American Girls (39 page)

I talked to Zanab on the phone; she was in Sacramento. We met telephonically through a mutual friend. She was eighteen and described herself as a “modern Muslim.” Her parents were from Pakistan, but they didn't always speak Urdu in their home, she said, as more traditional families did. She and her mother didn't wear hijab. “I wear short sleeves. I can dress however I want.” She said she was on social media—Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram—“but I'm not constantly updating pictures. It's not like an hourly thing. And actually I hate it.

“My school is very academic,” Zanab said. “We come home and start working on homework immediately, so I don't have a lot of time for anything else. And this relates to why I think social media is not that great—not because it's all an ego thing; it's because being on social media takes away from the precious time that you have on this earth.

“As a Muslim I believe one day the end is going to come and I'll be judged for my actions and what I did on this earth. Being on social media takes away from the precious time that you have and that time could be used in much more productive ways—whether religiously, with family, or whatever it is; it's just not a good use of time,” she said.

“My perspective isn't so much religious, it's more, I guess, toward productivity and what you can do with your time. I'm only eighteen, I've seen very little of life, and I hope to see a lot more, but what I'm seeing of the kids of this generation after me, it really saddens me because they are all constantly on their phones, Snapchatting, Instagramming, and some of these are kids less than fourteen years old.

“I went to a family dinner two nights ago,” she said, “and one of my cousins, she is no more than twelve, she had her iPhone out the entire time while we were at dinner and she was FaceTiming with one of her friends. It was not only a breach of social etiquette—the fact that she even had an iPhone at dinner and was FaceTiming the entire time—but it saddened me, because instead of having a nice dinner with the family and spending time with us, she was doing something else. I know that we would never do that when I was younger. When I am with my family, my phone is never on, I'm never texting people. The constancy of social media is increasing all the time, and you can really see it in younger kids.

“People have no etiquette for using their technological devices anymore. I'll see people at the mosque taking selfies on their phone. They'll be texting in the mosque—that irks me so much. I can't explain how much it upsets me. I'm the same age as some of them and I would never do that. We're in a holy place and you're taking selfies on your phone? Really? How do people think that that's okay?” she asked.

“I have seen girls whose mothers are sitting right next to them when they're on their phones and the mothers don't say anything. My mom and I have discussed this multiple times. We agree it's incredibly disrespectful—you're in the house of God and you're on Snapchat? What's worse is that at my mosque, our imam, he has multiple times asked people to put their phones away, and they don't. He has decided he is going to buy a cell phone jammer to stop the incoming calls.”

“People take calls in the mosque?” I asked.

“While we're in prayer!” Zanab exclaimed. “Forget about that they have their ringers on and it goes off while we're in prayer. Two, three, four people's phones will go off even after the imam says turn off your cell phones. It's so sad—and it's not just kids, it's older people; some people just let it ring. What goes through your mind is, How can you think this is okay?

“I saw a lady during Ramadan, she was sitting in the mosque talking on her phone while people were doing prayers—people were in their sanctuary praying and she was talking on her phone! I just looked at her like, Are you serious right now? It's not just young people who are addicted. You try and tell your friends to put it away, but nothing changes.

“I get so mad when I'm out to lunch or dinner with my friends and they're playing on their phones,” Zanab said. “I think it's so rude when you're talking to someone and they're texting. I don't understand what runs through people's minds. You don't see it as much in Third World countries. There's more human, face-to-face interaction there—people
have
phones, they just seem to want to talk to each other. People in America don't like interacting face-to-face anymore. That's how people used to communicate before they had phones, by actually talking. I'm like, Hello, remember conversations?”

“I found Jesus on the Internet,” said Kira. She gave a little laugh. She was joking, sort of, but not really. Here's what happened:

She was a private school girl; she'd recently graduated from one of the top private schools in Manhattan. She had made excellent grades and competed in sports and enjoyed, for the most part, her school experience. But there was always a certain tension, she said, because she was one of the few black girls in her class.

“It's not that anyone is openly racist,” she said, sitting on the front stoop of her family's home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, one summer day. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and flat sandals. Her hair was pulled back in a stylish bun. “But things would always come up where it becomes clear there is this divide between you and the other girls in terms of your experience,” she said.

