American Girls (41 page)

In Panama City Beach, in March 2015, a nineteen-year-old girl was gang-raped in broad daylight on the beach as she lay unconscious in a lounge chair. Cell phone footage of the crime was retrieved in a police investigation. The video shows a crowd of hundreds of spring breakers, boys and girls, watching, not intervening, a few feet away; some are filming. “She isn't going to know,” one of the rapists reportedly joked.

When police tracked down the victim, she said she didn't remember anything about it. She said she thought she might have been drugged. Three arrests were made, two of students at Troy University in Alabama. One of the young men is alleged to have known the victim since middle school; they traveled to spring break together.

In porn, videos of a “passed out girl” getting gang-raped are not uncommon. On Pornhub and PornTubeMovs, there are links to videos titled “Passed Out Girl Fucked at Party” and “Passed Out Girl Gets Raped by Three Men.”

It was the night of another party with all her friends, the same sort of party they'd been having since high school. They were doing all the same things—drinking, listening to music, joking around, trying to hook up. This one was in someone's basement. It was always in a basement or a backyard or in someone's dorm room, now that they were all in college. There was always an air of expectation, involving the promise of sex. Who would hook up with whom, who hadn't hooked up with him or her before?

“In this town everybody's pretty much fucked each other,” Meredith said. “It starts in high school, freshman year. There's not much to do around here but drink and fuck and get on Twitter.”

But everybody knew Meredith probably wouldn't hook up, because she just didn't. “Meredith still has her V card,” said her friend Ethan approvingly, putting his arm around her. “He's a fuckboy,” said Meredith.

She liked to joke to her friends that “the name of my sex life is
The Virgin Suicides.
” It wasn't that she couldn't get a guy; she'd had plenty of opportunities. “All the guys around here are so easy. They try and get in every girl's pants.” In college, there was the expectation you would hook up, and that made her a curiosity to those who didn't know her, at first.

“They say like, Well, why not? They look at you like, What's wrong with you? They act like maybe you're a prude.” But after they got to know her, they knew that this was not the reason.

It wasn't that she refrained from sex on religious grounds. “My family goes to church and all that, but I'm not like some Jesus person.” She knew all about the “purity myth.” “I don't think being a virgin is some badge of honor or makes you any better. I mean, when the Jonas Brothers had purity rings, me and my friends just laughed.”

When she was in high school, she'd had a crush on Rob Pattinson, the handsome
Twilight
star. She'd had a pillowcase with his face on it that she slept on every night. “I just liked the way he was so in love with her,” meaning Bella, the gloomy high school girl played by Kristen Stewart. “I liked how he respected her and protected her.” It's true—he was a vampire. “But that made them have to wait,” she said. “It was all this sexual tension all the time and it made it romantic. I'm a hopeless romantic.”

Now, everything went so fast because of social media, she said. “And it's like you don't know who you can trust 'cause everybody's talking to like three different people at one time. So many relationships start and end because of social media. It causes so much conflict nowadays. People are just too friendly with each other all the time, and some are sneaky.”

She liked movies like
The Notebook
and
Dear John,
where the lovers loved each other and no one else. “The guy is just so in love with the girl and the girl gets to decide what happens and there's this really long time before anything does happen, and there's this build-up of feeling.” But she'd never seen anything like that in real life. “Now it's just like, DTF?” Down to fuck. “Yeah, let's go. And maybe they wind up dating. But I've seen so many girls get their feelings hurt and so many girls get bad reputations.

“I'm just afraid if I lose it to someone who doesn't really care, something bad will happen. Or it'll just be so disappointing. I'm afraid I'm gonna get my feelings hurt, and it will be just awful.”

She'd dated guys, she said, but “they've all been douchers,” douchebags. “I don't want to waste it,” her virginity, “on some random guy. They all have STDs from these girls around here. Nothing verified, but I'm sure. They don't use condoms.”

She looked around at the party, sipping her beer, wondering how or when it would ever happen for her.

In the 1980s, when HIV/AIDS was spreading and taking thousands of lives, American high schools instituted sex education classes stressing the use of condoms. There was AIDS hysteria and legitimate AIDS fear, and “safe sex” became a national obsession. With the ascendance of the Moral Majority and the Republican right, sex ed in American schools also encouraged abstinence. Teenagers were still having sex, but they seemed to get the message, using condoms more often. Widespread condom use may have had an effect on the teen pregnancy rate, which dropped by more than 30 percent between 1990 and 2004. Condom references in pop culture abounded; in the 1992 Cameron Crowe movie
Singles,
there's a party scene in which a basket of condoms is prominently displayed. “They're free,” the hostess says cheerily. Condoms were party favors.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, antiretroviral drugs, used to control HIV infection, became more and more effective. The disease was by no means cured, but it became possible for people with HIV to live long and relatively healthy lives. With this welcome advance in medicine, the fear of AIDS receded; the disease was no longer the constant subject it once was in the media; and condoms became less evident in pop culture. In
Sex and the City
and
Entourage,
two hit shows from the 2000s about sexually active women and men, there was rarely any mention of condoms. In one episode of
Sex and the City,
the female characters do discuss them, sheepishly admitting that they don't always use them.

