American Girls (4 page)
Authors: Nancy Jo Sales
This isn't a book about how girls are victims. “Victim” isn't a word I'd use to describe the kind of girls I've seen, surviving and thriving in an atmosphere which has become very hostile to them, much of the time. How can this be, when girls are graduating from college in higher numbers than ever before, when they're becoming leaders in their chosen fields in greater numbers? From what we hear, American girls are among the most privileged and successful girls in the world. But tell that to a thirteen-year-old who gets called a “slut” and feels she can't walk into a school classroom because everybody will be staring at her, texting about her on their phones. “We need to puzzle out why women have made more strides in the public arena than in the private arena,” says Elizabeth Armstrong, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan who specializes in sexuality and gender. Women, and girls as well. We need also to examine the ways in which girls sometimes echo the sexism they experience in their dealings with one another. For it isn't only boys who slut-shame, not only boys who hold girls to a double standard.
As I traveled and reported, stories in the news continued appearing which reflected what I was hearing from girls. As I'm finishing this introduction, another high school, in Cañon City, Colorado, has been “rocked,” as they say, by revelations of a “sexting ring”âknown to girls as “slut pages.” “The high school football team appears to have been ground zero for the scandal,” reported the
Deseret News National.
Technology, again, played a key role in the case, with “vault apps” serving to mask the collection of 300 to 400 nude photographs of mostly girls among at least 100 students. The boy with the largest stash of photographs was referred to as “the pimp of pictures,” according to
The New York Times.
The mother of a student at the school complained to the paper that her daughter, a junior, “had been âpropositioned by multiple guys' during her freshman year. âShe received unsolicited photos from guys, which she immediately deleted.'â”
“Sexism has filtered into new arenas that adults don't see or understand because they're not using social media the same way,” said Katie, a student at Barnard. “They think, Oh, how can there be anything wrong here if it's just Snapchat or Instagram, it's just a game.” But if this is a game, it's unlike any other we've ever played. And the stakes for American girls could not be higher.
13
“SEND NOODZ.”
The boy sent the message in the middle of the day, when she was walking home from school. He sent it via direct message on Instagram, in the same shaky, childlike font as the new Drake album (“IF YOURE READING THIS ITS TOO LATE”).
Sophia stared at her phone.
“Wait what???” she responded.
No answer.
She continued along the empty streets. It was a warm spring day and the wide green lawns were full of blooming trees. Montclair was a pretty place, and it was safe, so a lot of kids walked home from school. She'd been with friends, but they had already peeled off and gone inside their houses, so she was all alone. She hoped to see someone she knew, hopefully a girl she could tell: “Oh my God, you know Zack, he asked me for nudes!” And: “What should I do?”
But there was no one around. She thought about texting someoneâmost things, observations, gossip, jokes, were shared right away, but this seemed like something new. Something almostâ¦private. Secret. That rare thing, something no one else could know.
She had heard of boys asking girls for nudes before, but it had never happened to her. This was her first time. She didn't know how to respond, or if she should respond. Should she be outraged? Shocked? Her first reaction was: “I was like,
Whoa,
he finds me attractive?
That's
kind of strange. I never knew he found me attractive⦔
She thought about the boy. He was thirteen, the same age as she, a boy from her eighth-grade class. He was a boy like other boysâhe talked loud and rough and wore baggy shorts and snapback hats and had a swaggering demeanor like Justin Bieber, whom he probably would have dissed. He was “cute,” “but kind of gross.”
She wondered if he liked her. “He never likes anything of mine on Instagram, but why would he ask me that if he hadn't been thinking about me? If I wasn't
in his mind
? Boys aren't gonna come out and just say, âI like you,' 'cause they don't do that. They have, like, their own
language
⦔
When she got to her house, a Victorian house with a wraparound porch, the place where boys had once come calling for girls, she went upstairs to her room. Plugged her phone into the charger. It was almost out of juice. She'd been up most of the night texting under the covers so if her mother walked in she wouldn't seeâtexting friends in her group chat who were still awake, sending words and emojis and giggling over inside jokes. And then during the day she had texted all through school. She woke up tired a lot of the time, but, she said, “I just drink a Red Bull.”
She went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Peered at herself. Pursed her lips. Stuck her tongue out to the side, Miley-style. Tossed her hair. She knew that she was “attractive,” so she wasn't all that surprised that the boy had asked her for nudes. “I get, like, a hundred likes on all my pictures and people comment, like,
âGorgeousâ¦'â
”
But she wondered what it would be like if someone actually had a naked picture of her, and she wondered what that picture would be. “Not like I was gonna
do
itâoh my
God,
noâbut if you
did,
like, what would you send so it looked good, and not ratchet?”
