American Girls (37 page)

“I think that's the darkest aspect of this story,” Kazemi said, “this possibility that she's saying these very real, very disturbing things for a very fake, superficial outcome, exploiting the issues to essentially loop back to what she's supposedly fighting against, and benefit from it.”

But is it possible to do anything on social media that is not self-promoting? It's one of the questions O'Neill raised; and the answer would seem to have come as soon as she asked it, with the increase in her followers and fans. Even calling out the enterprise of “likes” as a sham gets you likes. This speaks to not only the culture of social media but its existence in a broader culture of fame, in which so much focus and value is placed on the self and the promotion of self, self as a brand.

Kazemi experienced a real-life cautionary tale along these lines with his Snapchat film; what he conceived as a sort of exposé of social media, fame culture, and porn was soon absorbed into all those things and, he believes, transformed into an example of the very thing he meant to condemn. “
Snapchat: Mudditchgirl91
was a social experiment,” Kazemi says. “It was meant to hold up a mirror to a culture obsessed with the way things look. At a time when Instagram stars post a Windex bottle beside a skull lighter, and thousands of people gaze at it and like it for its ‘aesthetic,' I wanted people to see three minutes of the unspoken reality of the way people are using Tumblr. Teens exploit themselves before they even get a chance to be exploited by older people; girls playing up to porn categories like ‘barely legal' is considered normal, and they think it's artistic. It was perfect that a site like
Playboy
”—which called it “The Weirdest Snapchat Story of All Time”—“exposed the video to millions of viewers, because them sexualizing the situation just proved my point on the huge problem with what makes clickbait.

“People have a hard time separating who people are outside of Instagram and who they are on Instagram,” Kazemi says. “And so I thought that if I took a girl like Internet Girl,” a real online celebrity, Toronto-based Bella McFadden, “who posts self-sexualized, provocative photos, and has made a brand for herself based off of industrial-nu-metal shock”—referring to the hard-core, post–heavy metal music style popularized by Marilyn Manson—“if I got her to pretend to make a Snapchat account and perform a real-time fictional Snapchat Story for her followers, would they be able to tell that something was off? That she was in character? Or would they just grab a snack and watch this possibly mentally ill girl lose her mind as entertainment, in the same way we as a culture are the audience for the meltdowns of female celebrities like Amanda Bynes?

“Vice,” the news outlet, “ended up posting about the film on their official Snapchat channel,” Kazemi says, “and the account gained over fifty thousand followers.” Marilyn Manson tweeted, “I have no idea why, but I know I like it.” Kazemi says, “Boys were posting messages [to McFadden/mudditchgirl91] like, ‘I'm going to rape you,' and men were sending dick pics, and kids were sending me pictures of themselves imitating and fetishizing the satirical scenes in the movie.

“Hollywood tried to get involved,” Kazemi says, offering him deals to produce the film as mass entertainment, “and that's when I pulled the plug, rather than using this account in the future for my own self-promotion or for Bella's. I had the real-time character post a live suicide note”—
The Real-Time Suicide Note of Snapchat: Mudditchgirl91
—“to raise awareness of the psychological danger of garnering instant attention and fame too fast. The Snapchat account and all other mudditchgirl91 accounts were deleted.

“Two weeks later, Bella got an online spread in
Nylon
magazine. People were still trying to use her as clickbait and trying to make her a star. My message was washed away into the depths of the Internet, right along with the movie.

“Why do some people today still have Twitter and Instagram handles with the name mudditchgirl? I don't know. I think people today just think that if you do something shocking, anything shocking, you'll be rewarded with likes and sexual attention, which is why they saw the character as something they aspired to be.”

“Growing up in L.A. is unlike growing up in any other place in the world,” Leilah said. “You're growing up in an environment where everyone knows someone famous, or is someone famous.”

We were sitting in her bedroom. She lived in a Spanish Revival house in the Hollywood Hills on a steep, winding street with homes hidden behind cockeyed driveways and boxy hedges. Her bedroom had a bulletin board crammed with mementos of her high school years. There was a test on which she'd gotten 99 percent, snapshots of herself with friends, and the bright red bow from when her father bought her first car. There were books and art supplies and stuffed animals on the shelves and desk and bed. There was nothing that alluded to celebrity, not a magazine or a photo.

