American Girls (45 page)

“I'm not gonna lie,” Ethan said. “I always tell them, I ain't got no condom, and they're just like, Fuck it, let's do this shit. I'm Mr. Raw Dog, all right?”

“Raw dog” refers to condomless sex.

“Basically, shit happens,” Ethan said. We were in his house. There was a party going on in his basement.

His mother was away for the holiday weekend. The basement was dark and filled with kids listening to music, talking, drinking.

“But it gets down to the nitty-gritty when they come back for a visit and I'm with my boys,” Ethan said. “That's when you hit them with the old hocus-pocus: they get into bed, then I leave the room and go tag-team my boy, and, boom, he does the ol' hocus-pocus. She don't even know who's who”—meaning he's tricked girls into thinking they were having sex with him when they were actually having sex with him and his friends.

“The girls always find out,” Meredith said with a frown. “They might not know right away if they're drunk, but they'll always find out.”

“You basically gotta look out for your dudes,” Ethan said. “If I know I'm with a disrespectful woman, she's got downright dirty standards, I might as well get a few good friends in on the action.”

I asked him if he watched a lot of porn.

“I got caught with porn at age thirteen,” he said. “I first looked up ‘boobs' on Google when I was like twelve or thirteen. I went on a porn site and saw what a blowjob was and I was like, Damn, I gotta get one of those. And so I went on a hunt, and like in sixth grade I got my first BJ. Today, I probably watch porn twice a day minimum.

“I wanna believe in y'all's species, your race,” Ethan said, referring to women, “but I can't right now. I'd have to scan this room, but I'd have to say like forty-five to sixty-five percent of them are thots. A thot is ‘that ho over there.' It's a new word for ‘ho' or ‘whore.' I don't like to disrespect women, but it's necessary.”

Why? I asked.

“Because,” he said, “they don't respect themselves, you know what I'm saying? I'll bet every chick in here except for two or three has had sex with multiple guys. If you want me to, I'll call them out.”

“It's a small town,” said Ashley, also frowning. “A lot of people around here have hooked up with the same people because there's not a lot to choose from. The dudes are thirsty as fuck. I've had at least twelve guys in this room hit me up on Facebook, Tinder, Twitter, Instagram—all of it.”

“Social media?” Ethan said. “That's where the thots come out. I'm getting calls from girls I ain't even heard of before: ‘Ethan, come over here,' you know what I'm saying?”

There was a supporting pole in the middle of the room and Ethan ran to it and swung around it, stripper-style. His friends laughed, cheering.

“At some point I want to get out of here,” Ashley had told me earlier. “Like, it's just too small for me. I feel like I can do bigger and better things with my life. Like I would love to be famous,” she said. “I think I could be famous. I love the Kardashians. Like, I wish I
was
a Kardashian. I start watching that show and I feel like I am one of them. I start talking like them. I love Kylie Jenner's style. I love reality TV.”

She once tweeted: “I feel like I personally know every celebrity.”

Her Tumblr blog was artistic and erotic. A lot of it was sort of curated porn, showing images of rough sex between tattooed young men and women; breasts and necks with bite marks.

Some drunk boys were playing a game where they smacked each other in the face. A boy with half-closed eyes was standing bent over, his chin stuck out, waiting for someone to punch him.

“I'll fucking hit you,” Ashley said, running over.

She pulled back her fist and punched him hard on the jaw. There was a crack as he went reeling.

At the end of the night, some of the girls of Haines went down to the basement to smoke pot. A bong went around. A wiry white girl named Brit, who they said was “nuts,” had come over and was telling loud stories about her night; the rest of them barely listened. They were all on their phones, checking their texts and Snapchat, Instagram, to see what all their friends had been doing. A box of Insomnia Cookies was passed around.

Someone had posted something on Yik Yak about Kim “going off on some random freshman girl.”

“Oh,” Brit said, and shrugged, “I don't Yak. I use Facebook the most—I
stalk.
”

They started talking about their social media use.