“Like you'd hear someone say something a little strange about a pop star, like Beyoncé; they'd say something like, Oh, how can Beyoncé say she's a feminist when she's dancing around like a stripper, or something like that. And they don't understand that to black girls, black women, Beyoncé is a symbol of something greater than just what she's wearing. She's an incredibly powerful businesswoman who has a very strong perspective on female empowerment.

“But you can't get into a big argument every time,” Kira said. “You have to pick your battles. You have to be with these girls for four years, and so you don't want to constantly be fighting over every little thing.”

Then something came up that Kira felt she could not ignore. It was in July 2014, when Eric Garner was killed by a New York City police officer who put him in a chokehold while arresting him on suspicion of selling cigarettes on the street. “This was such a clear-cut case of police brutality and also racism,” Kira said. “It was so traumatic to see this man be literally murdered before our very eyes. I couldn't watch it but one time. It was just so disgusting that this happened.

“And we would have never known it happened without phones,” said Kira. “So that's the first thing I want to say about phones. With everything bad that's happening with phones, they are the one thing making it possible for people to really see the racism. I feel like God has given us these phones to help us bear witness to our struggle. I think a lot of people had no idea just how bad it was before all these videos of police shootings.”

And in the months after the Garner killing, there were other shootings, other videos. “It seemed like every day you would go on Facebook and see another unarmed black person being murdered,” Kira said. “So that's another thing I want to say about social media: it raises awareness. People would never have seen these things without the Internet and social media. They would never have seen Phillip White or Walter Scott being killed. I think the one that got to me the most was Tamir Rice.”

Rice was the twelve-year-old Cleveland boy who was shot point-blank by a police officer in a park, where Rice had been playing, in December 2014. A tip had come in to 911 that there was “a guy…with a pistol” in the park; Rice had a pellet gun, a toy. “They shot him for no reason,” Kira said. “He was just a child and they murdered him. And the police called this ‘reasonable.' I think that one affected me the most because I have a little brother who is thirteen. He was twelve at the time, same as Tamir.”

She'd been following stories about the Black Lives Matter movement that had been growing in the wake of more police shootings. She'd been reading tweets with the hashtag #blacklivesmatter on Twitter. The Black Lives Matter movement, which would prove to be so effective in the coming months, was begun by three black women—community organizers and activists Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrisse Cullors—as an online campaign. “And that's another thing about social media, okay?” Kira said. “It's a tool for activism. All these people all over the country, all over the world, were galvanized by this organizing that was going on on social media. You could go on Twitter and find out exactly where you could go to a protest. You could hear a thousand voices talking about what was happening and how it was affecting different people. Some people are using social media to promote themselves. But other people are using it as a way to try and really change our society for the better.”

In December 2014, she said, she joined the Millions March NYC protest. “The media said tens of thousands of people were there, but to me it seemed like it must have been a lot more than that.” She marched up Sixth Avenue and then down Broadway, “and then when we got to the Brooklyn Bridge, I participated in a civil disobedience. The police said we couldn't go across, but we did it.” She was energized by the protest, she said, by the feeling of being a part of change. “It was good to see so many white people out there,” she said. “I actually didn't expect that. There were people of all races.”

But when she went to school on the Monday morning after the protest, she was shocked to find that some of her classmates were not even aware that the protest had happened. “An historical event takes place in your city and you don't even know?”

When she talked about it to other students, she said, there were some “strange reactions. Like some people didn't understand why you ‘need' to protest. They didn't say it this way exactly, but it was like, Your life is fine, what are you complaining about?

“If people aren't aware that there is institutional racism, and these police shootings affect every black person, how do you explain it?” she asked. “Where do you begin? How do you explain that this could happen to my little brother at any time? Or
me
—black women get killed by police, too, although you don't hear as much about it. That's why they made #SayHerName”—a hashtag created to raise awareness about the deaths of Sandra Bland, Natasha McKenna, Janisha Fonville, and other black women who died as a result of police shootings or while in police custody.

Kira tried, she said, to engage in dialogue with her classmates. “But almost every conversation was very frustrating. One girl even said, like, Why can't they forgive? And I'm like, Why can't they forgive? Why can't the police stop shooting?”

She started to feel tired a lot of the time, she said, “which didn't make any sense, 'cause I was getting lots of sleep. If anything, I was sleeping more.” She started to wonder if she was depressed. “And I've never been a depressed person, like nothing ever gets me down.” She suddenly felt, a few times, a shortness of breath when she was sitting in class or walking through the halls. She started to wonder if she was developing anxiety; there was so much going on—applying to colleges, taking SATs, “all that senior stuff.” And then it finally occurred to her that “I can't breathe” were Eric Garner's final words. “It's one of the chants we do at protests—‘I can't breathe.' And here I was literally feeling like I couldn't breathe.” She then identified her anxiety as coming from something else; from “the reality of my school life versus the reality of what I was seeing online, all this murder of black people.”

