American Girls (36 page)

And then her little sister, who was thirteen and, Sally said, “much more into social media than I am, took my phone and added him again and he added me back. I was like screaming, running around the house, I was so happy.” Ever since, she said, they had been Snapchatting. “Texting is one thing,” Sally said, “but Snapchat is so much more personal. You're sending someone a picture of where you are and what you're doing—what you can see with your eyes.

“First he sent me a picture of his dog,” she went on, shyly, “and then I sent him a picture of my Pillow Pet. It was just funny and cute. He sent a selfie, then I sent a selfie.

“Now,” she said, “we go to lunch together.”

“So in the midst of all this hypersexual stuff you're having a real romance,” I said.

Sally smiled. “It's a fairy tale. I'm hopeful, yes.”

“It's not social media that's the problem,” Billie observed, “it's the way we use it, it's the people behind it.”

“When he followed me on Instagram, I got so excited,” Sally said. “Or when he likes my pictures, I feel like he's sending me a message, like, I'm thinking about you.”

“I see the way he looks at her,” said Billie, smiling.

“He's cute,” said Michelle.

Sally laughed, joyful.

The other girls giggled.

“I like this guy,” said Madison.

“Yeah, me, too,” said Sally.

“His posts are about, like, history and things,” said Michelle. “It's cute, it's funny.”

“We're Facebook friends, too,” Sally said.

I asked if they had gone on an actual date.

“Well, no,” Sally said. “I think he's shy. So I'll probably have to ask him out. I think I might text him, What are you doing this weekend? Or Snapchat him. I'll just put it out there, you know? Social media is definitely a good way to ask someone something like that, 'cause you can always check if they're online.”

They already had one another's phone numbers, she said, as they all shared numbers in school for homework purposes. “It always starts with homework,” said Michelle. “Some guy will text you like, Do you have the chemistry notes? And the next thing he's asking you for nudes.”

They laughed.

“I have a question,” Sally said. “If you send someone a Snapchat, you can see if they open it up or not, you know, with the arrow or the square? So he Snapchatted me a couple days ago and we FaceTimed for two hours and then I sent him back a Snapchat the next day and he opened it up but he didn't respond. And my thirteen-year-old sister said, Oh, that's bad, you can't Snapchat him for the rest of the week unless he does it first! And I'm like, Oh my God, that's crazy. She said, You need to have the square and not the arrow.”

The other girls pondered that a moment. “Well…”

“This is all we do,” Billie remarked, “is analyze this stuff, like tea leaves.”

“You sister is so critical of you,” said Michelle. “Why is she always telling you what to do?”

“She's just trying to look out for me,” Sally said, “because she knows I don't know about social media.”

They started talking about how their younger sisters—they all had one except for Billie—were social media mavens on a scale they couldn't even imagine: “They're
all
about social media.”

“My sister posts selfies every day,” Sally said. “She cares so much about how she looks. I could care less when I was her age. I'd wake up, go to school. I didn't put on makeup. They skip the awkward stage.”

“They're really self-conscious,” said Michelle. “They're so picky about what they post—if they have forty-nine likes on a picture they have to delete it because it's not enough.”

“They're always comparing themselves,” said Madison.

“In middle school now, the way they dress and use makeup,” Billie clucked. “In middle school I had a flip phone. I just pulled my hair back in a ponytail. I was so gawky.”

“My sister is complaining to my mom that she has yellow teeth!” said Michelle. “She has an iPhone and she's freaking out about how she looks in selfies. She uses the app to whiten her teeth.”

“A lot of these girls are getting eating disorders and they don't even know that these models are Photoshopped to make the thigh gap or whatever,” said Sally.

“I was watching an interview with a girl who posed for
Playboy,
” said Michelle, “and she was like, I did not even recognize myself. That's how much they edit them.”

“We're so fragile,” Sally said. “We're very vulnerable now; being a teenager, you're already so susceptible to all this stuff. And just looking at social media and having these expectations placed on you—what you need to look like, dress like. It's a lot of pressure to put on girls and it's really taking a toll on girls and you can see it.”

She was lying on top of a grainer, headed for Tucson, when she realized she hadn't looked in a mirror in weeks. It seemed so silly, to think of that now. She wondered what she looked like. And then she realized she didn't care.

She used to be one of those girls who puts pictures of herself on Facebook. In her album there was a photo of her as a girl of twelve, smiling broadly in sporty clothes; she was wearing glasses, looking expectant and eager to please, standing next to a piano in a suburban living room. And then there was a selfie taken a few years later, when she was fifteen; she was wearing something tight and red. Eye makeup heavy. It all seemed so far away.

