American Girls (32 page)

I met Sydney's mother, Anne, one day for brunch in the East Village. She came into the restaurant, an unassuming place, wearing a cape and four-inch heels. She carried a significant handbag. She wanted some reassurance, she said, that I wasn't going to identify Sydney in my book. I assured her I wouldn't. “You have to understand,” said Anne. “These girls can make your daughter's life
hell.
” Her eyes, so like Sydney's, still looked haunted by Sydney's experience with bullying.

“I blame
Gossip Girl,
” Anne said. “When we were kids we weren't
innocent,
but we weren't that mean. Were we?

“I blame MTV,” she said. “That's when kids started seeing things they shouldn't see on television. I walked out of
Kill Bill.
I couldn't take the violence. There were people in the movie theater with their kids, and as I walked out I said, ‘How can you take your children to watch this?' I said it out loud. I did.

“Read
A Clockwork Orange,
” she said. “It's all there, what's happening with kids today.” Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel famously depicts a dystopian future in which marauding gangs of teens engage in “ultra-violence” and rape. “He predicted it—it's all sex and violence,” Anne said. “When it's all sex and violence, there can't be any childhood.” Interestingly, Burgess repudiated Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film version of his book, saying that it “seemed to glorify sex and violence.”

“
We
dressed sexy,” said Anne. “But not when we were
eleven.
And now you see parents putting their daughters in these tiny little microminis. In
thongs.
What the hell are they thinking? It's like child porn.

“
We
wore tight jeans and halter tops,” she said. “We were all trying to look ‘foxy,' remember? We had to lie down on the bed to get our pants to zip up. We knew what we were doing. We wore tube tops.

“We did drugs,” she went on. “I think we did more drugs than kids do now. We had
sex.
I ran away with an older guy. I met him at a concert. I came
back,
but I was gone for weeks. We hooked up. I think we
invented
hooking up. We did gender-bending things. David Bowie was my god. But it was different. Wasn't it? Why does it feel like it was different? Why does it feel like everything is going to
hell
?

“Are we just getting old?” Anne asked, blinking her startled blue eyes. “Have things always been this
corrupt
?

“Sydney went to the Hamptons one weekend,” she said. “The stories that she came back with are so appalling. It was a house party. There weren't enough beds. So the boys made the girls who wouldn't sleep with them sleep on the floor. Chivalry is dead! The trust-fund-Wall-Street-entitled class are a bunch of monsters. There's no feminism anymore—men treat all women like whores, and the girls are all willing sluts that will do anything to get something from these monsters. It's very frightening.”

“Being a parent of a teenager today, it's hard to advise them,” Debby said. “We didn't grow up with social media, so we can't understand what they're experiencing. It's easy to tell them how to pick a college and things like that, but we didn't have this constant barrage of stuff, so it's hard to know how to navigate it. So we're doing it together.”

Debby and her daughter, Billie, were having coffee at the Starbucks in the Glades Plaza in Boca one hot bright afternoon. Debby was in her forties, Billie was seventeen. They were white, with matching cascades of curly brown hair and big brown eyes. Debby wore jeans and a silky top, Billie wore a sundress and flats. Debby was a stay-at-home mom, she said, and Billie's father was a sales manager.

“What I see in teenagers now is they advertise what they're doing all the time,” Debby said, “and it can cause a lot of hurt feelings.” She told of how, before a homecoming dance, some of Billie's friends had gone shopping for dresses together and posted the pictures on Instagram. “And Billie was like, They didn't even ask me. It's so devastating,” Debby said. “Before, you might not have even known that they went, but now everyone posts everything so you so have a thousand more ways to get hurt.”

“It's okay,” Billie said quietly. “I had my dress already.”

Billie went to a public school, a magnet school for high achievers.

“Her friends are in all the AP classes,” Debby said proudly. “They're the nerdy girls.”

“Yeah, we're the nerds,” Billie said with a laugh.

“They don't go to parties,” Debby said. “So we haven't had any problem with drinking or drugs. We are very close and she knows that I support her no matter what. We've talked about this many times—I say, I know you're a teenager and you're gonna make some stupid mistakes. But you don't have to hide it from me. I would rather know about it and help you than punish you.”

“Most moms don't know what's going on,” Billie said. “I'm glad that you're cool with it and I can come to you,” she told her mom. She sounded sincere.

“She has girls at her high school that post pictures of themselves smoking pot out of a bong online,” Debby said. “And I'm like, Are you kidding me? Where are their parents? They have these rave parties and the girls wear booty shorts and a bra; they're all but naked. And they have no bones about sharing what they're doing—they put it all out there.”

“They think it's cool,” Billie said with a shrug. “They get like two hundred likes.” She said there were girls in her school who posted provocative pictures and sent nudes to boys. “And the boys screenshot them and send them around.”

