So to avoid seeming
too emotional, crazy,
or any of the related stereotypes commonly pegged on women, I followed Nate's immature lead: I walked away…This anecdote sums up a pattern I have experienced, observed, and heard about from almost all my college-age friends.”

It could also describe the experience of many high school and middle school girls, who talk about similar dealings with boys—boys who never want to make a definite plan; who seem to be leaving all their options open; and who seem to assume that girls are waiting with bated breath for boys to appear at their door, or at least to text them. “They're so funny,” said a seventeen-year-old girl in the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, where she was sitting with a friend. “They'll text you something like”—bro-ish voice—“Hey, maybe if you're around later I
might
be around, or like,
maybe
we can get together.”

“Could they just be insecure?” I asked.

“Noooooo,” said the girls. “They have like three other girls they're talking to, so they're waiting to see which one will say yes,” the first girl said. “Which one will hook up,” the second one clarified. “Or, like, do whatever.”

“But we see through them,” the first girl said. “We know
exactly
what they're doing.” “Yeah, but it's still totally annoying,” said the second girl, “because if you actually like someone and want to hang out with them, it would be nice to know if they actually like you back, or what.”

Lieberman's piece was in part a response to two widely discussed articles, both portraying hookup culture as a boon for female empowerment. In
The Atlantic
in 2012, Hanna Rosin wrote of young women at “an Ivy League business school” who used young men for their sexual pleasure in order to focus on what they really cared about—academic achievement and career advancement. “To put it crudely,” said Rosin, “feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of the hookup culture.” Kate Taylor's 2013 piece in
The New York Times
about female undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania similarly claimed that young women “saw building their résumés, not finding boyfriends (never mind husbands), as their main job at Penn…In this context, some women…seized the opportunity to have sex without relationships, preferring ‘hookup buddies' (regular sexual partners with little emotional commitment) to boyfriends.”

This vision of empowered women as sexually efficient Amazons has been circulating in popular culture at least since the 1930s, as in
Female
—a steamy, pre-Code 1933 film in which Ruth Chatterton plays the hard-charging boss of a car company who uses men as sexual playthings. It's a long-standing female stereotype, as well as a sexual fantasy, that of the shallow, powerful woman bent on material gain, a woman who is able to enjoy copious amounts of casual sex without any need or desire for an emotional connection, much less a relationship. It's also a type of dominating woman found in “businesswoman porn.”

By contrast, a 2013 feature by Raisa Bruner in the
Yale Daily News
told of the SWUG, or the “Senior Washed-Up Girl,” a sad figure on campus, a veteran of four years of campus hookup culture, who now faced “the slow, wine-filled decline of female sexual empowerment as we live out our college glory days. Welcome to the world of the ladies who have given up on boys because they don't so much empower as frustrate, satisfy as agitate.”

In 2011, Lisa Wade, a professor of sociology at Occidental College who specializes in gender studies, gave a lecture about a study she had conducted on the attitudes of college students toward hookup culture; many young women in the study reported that hooking up left them feeling emotionally taxed rather than empowered. “Many of the women in our sample, specifically, felt that they had inherited a right to express their sexuality from the women's movement of the sixties and seventies,” Wade said. “So they embraced sex…and the right to say ‘yes' to sex. They saw college as an opportunity to enact their liberation. And it was going to be glorious…But many of our female respondents felt disempowered instead of empowered by sexual encounters. They didn't feel like equals on the sexual playground, more like jungle gyms.”

Does hookup culture privilege men and boys? Many girls and young women seem to think so. “When it comes to college dating today, guys seem to be in a position of power, calling the shots on sex and romance,” Lieberman wrote. “My friends on other campuses around the country, especially ones where women outnumber men, agree that guys seem to hold the dating power. And even the brightest, most ambitious college women are permitting them to dominate the sexual culture.”

“For young women the problem in navigating sexuality and relationships is still gender inequality,” says Elizabeth Armstrong, the University of Michigan sociology professor. “Young women complain that young men still have the power to decide when something is going to be serious and when something is not—they can go, She's girlfriend material, she's hookup material…There's still this pervasive double standard.”

“It's such a game, and you have to always be doing everything right, and if not, you risk losing whoever you're hooking up with,” said Fallon, a Boston College undergraduate, one night in New York, where she was working at a summer internship. By “doing everything right” she said she meant “not texting back too soon; never double texting; liking the right amount of his stuff” on social media.

“And it reaches a point where,” said her friend Jane, “if you receive a text message” from a guy, “you forward the message to, like, seven different people: What do I say back? Oh my God, he just texted me! It becomes a surprise. He
texted
me! Which is really sad…We call it ‘text by committee,' ” she added.

“If he texts you before midnight, he actually likes you as a person. If it's after midnight, it's just for your body,” said Amanda, another Boston College undergrad. It was not, she said, that young women didn't want to have sex. “Who doesn't want to have
sex
? But it feels bad when they're like,
See ya.
”

“It seems like the girls don't have any control over the situation, and it should not be like that at all,” Fallon said. Girls talk about how boys say they want “no label” on their relationships, and no commitment.

The double standard in hookup culture is also apparent when it comes to orgasms. A 2013 study by researchers at the Kinsey Institute and Binghamton University found that women were twice as likely to have orgasms in the context of serious relationships than in casual encounters. A survey conducted by sociologist Paula England of New York University, involving more than 20,000 students at twenty-one colleges over more than five years, found that about 30 percent of women had an orgasm during their last hookup with intercourse in contrast to more than 60 percent of men; nearly 60 percent of women in the survey reported having an orgasm the last time they had sex in a committed relationship. Complaints about the elusiveness of orgasms are almost a genre on Yik Yak in New York. “Nobody has ever given me an orgasm,” said one post. “The only person that can really get me off is me.” “Same,” someone commented, with an emoji of a crying face.

According to some young women, young men in hookup culture often don't pay much attention to their physical needs; and this may be because, as one young man frankly put it, “We don't know the girls.” Apparently, though, many young men are willing to receive oral sex from women they barely know. A 2012 review of research on hookup culture in the
Review of General Psychology
reported on a study which found that in 55 percent of first-time hookups, only men received oral sex, while just 19 percent of such encounters saw women enjoying the same privilege.

And it may also be that both young men and young women are taking their cues from porn. In the most popular online porn, women are most often seen serving men's needs, rather than the other way around; there are a lot of blowjobs; and the act of intercourse is, again, often an exercise in “pounding,” from which the women have noisy orgasms, in contrast to many women's actual experience.

“When you have sex with a guy, they want it to be like a porno,” says a nineteen-year-old girl in New York. “They want anal and oral right away. Oral is, like, the new kissing.” “The cum shot in the face is a big thing,” said another New York girl, age seventeen. One young woman described sex that feels like “running through a mash-up of porn videos.”

“Boys call having sex with a girl the most disgusting things, like ‘hit it and quit it,' ‘pump and dump,' ‘fuck and chuck,' ” said an L.A. girl, age nineteen. “ ‘Smash and dash.' That says it all right there.” (Interestingly, “pump and dump” is also the name unethical stockbrokers use for the practice of defrauding investors with cheap stocks with falsely inflated prices; the stockbrokers in the scam reap profits, while the investors lose their money. Early in his career, Jordan “The Wolf of Wall Street” Belfort was a notorious pump-and-dumper.)