She was a white girl, age eighteen, tall with long dirty-blond hair, a round open face with wide blue eyes. She wore a beige cotton dress and no makeup.

“Celebrity and fame are just kind of the norm in our day-to-day lives,” Leilah said. “Every Westside academy,” meaning the private schools in the western part of L.A., “has a number of Academy Award–winning parents. So every time there's an awards show, you see someone's dad or mom or aunt or uncle, either winning an award, or there would be a pan to their table.” Her own mother and father were executives in the movie business.

“Parents are by definition uncool,” she said, “so when your friend's mom or dad is famous it doesn't seem all that amazing. When you see some major star getting a snack out of the refrigerator at night when you're on a sleepover, he doesn't seem that big of a deal anymore. He's just somebody's dad eating an apple.

“My friends in the Valley think of L.A. as this wonderland of stardom and fame, but it's not anything like that,” she said. “The idea that everyone has of Los Angeles is actually much different than it really is. It's really not that glamorous. I think L.A. kids are more aware that fame is an illusion. So it's kind of uncool to say you want to be famous.”

And yet everyone was on social media.

“Everyone knows how many followers everybody else has,” Leilah said. “The amount of followers you have on your Instagram speaks to your popularity. It's very present in our lives, like thinking about how to get more likes on Instagram. Girls make sure they post their picture at the right time of day when people are online or they'll add a good filter. They'll go to a certain restaurant and post a picture saying, I like this restaurant, I like the food here, but really they're thinking this is going to make a good Instagram picture.”

And, she said, everyone idolized Kendall Jenner. “I think it's because she's the same age as me and my friends and because she almost seems just like a normal teenage girl. And although she has fame and celebrity, she seems to be ‘just like us.' ” It was the Kardashian magic trick, becoming famous for the illusion of being real.

“I'm not that active on social media,” Leilah said. “I do have an Instagram, but I don't try and get followers. When I was younger I would look at social media all the time and check how many likes I got on every picture. I was very conscious of my activity on Facebook, making sure I posted pictures on a regular basis. Now I don't think I've posted anything in two years.”

What had changed? I asked.

“It was gradual,” she said. She'd started to realize that social media was bringing out in her things that she didn't like. She said it made her “jealous.” “A lot of social media is just the best part of everyone's lives, and it can make you jealous of what someone else's life is like. It can be very overwhelming, every five seconds seeing someone's new profile pic on Facebook and they look perfect and they get a hundred likes.”

She said she'd started to catch herself thinking of ways to present herself in order to get likes. “It seemed so icky. I try to stay off it now because it's not a real representation of your life. You may post a picture with your makeup done and your hair perfect, but on a daily basis that's not what you look like.”

She said she tried not to stalk people anymore, not to look through anyone's pictures. “I think that now, before you ever get to know someone, you know far too much about them, just clicking through a few pictures. It's not real, and yet it melds into the actual reality of a relationship. Like somebody will say, Last month I went to visit my grandma in Wyoming, and you say, Oh, that's very interesting; but you already knew that because you looked on their Instagram profile and you saw that they posted a picture of them with their grandma.

“Social media is this weird, kind of half reality, half fantasy world. It's almost like you know people's secrets, and they never know how much you know. There's something sort of sinister about it. It's like you're spying. I have to consciously say, No, I'm not going to look through these pictures. But it's very tempting when you have this access.”

She said she tried to keep off social media as much as possible now in order to “stay in the moment.” “I think that making a conscious effort to not be on my phone all the time and enjoy life as it's happening has really helped me stay sane. Gradually being able to separate from social media has helped me in just realizing that the world
isn't
social media. Social media is so present, it feels like it's
there
—but it's not. You may think that that is what reality is, but it isn't. And so to separate from it just keeps me seeing the world as it is, if that makes sense.”

She said she knew girls who were “obsessed” with posting, who would never stop checking their phones. “And it's strange, it's like this elephant in the room, but nobody talks about it. I think to sit on your bed for five hours checking your Instagram and Twitter and Snapchat and making sure that you have updated your profile picture—it can make you sick. To always be texting and posting and tweeting twenty-four/seven, to always be on your phone, is unhealthy.

“It's not that I don't like social media,” Leilah added. “I do—I'm a teenage girl, it's part of our DNA. But I think I like it too much. I think we all like it too much.”

I asked what she thought the answer was.