“My personal Snapchat is like, ‘In my bed throwing up,' ” said Brit. “My Special Moments,” a Snapchat feature, “are like, throwing up, being drunk, getting hungover, being re-drunk.”

“I'd delete my Facebook if I could,” said Caleb, Paige's boyfriend, who had joined them. “I keep it 'cause of Paige, 'cause we're in a relationship.”

Paige murmured, “I like to look at his pictures.”

“I'm such a
stalker,
” Brit said.

“I used to leave my job to go water my crops on FarmVille,” said Lally, meaning the social media game on Facebook where the user is a farmer who must tend to his livestock and crops.

“Watering my crops on FarmVille got me through the day in high school,” Brit said.

Ariel said, “My professor had to make an announcement—he said, You can't leave class to go harvest your crops, and we were like, You
water
your crops, you don't
harvest
them.”

They all laughed.

“FarmVille was a while ago,” someone said.

They went on thumbing, swiping, checking, texting.

“We're gonna be like, Will you marry me?” Ethan said, miming texting the proposal on his phone. “And they'll be like, I do,” he said, continuing to pretend to text the wedding ceremony.

The party had wound down. There were just around ten kids left. Some of them lay on the floor, passed out, or checking their phones.

Mikayla and Jim lay behind the couches, talking and whispering. Some kids sat around the counter on the swivel chairs. They were Ethan, Ashley, Kelsey, Meredith, a young black kid named Devon, and a chubby white boy named Jared. The counter was littered with fast-food containers.

“Social media is a nightmare,” Jared said, “because we all hang out together and ninety percent of the time we're all on our phones. Look at Meredith right now.”

They all looked at Meredith, who kept on touching her phone, not looking up.

Jared said, “You just sit there and—” He picked up his phone to illustrate, and then he saw that he had received some texts. “Oh, I'm sorry,” he said, swiping at them.

“Ooh, popular,” said Meredith.

They tried to calculate how many group messages they received a day from the twenty-one people in their texting group.

“Two thousand?” “Three thousand?” “Three thousand four hundred?” they asked.

“It's stupid,” said Jared.

“It is stupid,” said Devon.

“I have to turn my phone off when I go to sleep so I don't hear it,” Jared said. “It just keeps going off with texts. It wakes me up.”

“You lose sleep,” said Ashley.

“I love talking to my friends all day—it gets me
through
my day—but it's a love-hate relationship,” said Jared. “More of a hate.”

Ethan posed a question to the group: “Relationship or single? Which would you rather be?”

“I wanna marry Ethan,” Ashley said sarcastically. Apparently they had a history.

“I wouldn't be mad,” Ethan said. “You get a decent job, I get a decent job. But let me put it this way, every girl around here is not worth our time.”

Ashley stared.

“I take offense at that,” Meredith said.

“I do, too,” said Kelsey.

“You should—you definitely should,” Ashley said.

“What's wrong with us?” Meredith demanded.

“Meredith's still got the card,” as in the “V card,” Ethan said. “Ashley is a sweet girl, but she just likes to act reckless whenever she's around people.”

Ashley gave him a look.

“I have no bad words to say about Kelsey,” Ethan said. Kelsey had a long-term boyfriend. Ethan said he would never get serious with any girls in their town because they had “fucked too many people.”

“But what about you?” I asked, reminding him of his claims about his sexual exploits.

“I'm on a rampage,” meaning sexually, he admitted. “With a scoring average higher than Kobe Bryant.” He claimed to have slept with more than forty people.

I asked, “Do you think having such a high number makes you less—”

“Desirable?” he said. “Of course.”

“Less human,” Ashley muttered.

“Less respectable,” said Ethan.

“I was going to say, Do you think it makes you less able to connect with people emotionally?” I asked.

“Yes, of course,” Ethan said. “Relationships aren't coveted now. Back in the day, a relationship meant something. Now it's like we're dating but we're not gonna get married, so I'll just cheat. My friends are like, She's not gonna find out—you can have the main course and some appetizers, too.”

“I do not think like that,” Kelsey said.

“That's like the shittiest thing I've ever heard,” Meredith said. “I think it's the thrill of getting away with something.”