She wondered if the boy had thought about kissing her. If he was going to be her first kiss. She'd been wondering what it would be like to kiss a boy, to have one want you so bad he would take you into the park or even his room and press his lips against yours, wrapping his arms around you, holding you close.
She heard her phone ding from inside the bathroom. A text alert. She ran to see. It was the boy, responding to her message:
“I really need this 'cause I have to win a bet I wont show anyone,” he wrote.
“What serious who else did you ask,” she texted, her heart beating fast.
“nobody lol I need it from you please”
“Why”
“so theres this high school kid I think hes a senior who hooks me up with lq”âboozeâ“he said hell get us as much as we need cause hes rich if me and jack show that we can get nudes no disrespect im just asking you cause youre the prettiest girl and the best person to ask”
She stared at the phone, thought about it a moment, and wrote: “lol”
At the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan in May 2015, Kim Kardashian was launching her latest book,
Selfish,
a collection of selfies and nudes. It was more than 400 pages of Kim staring into the camera, pursing her lips, looking sultry and suggestive. It was Kim naked in a bathroom mirror, naked in a bedroom mirror, clutching her naked breasts, leaning naked over a bathroom sink, sticking her famous behind up in the air; Kim leaning naked over a bed in the grainy dark, Kim in lingerie and bathing suits, lounging beside electric-blue swimming pools, doing “leg shots.”
“Oh my God oh my God oh my God oh my God,” said a thirteen-year-old girl waiting in the line snaking through the store.
There were pictures of Kim from 2006, when she was still an L.A. party girl and friend of Paris Hilton's, to 2014, after she had become one of the most famous women in the world. In those eight years, which had seen the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, and the global spread of social media through mobile technology, Kim had become social media's biggest star. In 2006, she had just 856 friends on Myspaceâwhere she announced in her profile, “I'm a PRINCESS and you're not so there!”âand now she had 31 million followers on Instagram, second only to Beyoncé, whom she would eclipse in a few months, climbing to number one. She had 34 million followers on Twitter, where she posted more selfies daily, most of which got thousands of favorites and retweets.
“I love her,” said another girl in the store.
What was the meaning of Kim Kardashian? Why was she here, and why wouldn't she go? Why did anyone care about her, and how had she become so ubiquitous? Throughout the years of her ascendance, people had been trying to figure this out. Some seemed furious at her success, which in 2015 included TV shows, endorsement deals, makeup, fragrances, clothing lines, one of the most popular of all mobile appsâin which a Kim avatar showed you how to become as famous as sheâand a net worth of $85 million. Still, she was called “vain,” “shallow,” “frivolous,” “egotistical,” “materialistic,” and many other more vulgar insults in endless media pieces and online rants. “I have never heard more anger and dismay than when we announced that the people you are about to see were on our list,” Barbara Walters told viewers before airing a segment on the Kardashian family in her
10 Most Fascinating People
show of 2011. “You are all often described as famous for being famous,” Walters leveled at sisters Kim, Khloé, Kourtney, and their mother, Kris, who sat before her in sleek couture. “You don't really act, you don't sing, you don't dance, you don't have anyâforgive meâany talent.”
The Kardashians tried, in their mild way, but they couldn't quite seem to explain to Walters, who had come of age at a different time, that this was actually the pointâtalent didn't matter much in becoming famous anymore. Or perhaps what served as talent had transformed. It was now enough to know how to become famous purely for the sake of fame.
“She's amazing,” said another girl in Barnes & Noble.
The Kardashians, a family of American girls, had come on the scene, swept forward by the gown of Princess Kim, in a kind of perfect cultural storm: there was the fascination with fame that had always danced at the edges of American identity, and now, with the explosion of a celebrity news industry fueled by Internet blogs and TMZ, had taken over the aspirational longings of the young. A 2007 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 51 percent of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds said their most or second most important life goal was to become famous. Sixty-four percent said their number one goal was to become rich.
A girl waiting in line for Kim said, “I want her life.”
There was reality television, which stoked a thirst for more and more intimate details of the lives of celebrities and newly minted reality show stars. And there was princess culture. For a generation of girls raised on the Disney corporation's multibillion-dollar line of so-called princess products, the five sisters of
Keeping Up with the Kardashians
were real-life princesses who lived in a Calabasas, California, castle, unabashedly focused on the pursuit of beauty treatments, expensive fun, and luxury brandsâthe latter a national fixation spawned in the “luxury revolution” of the last thirtysomething years, in which most of the wealth of the country had traveled into the hands of a few, with the rest of the population looking on longingly as the beneficiaries of a new Gilded Age flaunted their high-end stuff. And entertainment media, from
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
to
Keeping Up with the Kardashians,
provided them with ample opportunities to do just that.