“I think if girls would have a conversation about the fact that our self-worth is not based on how many likes we got on our last Instagram picture or Facebook profile picture,” she said, “and be really honest about the fact that we're all thinking it—we're all thinking, Ooh, yay, I got five more likes on my picture today, and getting excited when we check our phones and see ten more people liked our Instagram pictures—if we could be very candid about it, if we were able to discuss this with friends and be open, I think it would make it less scary.”

She had an air of finality, as if she'd said what she wanted to say. The air conditioner in her window whirred.

Daisy used to have a phone but, she said, she couldn't afford one anymore. “But I don't mind,” she said. “You don't spend all that time looking at Facebook.”

She was sitting on the corner of Congress Street and Fourth Avenue one sweltering afternoon. The corner was near some train tracks, and a train went by emitting a long, lonely whistle. “Don't you love that sound?” she said, looking up from her sewing.

She was a white girl, age eighteen, small with short straight dark hair sticking out from underneath a scuffed-up baseball cap. She was wearing a tank top, a pair of oversized shorts, and a brown scarf tied around her neck. She was barefoot, dirty, but not as dirty as some of the other homeless kids drifting around Tucson, the ones they called crusty punks. “Well, I'm clean right now,” she said. “Somebody let me use their shower.”

She was sewing a coyote patch on the seat of a pair of jeans, using dental floss as thread. “After a while your pants or any piece of clothing, they start to get holes,” she said with her Southwestern twang, which brought to mind the voice of Sissy Spacek in
Badlands.
She said, “It gets cold with the wind.”

Tucson is a city of about half a million people, about sixty miles from the Mexican border. One of its main features, besides heat and cactus, is homeless teenagers. In winter, they come seeking the warmer climate, arriving on freight trains or by hitching rides. They line the sidewalks of Congress Street—the center of Tucson's once seedy, now gentrified downtown—sprawled against backpacks, begging for spare change. Since the 2008 recession, the number of homeless children and teenagers in America has grown dramatically. According to a report from the National Center on Family Homelessness, the number of homeless kids in America reached an all-time high in 2013, nearly 2.5 million. Poverty is the main reason kids become homeless, but some are runaways, escaping homes where there's sexual abuse or violence; and some are tossed out because they're LGBTQ.

Daisy identified as queer, she said. The last time she saw her “wife,” a girl named Macaroon, was in San Francisco. They had “stood on a rock in a river” and “just repeated whatever we could remember from a wedding ceremony.” Macaroon had given Daisy her name, saying she was as pretty as the flower. And Macaroon was the first person with whom Daisy had ever hopped a train. She'd been living with her grandparents in Colorado when Macaroon proposed they take off. “And I was like, Okay, why not? I wanna see the country,” she said. “I wanna see the world.”

She had clear blue eyes and a few pale freckles sprinkled across her nose. Her shoulders and neck were burned. Her traveling companions—a square black lab, a wriggling brown pit bull puppy, and a bearded young man named Jack, age twenty-three—were lounging on the ground nearby, trying to stay out of the sun.

“Everything wears down from walking so much,” she said, talking about her sewing. “This is one of the most vulnerable areas on my body,” meaning her rear end, “so I have to keep it covered. I can't be running around showing my vagina or my ass all day. So I have to sew 'em constantly, and right after I get done sewing 'em, they get a new hole.

“You don't want to flaunt what you have too much,” she said. “I mean, wearing tank tops and shorts, 'cause it's hot, you can't really get away from it—everybody's gonna be looking at your legs and your cleavage, 'cause it's just there. Being a girl, it's definitely harder 'cause girls get stared at more. People like to look at a pretty face more than an ugly face. If they see an ugly face they're like,
Ewwww, I'm gonna get a disease.
” She shook her head.

“Dudes got it lucky, don't you know,” she said, tying knots in the threads on her coyote patch. “They don't have boobs, they don't have vaginas. They're cute, but they don't have as much to flaunt as a female. So they don't get approached the same. I mean, you don't see a lot of guys walking down the street checking out a guy's ass—like, Hey, dude, you got a nice ass.”

Hearing her talk, it occurred to me that, all over the country, girls were holding protests so that they could dress in revealing clothes, and here was a girl who had to worry about covering up to keep herself out of physical danger.

“They're gonna come at you anyway,” she said. “But there's no reason to give them extra cause. That's why in the winter, when it's cold, sometimes I'll put on a lotta layers and tuck my hair under my hat and try and pretend that I'm a boy.