And then, she said, “I hit my bottom,” in June 2015, when Dylann Roof, twenty-one and white, killed nine black people in Charleston, South Carolina, at one of the oldest black churches in the country. “This was a place that was important in the Civil Rights Movement,” Kira said. “He'd killed all these devout Christian people—even the preacher,” Clementa Pinckney, “who was also a state senator. Six women and three men.” She stayed up all night, she said, reading about the shooting on the Internet, “and crying.

“And, I don't know, there was just something about it that made me want to go to church. My parents are not very religious. We have a church, and we go on holidays with my grandmother. But after I read about that, I just felt the need to go.”

It was the place, she said, where “black people have always gone to find strength and solace in the struggle.”

When I was in Panama City Beach, I bought some GoPro footage for sixty dollars from a guy I'll call “the Bro.” I had seen the Bro walking up and down the beach with a GoPro camera strapped to his head. He was staying in my hotel. The Bro was a towering hunk of a boy, age eighteen, who went to Michigan State University. He wore a backward baseball cap and a backpack from which there was a plastic tube extending into his mouth; it carried beer. As I sat in my hotel room watching his work, I thought if the Bro didn't go into finance, as he told me he planned to after graduating from college, he had a future as a pornographer.

There were many sequences of the Bro walking up and down the beach asking girls to pull down their bathing suit tops, which they usually did, Girls Gone Wild–style, after giggling and making him promise that he “wouldn't put it on the Internet.” There were close-up shots of the shaking behinds of girls twerking. “Let me get the butt,” the Bro would ask, at which point the girls would laughingly back up into his camera. He filmed himself fingering the crotch of a girl as she twerked by the side of the hotel pool.

There was footage of the Bro and his buddies, black and white boys together, talking about how they had met some “white hos” who “liked the long d,” or dick.

And there was footage of the Bro and his friends having an assignation with these same girls, whom the Bro had described to me as “up-for-anything sluts.”

Teenagers have been filming themselves having sex since at least the mid-1990s, when digital camcorders went into mass circulation. They were only doing what they saw adults doing—making sex tapes, making porn, which they could now view online whenever they wanted. The leaking of the sex tape of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee in 1997 glamorized the practice. “Where are we?” Anderson asks Lee in a moment from their footage. “We're on some big-ass yacht,” says Lee. At first seen as shocking, the graphic images of these two celebrities having sex in a luxurious locale (on their honeymoon in Cancún in 1995) were soon distributed across the Internet, watched by millions of adults and kids. By today's standards, the Anderson-Lee sex tape seems mild; they're married and in love and rather tender with each other. Their private footage was never meant for public viewing. “The tape was, without question, physically and illegally taken from Anderson and Lee's home,” said
Rolling Stone.
The leaking of their sex tape normalized not only sex tapes themselves but their nonconsensual sharing. Afterward, sex tapes became a routine occurrence in celebrity news, and in teenage life as well.

In the Bro's footage, you see four girls, all barefoot in bikinis, dancing around his hotel room; they're waving around a large plastic water pistol and spraying it into each other's mouths; it's full of vodka. “Spring break forever, bitches!” one of the girls says, seemingly quoting from
Spring Breakers,
the 2013 movie starring Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens, both Disney Channel stars when the girls in the room were little.

Spring Breakers,
in the half-century-long tradition of spring break movies (the first was 1960's
Where the Boys Are
), is about a group of soul-searching, sexually curious college girls who travel to Florida for spring break. In the 2013 incarnation of the tale, they get some guns, knock off a fast-food joint, and then become the “bitches” of a drug-dealing rapper named Alien, played by James Franco, with whom they have a threesome before making off with his money in a stolen car.

The movie, directed by Harmony Korine, was hailed by reviewers as a triumph for its dreamlike cinematography (“a trippy, fluorescent whirl of boobs and bongs”—
Us Weekly
) and parody of youthful American decadence (“the pursuit of happiness taken to nihilistic extremes”—
The New York Times
). It also had an inordinate number of butt and crotch shots not unlike those in the Bro's GoPro footage.
Rolling Stone
said the film had a “kind of girl-power camaraderie that could almost be called feminist,” while
The Guardian
declared that it “reinforces rape culture…It's 90 minutes of reinforcement of the party girl image, the kind of bad girl who's ‘just asking for it.' ” The film did well with college students.