“I just think everyone wants to have sex with each other,” said Ashley.

“It's not just guys!” Ethan exclaimed. “Girls cheat, too. Do you know how much it hurts a guy to get cheated on?” His voice cracked. “My friends were like, Yo, your girl was at her ex's house.” He'd been cheated on; he still didn't seem over it.

“Social media makes everything so easy,” he said. “If you meet someone on Tinder, Twitter, Facebook, you can just easily start conversing and like, it's so easy now, it's unreal. It used to be you would meet someone and then you'd say something cute or funny and then ask like, Lemme take you out. But now like you meet 'em on Twitter and it's like, Hey, what's up, you tryna come over and chill? I haven't been on an actual date with a girl in probably two years.

“I almost wish we lived back in the day,” he said, “like in the seventies, when you had to go knock on the door and ask the dad for permission. That's when the best days were, not even lying.” He sounded wistful.

“You weren't even there, so how do you know it was better?” Ashley asked.

“From movies and shit,” Ethan maintained. “It was more genuine. Now so many girls are like on Twitter, tweeting and texting you, trying to hang out with you…It's not
hard.
”

Then Ashley and Ethan hugged; they kissed each other tenderly on the cheek.

“We made out last night,” Ethan said. “Not a hundred percent sure…”

“Ashley got those marks on her neck from him,” said Meredith, looking up from her phone.

Devon gently pulled back Ashley's hair. There were red marks along the sides of her neck. They looked like fingerprints.

“Who did that to you?” Devon asked.

“I think he
grabbed
me,” Ashley said, meaning Ethan. She put her hands around her throat in a mime of choking, eyes flying open.

Everybody went, “Oooooh.”

“What the fuck,” said Ethan, making a face.

“I swear,” Ashley said.

It seems reasonable to wonder whether the violence in online porn is having some influence on why hookup sex often seems to involve rough sex. “Any girls out there want to be cock slapped?” said a Yik Yak post in New York. It isn't just young men who bring rough sex into hookups, young women do as well. “I want to be pounded like a slut,” said another Yik Yak post. “Some girls literally want to get punched,” said a young man in New York, age twenty-five. Aggression is part of sexuality, and no one wants to judge anyone else for his or her sexual preferences. But the fact that women are so often the recipients of the violence in the sexual acts portrayed in porn gives one pause for the ramifications of this in rough hookup sex.

Amy, twenty-six, a young woman in New York, says she believes the rough sex in hookups actually stems from a lack of emotional intimacy: “It's this idea that you have to have this intense sexual experience. It covers up the fact that you barely know each other.”

“Okay, favorite movie,” Ethan said expectantly. “One, two, three—”

Ashley stared at him, uncomprehending.

“Aw,” he complained. “
The Notebook
!”

“Oh,
The Notebook,
” she said lightly. “We do love
The Notebook.
Sorry.”

“ ‘If you're a bird, I'm a bird!' ” he said, quoting the movie, dismayed.

It seemed like a very romantic film for “Mr. Raw Dog.”

“He fucking loves it,” said Ashley, grinning.

“I can quote every single line from it,” Ethan said. “But,” he added bitterly, “movies aren't real. It's all Tinder and Twitter and getting busy.”

He got up and went over to join the boys who were doing running jumps onto a bed in a corner of the room. They did cartwheels onto the bed, bouncing and flopping onto the floor, hitting the wall.

Ashley watched him. She looked alone.

“I'm so emotional,” she said self-consciously, glancing around. “Sometimes if I see, like, a good hit in baseball, I, like, have to leave. My mom's like, Ashley, you need to be on antidepressants.” Her eyes were welling up. “Or like, when people cheer, and everyone is happy, I feel like it's crazy no one else is crying. I get goose bumps like any time someone is happy.

“My friends get pissed at me 'cause I never want the party to end,” she said. “I will stay there until there's one person left. I will just fall asleep on the ground. I don't want to leave before the party's over, 'cause what if something cool happens? My friends say I have a FOMO. I just don't want to go home. I just want the party to go on forever.”

She looked lost.