“I get letters from little girls begging me to adopt them,” Kim once told a reporter. The Kardashian lifestyle was the fulfillment of a new American dream that had been embraced by many girls and young women, unsurprisingly enough, at a time when everything around them supported it as an ideal: it was to be beautiful, famous, and rich, and to have amazing clothes, bags, and shoes and tens of millions of followers on social media. It was to get tens or even hundreds of thousands of likes on all your selfies.
“I want to take a selfie with her,” a girl in Barnes & Noble said excitedly.
Behind the Kardashians' lifestyle, there was a mother, but it wasn't Kim; it was Kris Jenner, Kim's own mother and tireless manager, who took 10 percent of all her daughters' incomes. “My job is to take my family's fifteen minutes of fame and turn it into thirty,” Kris once declared. That her family's fifteen minutes had begun with a leaked sex tape of her daughter and the singer Ray J didn't seem to give her pause; in fact, it was just after the release of the tape that Kris started shopping her family's reality show, a move she likened to “[making] some lemonade out of these lemons.” The scandal which Paris Hilton had already endured wasn't much of a scandal anymore. Porn stars were writing best-selling books and appearing on
The Oprah Winfrey Show.
For the biggest, darkest cloud in the perfect storm that brought Kim Kardashian rising out of the ocean of wannabe celebrities like Venus on a flip phone was the widespread consumption and normalization of online porn. In 2014, Pornhub reported in its “Year in Review” that Kim was number eight in the top ten most popular “porn stars” in the world.
“Kim, you're doing amazing, sweetie,” Kris said in an iconic moment on
Keeping Up with the Kardashians,
in which Kim, naked except for jewelry and heels, is on her knees, arching her back, and posing as a photographer snaps picturesâas does Kris, with a little personal camera. The moment is striking in its depiction of another element of the cultural tempest that delivered us Kim: the hypersexualization of American girls and women.
“She's hot,” said a boy waiting in line to see her.
“Is Kim Kardashian a feminist role model?” asked Jezebel in 2013. The website answered “no” and “noooooÂoooooÂoooooÂo.” But already the worm of popular opinion was starting to turn. Kim was being touted as a “businesswoman.” She was being called “powerful”âand didn't achieving power, any kind of power, by any means, make a woman a feminist? So blogs and think pieces argued. Was it Kim's marriage to a powerful music industry player and self-described “creative genius,” Kanye West, or their joint appearance on the cover of
Vogue
in 2014âa nod from establishment media moving Kim onto the A-listâthat began to mute her haters? Or was it that Kim's true talent, her skill at using social mediaâthe real secret of her success, all alongâwas finally being recognized for the power it commanded?
“Something about Kim is very appealing to digital natives,” Re/code founder Kara Swisher told
Rolling Stone
in 2015. Yes, and that something was becoming very clear: Kim successfully used the technological tools now available to almost everyone to get what everyone wanted. What she'd been doing relentlessly since the introduction of smartphones and before, now everybody was doingâusing social media to self-promote, to craft an idealized online self; and girls coming of age in the second decade of the twenty-first century were using it to present a sexualized self. “My little cousin, she's thirteen, and she posts such inappropriate pictures on Instagram and boys post sexual comments, and she's like, Thank you. It's child porn, and everyone's looking at it on their iPhones in the cafeteria,” said a seventeen-year-old girl in New York.
Presiding over the pornification of American life was Princess Kim, who'd been crowned the “Selfie Queen.” Posting selfies, once thought to be embarrassingly narcissistic, was now as common as brushing one's teethâor putting on makeup, the subject of many of the selfies in Kim's new book. For the last and loudest thunderclap in this perfect storm, the precipitous rise of narcissism in the American psycheâcharted in studies since the 1970s, and accelerated by social media, according to psychologistsâwas personified and glamorized in the image of a dewy, contoured Kim staring into her iPhone screen.
Slate
called
Selfish
“riveting.”
The Atlantic,
in a review titled “You Win, Kim Kardashian,” gushed, “In declaring herself, against all common sense, as art, she mocks and dares and provokes. She rejects what came before. And with her candor about who she is and what it takes to make her that way, she might also, against all odds, move us forward.” Whatever that might mean.
At the Barnes & Noble in Manhattan, Kim, then thirty-four, was wearing a tight, high-necked white lace dress and glistening with products. She sat behind a table, signing books for her hundreds of awaiting fans.
“You've inspired me to be hot and famous,” a teenage girl told her, blushing.
“Aw,” said Kim. “I love you.”
Though there had been a ban on selfies at the signing, Kim stood up and took a selfie with the girl. They posed together, staring into the girl's smartphone, pursing their lips.
“You are a role model for my daughters,” said someone's mother.