“She would never do that,” said her mom.

Billie told the story of a girl, “a very popular girl,” who, in the eighth grade, was photographed “sucking a guy's dick. The guy's friend took it. She was kneeling in the grass in this guy's backyard. It was so bad. You could see her but not him. Someone posted it on Facebook and people shared it—mostly boys. Everyone was talking about it. The whole town knew.”

“Awful,” said Debby.

“People post, like, bikini pics, beach pics, gym pics,” Billie said. “It's Florida, so there's a lot of skin exposed all the time, and there's always an excuse for girls to show off their bodies. That's when they get the most attention from boys, when they get the most likes. They're trying to feel like they're worthy.”

“Well, you have done that before,” Debby said gently, “when you felt—”

“But I was in a group with friends,” Billie countered quickly. “It was not anything sexual.”

Debby said, “But like when you were on the catamaran with Laurie—”

“That was
different,
” Billie said firmly. “I've never done a sink shot or anything like that. Sometimes you're just in a bikini and your friends just take a picture.”

She said that girls in her school revered “Kendall and Kylie” for their social media fame. “Everyone loves them and follows them because they don't have a normal life—they don't go to school, they travel and model. They made an empire.”

“It's really sad,” Debby said. “Posting pictures all the time. What kind of life is that?”

“I do post pictures,” Billie said, “but it's like me and my friends at academic awards ceremonies.”

Debby said that she attributed Billie's critical perspective on social media to the fact that she hadn't gotten an iPhone until she was sixteen. “Kids are getting them at
six,
” Debby said. “I always thought it was ridiculous to buy such an expensive phone for a young person. But then I started to feel bad because that's how they socialize, so if she didn't have one it would be like not having a social life. I didn't want her to feel isolated and left out.”

“You have to have an iPhone,” Billie said. “It's like Apple has a monopoly on adolescence.”

With some ups and downs in its sales to teens since 2007, Apple has remained on top, still the number one provider of smartphones to kids. In the fall of 2015, 67 percent of teenagers owned iPhones, and 74 percent said the next smartphone they purchased would be an iPhone, according to the investment bank Piper Jaffray's biannual “Taking Stock with Teens” report. Has there ever been another brand that so infiltrated the tastes and habits and buying aspirations of the young? Apple has a stronger hold on teenagers than Studebaker or Clearasil or even Nike ever had, and a more profound influence in their lives. It would seem to follow that the company has a responsibility to assess the impact its products are having on the lives of teens, especially girls.

Soon after she got her phone, Billie said, she saw her first dick pic. “It was on a Snapchat Story. There are dick pics everywhere.”

“I didn't even know what a dick looked like at that age,” Debby said.

“Boys think it's hot to show their dicks,” Billie said.

“I don't think it only happens to teenagers,” said Debby, with a confidential tone. “I have a lot of friends who are getting divorced and are single right now, and they are on Plenty of Fish and Tinder and all those things,” meaning dating apps, “and you could not believe the things men are sending them. It's a whole new world out there.”

Billie said, “Dick pics are degrading.”

I asked her what dating was like in her school.

“People post pictures of their relationship to get likes and show off,” she said. “They post pictures on Instagram of each other making out and going out to fancy dinners in Miami.”

“And lying in a bed together and putting their hands in each other's pants,” her mother said. “They're sixteen years old and they're grabbing each other's crotches! Where are these parents? What room and what bed are they lying in?”

“They have sex here at like thirteen,” Billie said. “They do everything, so it's not a big deal for them to be posting pictures of them lying in bed together.”

She said it was common for boys to ask for nudes on text or to say, “Kik me,” meaning go on Kik Messenger to exchange nudes. “They're horny,” she said; “frankly, they're just horny.”

“And when the girls post sexy pictures they reward them by telling them ‘hawt,' ” Debby said with a frown.

“Like, Your body's perfect,” said Billie. “Damn, boobs. Those tits. Dat ass. Or they say, You're beautiful, with a heart [emoji]. Sometimes girls just fall for it.

“I guess I am a feminist, sort of,” Billie said tentatively. “Okay, I am a feminist. I don't want to be anyone's property. I don't like seeing guys rub their groin on people—it looks like they own that person. They grind up next to girls at parties. It's a grindfest. It makes me so uncomfortable. Some girls are willing. I wouldn't ever let them. So they don't come up to me and try it. I guess I'm not approachable.”

“She puts up a vibe, like keep your distance,” her mother said approvingly.

“You have to earn my respect,” Billie said. “But sometimes I feel like I can't be…” Her voice trailed off. “I feel like the guys don't like me,” she said after a moment.

“Because you don't fit into these categories!” her mother exclaimed.