A grainer was a train car that carried dry goods like grain or sand or clay; it had a ladder going up the side, that was how you climbed up. That was if the bulls, or the rail yard police, didn't catch you. But she'd gotten pretty good at knowing how to evade them. She had a
Crew Change
—that was the underground guide of train riders; she'd gotten it off a kid in San Francisco in exchange for beer. She was a traveling kid, a homeless girl, and had been since she was sixteen.

The best part about traveling, she said, was the trains. She loved “absolutely everything” about trains, “the noise, the speed, the distances, the way they shake.” The way you could scrunch into the corner of a boxcar with your head on your backpack and listen to the
chunk-chunk, chunk-chunk,
of the wheels against the rails, lulling you to sleep. She said, “People try to find that sound on YouTube just to listen to it when they can't drift off right away.” To her it was the sound of dreams, of traveling. She'd stretch out and look up at the stars.

She didn't know the names of the constellations, but she wished she did. She thought one of them might be Artemis, the goddess with the bow and arrow, who'd kill anybody who tried to do her harm. (Artemis does not appear in the stars.) “I wished I had a bow and arrow,” she said. She'd look for Artemis at night, the train moving beneath her like a big friendly whale, the dark trees and mountains sliding by like ocean landscapes. “I feel like it's heaven. You get to skip most of Babylon and see the pretty parts of the world that most people don't see 'cause they're taking the highway.”

The whistle would wake her up. The sound of a train whistle was an unforgettable thing, like a man's bellow or a woman's scream. She would have fitful dreams. There were things she was running away from, but she preferred to think of her exit from society as a choice she made in the spirit of adventure.

Everything had slipped away slowly, and then all at once. She'd lost her home, her phone. The phone was the last thing to go. Without it she felt untethered. At first it was a bad feeling, anxious-making, and then she had felt freed. There were things she had to get away from, and she realized one of them was her image in the selfie.

In October 2015, Essena O'Neill, an eighteen-year-old model from Coolum Beach, Australia, caused a sensation by renouncing social media. It made headlines all over the world because the blond and beautiful O'Neill was a social media star, with more than 600,000 followers on Instagram and more than 300,000 subscribers on YouTube.

“I'm quitting Instagram, YouTube and Tumblr,” O'Neill said in an Instagram post. “Deleted over 2000 photos here today that served no real purpose other than self promotion. Without realizing, I've spent [the] majority of my teenage life being addicted to social media, social approval, social status and my physical appearance. Social media, especially how I used it, isn't real. It's contrived images and edited clips ranked against each other. It's a system based on social approval, likes, validation in views, success in followers. It's perfectly orchestrated self absorbed judgment. I was consumed by it.”

Before deleting her account—which she renamed “Social Media Is NOT Real Life”—O'Neill rewrote the captions on her remaining photos, saying what had gone on behind the scenes, revealing they had been staged, often sponsored by brands. “NOT REAL LIFE,” O'Neill said on a photo of herself posing in a tight white gown. “I didn't pay for the dress, took countless photos trying to look hot for Instagram, the formal made me feel incredibly alone.” “And yet another photo taken purely to promote my 16 year old body,” she commented on another photo. “This was my whole identity. That was so limiting. Made me incredibly insecure. You have no idea.”

O'Neill decried the pressure on teenage girls to attain an image of perfection. “A 15 year old girl that calorie restricts and excessively exercises is not goals,” she said in another edited caption. “Anyone addicted to social media fame like I once was, is [not] in a conscious state.” “Trying to make my stomach look good,” she commented on a bikini shot, which she explained had been the result of more than 100 tries. “Would have hardly eaten that day. Would have yelled at my little sister to keep taking them until I was somewhat proud of this. Yep so totally #goals.”

O'Neill also appeared in a series of YouTube videos, pointedly barefaced—unedited in real life, so to speak—as she elaborated on her message. In these videos, as well as in interviews and on blog posts, she said: “I spent hours watching perfect girls online, wishing I was them…Then when I was one of them I still wasn't happy, content, or at peace with myself…” “Everything I did was for views, for likes, for followers. I did shoots for hours just to get photos for Instagram…” “I was addicted to what others thought of me, simply because it was so readily available. I was severely addicted…I didn't even see it happening, but social media had become my sole identity. I didn't even know what I was without it.”