“We got a cheerleader in the house!” one of the boys in the Bro's GoPro footage crows.

“Wooooo!” say the girls. “Yeah, baby.”

“You can record this,” says one of the girls.

“Oh, we're recording, don't worry,” says the Bro from under the camera, which is still strapped to his head.

We watch as the girls lie down next to each other on the bed and squirt liquor into each other's belly buttons. “One-two-three!” The boys swoop down to do “body shots” off the girls, slurping liquor from their stomachs. “Yeah!”

Then the boys and girls switch places; now the boys are lying side by side, getting liquor shot into their belly buttons by the girl holding the water pistol. The perspective of the Bro, the cameraman, has changed. Now, instead of looking down at the girls, he is looking up at them.

They're smiling. The girl poised to do a body shot off the Bro's stomach is dark-haired and voluptuous, in a hot-pink fringy bikini. She grins at him with big white teeth.

“You're going lower, way lower,” the Bro tells her, suggesting that she should travel to places below his belly.

“Three-two-one!”

The girls bend down and do their body shots, and then they all come up but one—the girl in the hot-pink bikini, who continues traveling from the Bro's belly button all the way up his torso, licking and kissing until they are finally making out.

“Wooooo!”

The other girls in the room hoot and holler and slap the pink-bikini girl's behind.

“Shake that ass, bitch!” they say, continuing to spank her as she and the Bro make out. Then the footage cuts off.

I thought about the scene later when reading some pieces on the subject of drinking and campus rape. The girls in the Bro's GoPro footage were clearly into what was going on. They were also drunk.

Drinking is a complicating aspect of the campus rape debate, which, among other things, has made it very charged. In 2013, when
Slate
columnist Emily Yoffe wrote an essay headlined “College Women: Stop Getting Drunk,” she was excoriated. Yoffe argued that with studies claiming a connection between binge drinking and rape on college campuses, young women should be warned about the dangers of drinking. “Young women are getting a distorted message that their right to match men drink for drink is a feminist issue,” wrote Yoffe. “The real feminist message should be that when you lose the ability to be responsible for yourself, you drastically increase the chances that you will attract the kinds of people who, shall we say, don't have your best interest at heart.”

On Jezebel, Erin Gloria Ryan expressed her outrage at Yoffe's piece: “DON'T write a piece about rape prevention without talking about rapist prevention.” On
Salon,
Katie McDonough accused Yoffe of victim-blaming: “Our culture is swimming with examples of women—in movies, television and real life—who are ‘punished' for their ‘bad choices' with sexual violence. ‘Bad choices' include wearing a short skirt, staying out too late, getting too drunk, trusting too much.” In 2014,
Wall Street Journal
columnist James Taranto did blame women for their rapes, arguing that intoxicated rape victims should be held equally accountable as their intoxicated rapists—and that they are not, he said, is “self-evidently unjust.” As unjust as rape? you want to ask.

Spring break and the specter of rape have been conjoined since
Where the Boys Are.
It was billed as a comedy, but—tellingly, in one of the first Hollywood movies to explore the changing sexual attitudes of American youth—it's really about a sexual assault. Toward the end of the film, the “insecure” girl in the group (Yvette Mimieux) is raped by a cavalier college boy who suffers no consequences for his crime. Mimieux's character is portrayed as having made those “bad choices” McDonough mentions. She's the only one in her group who actually has sex (willingly so, before her rape); the rest of the girls, who remain chaste, are rewarded at the end of the film with committed relationships with boys they've met on their trip. The film was in keeping with a long Hollywood tradition of shaming girls for being sexually active.

In 1991, the reliably hard-hearted Camille Paglia praised
Where the Boys Are
for its verisimilitude, saying it “still speaks directly to our time…The victim, Yvette Mimieux, makes mistake after mistake, obvious to the other girls. She allows herself to be lured away from her girlfriends and into isolation with boys whose character and intentions she misreads.” Paglia dismissed “the theatrics of public rage over date rape” as feminists' “way of restoring the old sexual rules that were shattered by my generation. Because nothing about the sexes has really changed.” In other words, boys will be boys, and girls must maneuver accordingly.