In a 2014 survey by the Trojan condom company on the attitudes and behaviors surrounding condom use, only 35 percent of adults reported always using condoms when they had sex. The study found that among those with repeat partners who reported not using a condom each time, close to 50 percent said they stopped using them in the first month of their encounters, and 62 percent by the second month. In 2015, a study by the CDC on the sex habits of teens was widely reported as saying that “contraception use” among teenagers “remains high.” But what the CDC study actually said was that the majority of teenagers used condoms “the first time they had sexual intercourse.” Of the 34 percent of teenagers who reported having had sex in the previous three months, 41 percent said they did not use a condom the last time they had sex. Use of the morning-after pill by teenage girls increased over the past decade from 8 percent in 2002 to 22 percent between 2011 and 2013, suggesting a decline in condom use or other forms of birth control overall.

Meanwhile, STDs are on the rise, which would suggest declining condom use as well. Half of the 20 million new STDs reported between 2011 and 2013 were among young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. Young people of those ages contract gonorrhea and chlamydia at four times the rate of the general population, and people in their early twenties have the highest reported cases of syphilis and HIV. One in four American women is currently infected with HPV, the human papillomavirus (the transmission of which condom use can greatly reduce, but not entirely prevent, as HPV is spread by skin-to-skin contact as well as by sexual intercourse). Some strains of HPV can cause cervical cancer. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported that “four in ten sexually active teen girls have had an STD that can cause infertility and even death.”

Medical professionals and sex educators use the terms “condom fatigue” and “prevention fatigue” to describe a reluctance to use condoms by those who have grown weary of the safe sex message. Some experts attribute condom fatigue to the fact that younger people have no memory of the worst years of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s and early '90s. “The young people today know HIV as a manageable, chronic disease,” Laura Kann, an expert in youth risk behaviors at the CDC, told
Time.
“It's not something that can kill you in their eyes. So that leads, most likely, to an attitude that it's not something that they have to protect themselves from.”

When I asked, “Do you use condoms?” of some young men in their early twenties in New York, active dating app users who said they had multiple sex partners every month, one answered, “Fuck no.” And another, “I'm not from the eighties. Everyone thinks that you have to use condoms, but in this day and age there's just not that risk out there.”

“I think it's also the alcohol,” says Eriauna Stratton, twenty-four, formerly the vice president of Voices for Planned Parenthood at the University of Kentucky. “As the resident adviser in my dorm I saw so many really drunk girls, especially freshman girls. Once a girl was brought back to the dorm by a stranger. We had to call an ambulance. She had alcohol poisoning; we were afraid she might die. I think the alcohol is leading them to not use condoms. They're not sober enough when they have sex to think of protection.”

Beth Kaper, a sex educator in Scottsdale, Arizona, who teaches students in fifth grade through college, says, “You can see the decreased condom use in the rise in chlamydia. Teenage girls are being infected at alarming rates.” The highest rates of chlamydia infection in the United States are among girls and women ages fifteen to twenty-four. “Chlamydia is a silent disease,” Kaper says. “Usually girls don't have any symptoms, so they don't go to the doctor, but if you don't get it treated it can lead to infertility. The guys can get it, but it usually doesn't affect their fertility.

“Young women aren't protecting themselves,” says Kaper. “They get hooked into the social aspect of having sex. The peer pressure now is ten times worse.” She attributes this increased pressure in part to social media. “Social media, as it's used,” she says, “is encouraging very sexual behavior at a very young age. And they're not learning to be intimate in any other way than a sexual way. They think intimacy is sex. We try to give them alternatives, explain that holding hands is intimate, talking to each other, spending time together. There is so much oral sex—usually it's girls giving it to guys. One boy said, ‘Well, Mrs. Kaper, it's a great way to get to know someone.' It's something so casual to them.”

There seems to be a correlation between the reduced use of condoms and a lack of conversation around the subject of condom use. The research by Trojan found that “nearly 40 percent of people who didn't use a condom during their last sexual experience reportedly did so without discussing it first.” Is this also due to condom fatigue? Or another sign of the diminished communication brought on by sexual relationships mediated by screens? In hookup culture, where partners are often relatively unknown to each other, or even anonymous, is it surprising that some aren't having conversations about contraception?