With this outpouring of self-revelation, O'Neill said, she wanted to inspire young girls to become conscious of the ways social media was influencing their self-esteem and their behavior. In other interviews and social media posts, she said: “I just want younger girls to know this isn't candid life, or cool or inspirational. It's contrived perfection made to get attention…” “If you find yourself looking at ‘Instagram girls' and wishing your life was theirs…realize you only see what they want…” “I urge you to try no social media, no viewing anyone online for a week.” “Go outside, go to a park, go to a beach, go somewhere there are people around you…What I'm doing here is a statement that real life isn't through screens.”

O'Neill had done a powerful thing: she'd said what many people were already thinking, or had thought at some point as they posted another selfie or edited picture that made their life seem more perfect and glamorous than it actually was. There were already many girls who knew that the photos of social media stars were manipulated, and manipulations—in fact, they were replicating the same techniques in their own social media posts. There was already a heavy sense among girls that there was something insidious about their social media obsession, as well as a feeling of helplessness as to how to escape it.

“I never paid attention to Essena O'Neill but I really admire her bravery and honesty now,” tweeted @caranvr. “essena o neill is one of the truest and realest people ever, i feel like my life has changed because of her movement i'm not even kidding,” tweeted @amateurlarry. “Essena O'Neill: ‘social media isn't real please stop worshipping me.' Me: *worships her even more*,” tweeted @lindslaaay. The actress Sophia Bush tweeted, “My GFs&I spent the better part of yday discussing Essena O'Neill's awesome serving of social truth.” Ironically, and yet unsurprisingly, before she shut down her accounts, O'Neill had amassed tens of thousands more followers.

Her Instagram edits quickly spawned copycats, social media users emboldened by her example to post pictures of their “real” selves, or to rewrite photo captions in order to express the truth behind their posts, using the hashtag #socialmediaisnotreal. “I have changed into someone who validates their self esteem and self worth on likes/comments on my photos and I'm over it. From now on, I will be posting unedited photos…Not just me trying to look like something I'm not in real life…Welcome to a new era,” wrote Baylynne Williford, an Instagram user, next to a shot of herself smiling and looking to be wearing no makeup.

But nothing on social media ever seems to stay uncontentious for long, and soon there was an O'Neill backlash. It had its own hashtag, #IAMREAL, and it was being spearheaded by other social media celebrities. Australian model Gabrielle Epstein, twenty-one, also blond and beautiful, wrote on her blog, “Of course Instagram isn't real life. Everyone, myself included, chooses the highlight reel of their life to present on social media—we all know that…However, that doesn't mean I have ever pretended to be someone that I am not on Instagram.” It was a contradictory sort of statement, which would actually seem to support O'Neill's questioning of the authenticity of an online self.

A more personal attack on O'Neill came from two of her former friends, the twin YouTubers and singer-songwriters Nina and Randa Nelson, age twenty-two, who refer to themselves as “influencers.” In a fifteen-minute video, widely circulated in the media, the two railed against her, calling her rejection of social media a “hoax.” The sisters revealed that they had been the hosts of a recent trip O'Neill made to L.A., where O'Neill had said she'd observed other social media personalities acting in a way she found “fake.” O'Neill hadn't named anyone's name, but the Nelson twins took her comments as a personal affront.

“How were any of us fake to you?” they asked, finishing each other's sentences. “
That
is fake. She thinks she's doing this whole real thing on the Internet, but to me it's just as fake as an edited image…I think the person who is fake here is Essena.” They sounded a bit like middle school girls cyberbullying someone on social media.

“It's still one hundred percent self-promotion,” said the twins, noting how O'Neill's rejection of social media was only gaining her more fans. “And also what's wrong with self-promotion?” they asked.

“Just because she sees views and likes and followers as validation doesn't mean we do,” they said. “If you're celebrating your body…people need to stop hating on other girls for that…don't be jealous just because somebody is confident in a bikini.” It was the slut-shaming Escher painting, in which girls hate on girls who hate on girls who hate on girls—and an example of one of the pernicious elements of social media O'Neill had been complaining about coming back to attack her.

The twins also gossiped about their former friend, alleging she had actually become despondent while visiting L.A. after a breakup with a young man. “The reason she's so down is because of this breakup with this guy,” they said, revealing that the young man was someone O'Neill had met through them. He was quickly identified as “Los Angeles heartthrob Blake Michael, nineteen, best known for his work in the Disney sitcom
Dog with a Blog,
” according to the
Daily Mail,
which noted, “Mr. Michael has more than one million followers on Instagram and is popular on both Facebook and Snapchat.” Michael and O'Neill had apparently dated for a few weeks.

O'Neill had perhaps opened herself up to this kind of scrutiny when she mentioned in one of her vlogs that, while in L.A., “I was dating a guy that was way more famous than me…way more successful, had an amazing car, beautiful beyond words. And he was fucking depressed!…I was surrounded by all this wealth and all this fame and all this power—and yet they were all miserable. And I had never been more miserable.”