The girls I met on spring break were very aware of the potential for rape in the hypersexualized atmosphere. Many of them carried their own plastic containers, which they called “chug jugs,” in order not to have to accept drinks from boys, who, they feared, might roofie them, or drug them with a “date rape” drug, most commonly Rohypnol. But their chug jugs tended to be half-gallon-sized and were filled with what they called “jungle juice,” a potent cocktail consisting of a haphazard blend of alcohol and juices. They sipped from the jugs all day long, getting drunker and drunker. “I don't want to be raped,” a nineteen-year-old girl named Mariah said. “I don't want to be drugged. That's why I am gonna be really careful with my drinking here. If it was back home, I would be comfortable getting passed out, I know my friends would take care of me, but here, I don't know what would happen if I was passed out.”

It was the way she phrased this that made me start thinking about rape in connection with social media, and porn. She talked about “getting passed out” as if it were something that just happened to her, as if she were passive in the experience. There were moments in other interviews when an impression of passivity among girls came up: the girls in Montclair saying how they felt they had to placate boys who asked them for nudes, lest there be retaliation; girls all over saying they felt there was nothing they could do when nudes were put up on slut pages; Lily in Garden City and others saying they felt they had to put on makeup and dress a certain way in order to attract boys and fit in with girls; the girls in Boca saying that they felt they couldn't speak up against sexual harassment; Jennifer Powell-Lunder saying outright, “Something about social media is making girls more submissive to boys.”

When I spoke to Donna Freitas, she said that, in her interviews on campuses, “these young women's sense of their own agency is incredibly detached; they tell me, And then I found myself in someone's bed having sex. There's little actual choice or volition when you are drunk, and there is this expectation among everyone that if you are walking with a boy to your dorm room after a party, sex will necessarily happen.”

Freitas talked about interviewing a girl who described a night when she went home drunk with a boy and she “woke up and, she said, He was masturbating in my mouth. She was talking about this like this was a usual occurrence, and I think it is.” The girl was surprised when Freitas referred to the experience as a sexual assault. “She had no idea that that's what it was,” Freitas said. “I'm not sure some young women know what consent is anymore.” It's ironic that there has been such outrage in the media about young women crying rape, when in actuality there seems to be a lack of understanding among some young women and girls about whether their encounters are rape or not.

“We've learned to be distant from our bodies,” Freitas said, something she attributed in part to our increased interaction on screens. Her words tied in to what Rachel and Leilah in L.A. were saying about how being on social media made them feel less than “present” and “in the moment.” “We're interacting with another virtual persona, profile to profile,” Freitas said. “Kids think they can hook up with someone like they're friending someone on Facebook, but afterward they realize it wasn't like friending someone on Facebook, because they say, I have this pit of emotions in my stomach. But I'll do it again to get rid of the feelings, I'll use alcohol to tamp down these feelings.”

There's been a lot of talk, in the current discourse around feminism, about women having “agency,” or independence of choice and action, self-definition and self-direction. There's so much emphasis on acknowledging the need for this, and in honoring girls' and women's capacity for this, that there's never much questioning of whether they actually have it. Agency isn't something that's always necessarily present in someone's decision-making. In fact, it's the nature of a sexist society to rob a woman of her agency long before she becomes a woman, when she's still a girl. Women's identities crystalize in cultures that are in many ways dead set against their interests. Girls are exposed to expected norms of behavior long before they're able to decide whether these norms are what they choose to inhabit. Feminists since the 1960s and '70s have been aware of the challenge of women having true agency in a society that teaches them to be subordinate and passive, or hypersexual, or whatever undermines their ability to achieve equality and respect.

That's why, when antifeminists accuse women of being complicit in the sexist stereotypes they also object to, feminists can legitimately argue that women might make different choices—they might have agency—were it not for the constant images and messages in the media, advertising, and so forth promoting sexist norms and role models. There's also the risk for girls and women of being punished for refusing to comply with what's expected of them. For feminists, the answer to the problem of agency has long been that of women discovering their own “voice.” And so now, if we are always insisting that no matter what girls want to do is what they need to do, and what they should do, then we are denying the possible influence of sexism on their decision-making—we're denying the existence of sexism. If girls aren't educated about what sexism is and encouraged to consider its effect on their own lives, then how can they have the critical tools with which to discover their own agency, and their own voice?