This would all seem to tie in with a 2015 report by the Rhode Island Department of Health, which found a connection between rising STD infection rates and high-risk behaviors associated with casual sexual encounters arranged on dating apps. Several other studies have also found that people who meet sexual partners online engage in riskier sexual behaviors.

Lastly, there's the widespread feeling that using condoms makes sex less enjoyable, especially for men. In 2013, Bill Gates presented a challenge to inventors to come up with “a Next Generation Condom that significantly preserves or enhances pleasure” as a way of promoting “regular use.” Though “male condoms are cheap, easy to manufacture, easy to distribute, and available globally,” said a news release from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, “including in resource poor settings, through numerous well-developed distribution channels,…the primary drawback from the male perspective is that condoms decrease pleasure as compared to no condom, creating a trade-off that many men find unacceptable. Is it possible to develop a product without this stigma, or better, one that is felt to enhance pleasure?”

The bigger question is why aren't teenage girls and women insisting that boys and men wear condoms? Why are women acquiescing to the preferences of their male sex partners, gambling with their own health and well-being? The research by Trojan also found that men are more likely to be the ones expected to purchase and provide condoms in heterosexual encounters, despite the fact that 75 percent of those surveyed agreed that men and women are equally responsible for bringing up condom use. So why are women leaving the question of condoms up to men? Why, again, are they being passive?

Notably, condoms are not used in porn. Since 2012, when California passed Measure B (the County of Los Angeles Safer Sex in the Adult Film Industry Act), requiring porn companies to use condoms when filming all vaginal and anal sex scenes, the majority of the porn industry has moved from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, where there are no such restrictions.

“Thousands of [porn] performers have been infected with thousands of STDs over the last few years according to the Los Angeles County Public Health Department,” wrote Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, a vocal supporter of Measure B, in 2012. “That is not a small issue…These performers are not disposable. As important is the effect that the films themselves have on public health. The fact that most straight porn is made without condoms sends a horrible message that the only kind of sex that is hot is unsafe.”

It was the Fourth of July, and the three girls were walking in the town parade. Mikayla's grandmother was running for an office in the county government, and they were supporting her by strolling alongside her candidacy golf cart. Mikayla's grandma waved to the town. The golf cart rolled slowly up Main Street.

The girls, Mikayla, Ashley, and Meredith, all nineteen and white, listlessly waved American flags on sticks. They were wearing short shorts and T-shirts, Converse and flip-flops and sunglasses.

People sat on the sidewalk, on folding chairs, watching the parade go by. Balloons bobbed around on strings. Little girls in red-white-and-blue dresses called “Bubble gum!” at a man who was tossing handfuls from a classic car.

“God bless America!” a woman yelled. “Woo!”

The girls seemed to be getting bored.

Ashley started checking Tinder on her iPhone.

“This guy matched me,” she said, walking along. “I'm gonna say, ‘Hey good-looking, what's cooking?' He looks like Peter Pan.”

“Oh my God, he
is
Peter Pan,” Meredith said, checking out the guy's profile pic. “He goes to my school,” Bellarmine University in Louisville. “We see him eating in the student lounge all the time. He's pretty cute in person.”

“He says, ‘Let's do dessert,' with a winky face,” Ashley said, rolling her eyes. “He sounds boring as fuck.” She was a dark-haired girl with a rock 'n' roll vibe; she had a stud in her lip and wore a T-shirt with a picture of Machine Gun Kelly, the white rapper.

“I just got a message,” said Meredith, checking Tinder on her own phone now. She was tall and rangy with shoulder-length dark hair and the jaunty air of a female comedian. “He wants to know my Snapchat.”

“Tell him your Snapchat,” Ashley said, unimpressed. “Ugh, this other dude won't leave me alone. I need to find a dude I can say is my boyfriend 'cause this dude keeps sending me pictures of his big huge donkey dick…

“Oh, no!” Ashley suddenly exclaimed. “I just passed a cute boy with long hair and forgot to swipe!”

Meredith said, “That always happens.”

Ashley said she liked “tattooed guys.” “I wanna marry a rock star.”

The girls swiped at more guys' pics on their phones. Mikayla, blond and olive-skinned, suppressed a yawn.

“Why are you on Tinder when you have a pregnant girlfriend?” Ashley asked, seeing a picture of someone they knew on her screen. “Who would date him?”

“Someone who wants to be a stepmom,” Meredith said.

“Meredith has the best Tinder story,” said Ashley.

Meredith grinned. “On my first Tinder date,” she said, “the guy got pulled over and his license was suspended and he didn't have the right tags on his truck. And the cop said he'd had a DUI.” Still, she kept dating the guy for a month. “Then he broke up with me,” after she wouldn't have sex with him, she said. “The next day on Facebook I saw he had a new girlfriend already.”