“I guess,” Billie said.

“This is what I tell her,” said her mother. “When the right one comes, he's gonna love her and never let her go.”

Billie smiled; but she didn't look convinced.

“A boy started texting her,” Debby said. “He'd followed her on Facebook and he told her, ‘You're so pretty, I want to take you out.' So they started texting, and then all of a sudden he started asking her the most inappropriate questions.”

“They were things you wouldn't ask someone in person,” Billie said. “What's funny is I think he thought that's what he was supposed to do. Like he actually thought that was how he would make me like him.”

In his profile picture on Facebook, he appeared to be an average-looking white boy, a year older than Billie, age eighteen. He wore a baseball cap. He looked like any number of boys you might see in any number of high school cafeterias.

Their texting started innocently enough.

“Hey, what's up?” he wrote.

“Nothing much, what about you?” she replied.

“Just chilling in art class.”

“I have English.”

“Honors?”

“AP.”

The boy seemed impressed. “Oh shit haha,” he responded.

“What do you want to do tonight?” he asked.

“Don't you have homework?” she replied.

“No.”

“It's a weeknight.”

“So.”

“Lucky. I wish that could be me,” Billie said, meaning she had homework to do. “Can I be you?”

“You can have me,” said the boy.

Debby exclaimed, “And they've never even met!”

“I thought we were just going to get to know each other,” Billie said. She said she had never sexted.

After that, she didn't respond to him for a while.

“What?” the boy texted repeatedly. “What?”

After a few days, they started talking again. Billie said, “I gave him another chance. I guess I thought like maybe it was a mistake, a onetime thing,” meaning his forward comment.

So they started talking about Billie's gym routine. The boy seemed very interested in Billie's athleticism. “I work out a lot,” she said, “and he kept asking, Do you have a six-pack? And I said, No, I'm just fit and strong. But he just kept asking about it. And so I said, Why do you want to know? Do
you
have a six-pack? And he said, No, I'm really skinny.”

“Oh my god I'm just skinny you could probably beat me up,” he wrote.

She didn't answer that.

Later he asked, “What are you doing now?”

She didn't answer that, either.

“What's the furthest you've been?” the boy suddenly asked.

“I don't want to talk about that,” Billie replied.

“I'll tell you if you tell me,” texted the boy. “Can I ask if you're still a virgin?”

Billie didn't answer.

“We can still chill tonight?” he asked her.

Billie wrote him. “You're making me uncomfortable. I'm sorry but I'm not into hanging out anymore.”

“What are you serious?” wrote the boy.

Billie didn't answer him.

“I'm sorry for asking,” the boy said. “I'm sorry it made you uncomfortable.”

“That's okay,” Billie answered, “but that doesn't make me feel any more comfortable.”

“So there's no way to hang out?” he said. “How can I make you feel more comfortable?”

When she didn't respond, the boy went on: “I'm not the guy you think I am. I've barely done anything with a girl and that's why I asked you because I didn't want you to get disappointed with me. I haven't done anything with girls! I'm not experienced like other guys. If you still feel uncomfortable I understand but I really want a gf,” a girlfriend, “and I think you would be the perfect one.” Here he added a string of heart emojis. “Please give me a chance. Why can't we hang out?”

“No,” Billie wrote.

“But he kept pressuring her,” Debby said. “Why
did
you ever talk to him again?” she asked Billie.

“I don't know,” Billie said. “I guess I felt bad.”

She had never had a boyfriend before, she said; she'd never had a texting relationship, either.

“I told him, I don't want to rush into anything,” she said. “I said, Let's get to know each other first. I finally said, Okay, I'll meet you in a public place, so he couldn't, like, advance on me.”

“When do we chill?” he asked her.

“Over the weekend,” she said.

“What about today?”

She told him the weekend was better.

“Will you cancel?” he asked.

“Only if you act disrespectful,” she answered.

“I won't baby.”

“He called me ‘baby,' ” Billie said with a frown.

“And he never had met her in person!” Debby pointed out again.

The boy kept on texting, asking Billie when they could “chill.” Billie evaded the question. She told him, “I have a lot of homework to do and I'm taking my grandma to lunch and to a movie.”

“Are you with your grandma?” he asked later that day. She didn't answer.

The next day he wrote, “What are you doing?”

“I have to volunteer later at a home for adults with disabilities,” Billie said.

“Do you have a Snapchat then?” the boy asked, possibly looking for an exchange of nudes.

Billie said, “I blocked him.”

“This is my opinion,” Debby said. “We didn't have access to porn. Now the guys all watch porn, so they have this very unrealistic expectation of how they're supposed to behave and what they're supposed to get out of it. And there are plenty of girls who will give them just what they want.”