Her Taylor Swift–style allusion to her allegedly depressive lover was not the wisest step in terms of maintaining her credibility; but she is a teenager (as Swift was when she wrote those difficult-breakup songs that got her called boy crazy), and one who had just experienced L.A. in all its glitzy glory. “I was…extremely lost in the ‘celebrity construct,' ” O'Neill blogged. The
Daily Mail
reported that the Nelson twins said that “O'Neill began to ‘hate L.A. and I guess everyone along with it' when her L.A.-based relationship broke down.” With these claims, the story began to turn. It was no longer about a girl with a critique of online culture. It was about a girl who'd had her heart broken by a cute boy. And that was a much more familiar and perhaps more palatable story.

Is it really impossible to imagine that it was experiencing L.A., the heart of fame culture, that made O'Neill reassess her pursuit of fame online? It wouldn't be the first time that someone was thrown into self-examination by the shallowness of Tinseltown.

The media in America was not much more sympathetic to O'Neill. A piece in
The New York Times
spent more time doubting her message than relaying it to its readers. The piece didn't mention any of O'Neill's online supporters, though it did say “some Facebook users, skeptical of Ms. O'Neill's declarations, view her turn against Instagram as just another means of self-promotion.” The
Times
interviewed an expert, a “researcher at Snapchat” named Nathan Jurgenson, who argued that “intentional construction of our identities is not an activity unique to the online world.” Jurgenson said, “All of identity theory is about talking about how we perform, so it's a little bit strange when people who have studied that literature hear people go ‘oh everyone's performing now,' and it's like, no, that's all the self has ever been.”

“All the self has ever been”? Identity theorists might agree on that, but Descartes might not. Or Kant. Or the Buddha. “What is a self?” is a question that's been explored and debated by philosophers for centuries, with no consensus that all “self” is “performance.”

Jurgenson's dismissiveness of O'Neill was a defense of social media by someone who had an interest in protecting it, as the employee of a social media company (and a company, Snapchat, which was being widely used for the exchanging of nudes among teenagers). It ignored the reams of studies that have been done supporting much of what O'Neill was saying: studies questioning whether social media makes people addicted, anxious, and depressed, more craving of approval and more superficial; studies asking whether communication over screens is less rich and empathetic than communicating face-to-face. Jurgenson and the
Times,
as well as many other reports on O'Neill, also ignored the other main element of her message—that social media is a place where girls and young women are hypersexualized and feel pressure to sexualize themselves.

Other criticisms of O'Neill were more blatantly sexist. On a Facebook post, also widely quoted in the media, former YouTuber Zack James, the CEO of a social media advertising company, Rise9, addressed O'Neill by saying, “Social Media isn't a lie, you were the lie.” Calling social media “mankind's greatest communication tool,” James said, “Allowing yourself to become pressured into a false life that you're uncomfortable with is the result of your own actions and intent.” He informed O'Neill that her critique “further shows your lack of attempt to understand yourself”—thereby reducing her analysis to a personal failing, and disregarding her intelligence, which, whatever you thought of her message, was evident in how she expressed herself. More backlash came from still other social media users, who called O'Neill a “poser,” a “liar,” and a “fake.”

When I asked Alex Kazemi what he thought about all this, he said, “I think regardless if she is being fake or genuine, look at the reaction. It comes from a place of threat.” Kazemi is a twenty-one-year-old Vancouver-based writer and filmmaker, Internet famous for his short film
Snapchat: Mudditchgirl91
(first released as a Snapchat Story), about a teenage girl who acts out sexually online and ponders self-mutilation.

“Social media is like Scientology,” Kazemi said. “If you leave it, you are shunned or disconnected, but if you stay on it, you are normalized and not posing as a threat. Snapchat feels insulted, because she left them. Those girls,” the Nelson twins, “feel catty because it's like, What makes you any better than us?”

And was O'Neill just being “fake”? Was her exposure of her own falseness on social media an act of self-promotion after all—a clever form of rebranding? For even as she denounced her own online presence, she announced a new one, with the launching of a website, Let's Be Game Changers. She said the site would be dedicated to promoting her true passions, including environmental preservation, veganism, and gender equality. She was reportedly also writing a book.

As for her critics, O'Neill wrote, “PEOPLE SAY GOSSIP AND RUMOURS TO AVOID THE REAL PROBLEMS: paid posts, endless shoots, edited life. Is it real? Is it what our generation should be doing with our time?”