“I don't like to get into any guy's car anymore,” she said, “ 'cause—this happened to me before I ran away—this guy pulls into this street, I'm just trying to walk home, and this guy's like, Where you going? Like, he pulls into the road so that I have no chance to move unless I go around his car. And I say, I'm going home. And he says, Can I take you there? And I didn't want to walk another mile and a half to my house.” So she got in. “So we're driving along and he's like, Do you want to make some money? He asked me, How much for an hour? And so I said, I have a gun and I'm not afraid to use it.” She made her face look tough.

“I didn't really have a gun,” she said. “Guns, you have to have a permit, and I lose papers too easy.

“I do have this,” she said, drawing a switchblade from her backpack. It was carved, black and silver, about the size of a stapler. She let a blade fly open with a click. “This was a ground score,” she said. “That's something you find on the ground that nobody claims. I got it in San Diego.”

I asked her if she'd ever had to use it. “No,” she said. “I mostly use it to cut fruit. That's good, 'cause I'm not really that good at fighting.”

She said she ate from Dumpsters, or from handouts from strangers, or with money she “spare-changed.” She mostly slept outside, she said. She didn't like shelters; “they're not so safe and anyways there's never any room.” She said she'd been all over, seen mountains and oceans, “the grand parts of the country.” She saw the sun setting from the cliffs at Big Sur, the green waves crashing, foamy. She saw the huge stone faces of the presidents staring down at her from Mount Rushmore.

She said a moment came when she was on a train when she realized she hadn't looked in a mirror in weeks. There was something happening to her, she said, happening to her as a girl; she didn't care what she looked like anymore, or what anybody thought of how she looked.

“When I was in high school,” she said, “I used to do the same thing as everybody else. I'd have to buy pretty clothes and put makeup on and brush my hair and put it up and make it look nice and walk like this”—she did a little parody, sitting, of a “sexy” walk—“and not like this”—she moved her shoulders more naturally side to side—“you know? You have to walk a certain way, you have to talk a certain way, you have to look a certain way. You pretty much have to fit the role society gives you, because if you don't, a lot of men are gonna be like, Oh, she's pretty, but what the fuck is she wearing? Like,
Ewww,
you're not pretty because your clothes are ugly, you're not pretty because you didn't brush your hair—like, Look at you, you don't wear makeup, you ugly-ass bitch.

“Fuck that,” Daisy said. “I don't like makeup. Makeup's a cover-up—it's hiding your natural beauty. You're already fucking pretty, why do you have to emphasize it? Like, I'm gonna wear short-ass shorts that show half my butt cheeks and put eyeliner and lipstick and blush and whatever else, man, just to emphasize these here cheekbones and shape of my eyes.
Ooh
”—she sounded sarcastic—“look at my
lips.
People look at your eyes anyway if you're having a conversation with someone and they have any respect…you don't have to put on eyeliner to make people look into your eyes…You shouldn't.”

She said, “I think girls need to be themselves, stop trying to fit in, stop trying to do what everybody else wants you to do.” She said she used to use social media, post pictures of herself, and try to get “the likes.” But “I don't like social media,” she said. “Social media's just really overrated. Like, people just want to stare at themselves and never talk to each other. If people never talk to each other, what's the world come to?

“One time I was in a mall,” she said, “and I saw a guy looking at his phone walk right into a glass door.” She laughed, shaking her head.

“I don't know why girls put up all those sexy pictures online and all that,” Daisy said. “Like, why do they have to have every guy be like, Damn, girl. Why do I need a guy to make me feel pretty? I already feel pretty. I guess I used to not think so. But then I did.”

She said she hadn't seen a TV show or a movie in months, hadn't opened a magazine or gone on the Internet to surf the Web. I asked her if she thought that getting away from the sexualized images of women in mass media had made her care less about looking “a certain way” herself.

“I don't know,” she said, shrugging. “I just realized I loved myself the way I am, no matter what anybody thinks. I stopped trying to make everybody think I'm pretty or like me, or trying to fit in—'cause, shit, I did try to do that for a while…and that never works, never gets you real friends. I stopped talking to a lot of people 'cause a lot of people judged me for it and now I don't care.

“I love myself,” she said. She smiled. “When I get hyper, though, I'm fucking nuts.”