American Girls (6 page)

In 1845, a photographer made a daguerreotype of a nude. It's housed in the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, the world's oldest museum of photography, located in the former home of the founder of the Eastman Kodak Company. The woman in the picture is lying, naked, on her side with her back to the camera, on a chaise longue draped with lace. The focus of the frame is her round behind. She looks a bit like Kim Kardashian, with her long dark hair and dark eyes, staring off to the right.

The Eastman Museum's title for the daguerreotype is
Odalisque;
the woman has been styled to suggest a harem girl or prostitute from some “exotic” land, with a serpent bracelet and a headdress adorned with coins. In the past, the photograph had also been called
Académie,
a reference to the “academy figures,” or nude photographs, used by painters in French art schools in the nineteenth century, ostensibly for the purpose of study.

The photographing of nudes began almost as soon as there were cameras; the justification was the needs of artists. In “Nude Photography, 1840–1920,” Peter Marshall wrote, “In the prevailing moral climate at the time of the invention of photography, the only officially sanctioned photography of the body was for the production of artist's studies.” However, Marshall went on, “many of the surviving examples of daguerreotypes are…clearly not in this genre but have a sensuality that clearly implies they were designed as erotic or pornographic images.” “This explains the demand—which lasted far into the twentieth century—for Artistic Photographs of Nudes,” conjectured Uwe Scheid and Hans-Michael Koetzle in
1000 Nudes: A History of Erotic Photography from 1839–1939.

April Alliston, a professor of comparative literature at Princeton who specializes in gender studies and has taught classes on the history of porn, points out that technological advances are often accompanied by a surge in the production and consumption of pornography. “Historically, a spike in interest in pornography is also associated with advancement in women's rights,” Alliston says. “What happened at the time of the invention of the printing press was very similar to what's happening now with the Internet. With the printing press you had porn suddenly made available through technology. At the same time you had women getting more rights; there was more literacy and freedom for women.” She goes on, “Historians talk about how pornography, as we understand it today, was invented in the era of the printing press in response to widespread cultural anxieties that women could gain more knowledge through reading. With the printing press, pornographic images and texts were circulated among men in a way that excluded women…Most early pornography was presented from the point of view of female prostitutes, whose foremost desire was to service men's pleasure, and to profit from it for lack of other means of survival.

“I see the spread of porn in part as a backlash to women's increased independence,” Alliston asserts. “I believe that porn has gone mainstream now because women have been gaining power…Rather than being about sexual liberation, I see in porn a form of control over sex and sexuality.”

The debate among feminists about pornography, also known as “the porn wars,” began in the late 1970s. There are anti-porn feminists who see porn as oppressive to women, a form of patriarchal control, and say that it should be banned. Anti-censorship feminists agree that porn is misogynistic but oppose a legal response. And pro-porn feminists regard porn as liberating for women's sexuality, even a cause for celebration. Since online porn seeped into computers and smartphones in the 1990s and 2000s, it has been the latter view which has gained dominance in the mainstream. “4 Reasons Porn Is Actually Really, Really Good for Women,” said a post on MarieClaire.com in 2015. Liking porn has become a trait associated with girls and women who are seen as cool and fashionable. “I love porn,” Cameron Diaz said on
Jimmy Kimmel Live.
“I watch a lot of it,” said singer Lily Allen.

Today, the online porn industry is overwhelmingly controlled by a handful of men, some of them dubbed the “geek-kings of smut” by
New York
magazine for their background in tech. Many of the top online pornography sites, including Pornhub, RedTube, YouPorn, Tube8, and Extremetube, are owned by a single multibillion-dollar conglomerate, MindGeek, the number one producer and distributer of porn in the world. A spokesperson for the company has claimed that it is one of the top five in the world in bandwidth consumption. Three of its founding owners—Matt Keezer, Ouissam Youssef, and Stephane Manos—are tech guys in their thirties from Montreal who originally know one another from attending Concordia University and “the competitive Foosball circuit.” Their sleek website describes the company as a “global industry-leading information technology firm,” as if likening it to Google or Apple. Nowhere does it mention that the bulk of the company's profits come from pornography. There are none of the images of women being “pounded” and “jackhammered” that one sees when pulling up any of the MindGeek-owned porn sites. There's no sign of the “barely legal” girls who perform in the videos in Pornhub's most popular category.

“When it comes to children,” Alliston says, “there's really nothing to argue about. Kids are defined by our laws as not being able to consent to viewing porn. There are few protections against them seeing it, and some people take the attitude that it's inevitable and benign. I think a lot of people who make this argument don't realize what porn today really looks like in terms of how the women are treated.” She adds that in recent years there have been reports of kids watching porn at schools across the country. In 2014, school district officials in Los Angeles discovered that high-schoolers in its iPad program were bypassing the devices' security settings in order to watch porn. In 2015, in Encinitas, California, parents were outraged to learn that second-graders were using school-issued iPads to watch it.

Nudes. To have a social media account is to at some point see nudes or semi-nudes—“boob” and “butt” and body shots of teenage girls and women, many of whom work in porn. Whether or not a young person seeks out porn online, chances are she will see pornographic images popping up on her social media accounts, whether in circulated photos that appear on news feeds or as spam for porn sites. Or she can easily search social media for porn. On Twitter there are hashtags for “nudes” and “sluts.” On Tumblr and Instagram, searches for “porn” and “nudes” turn up multiple results. There are thousands of links on the Web to “leaked” nudes—screenshots taken and forwarded by those who received them, almost always without the senders' knowledge or consent. You don't even need to be on social media to see porn or nudes, graphic nudes; you can just Google them.

There are plenty of sex acts to be seen on social media as well. “It's a thing to find that really outrageous thing and send it around,” said a thirteen-year-old girl in New York. “When I was in seventh grade, everybody was watching this viral video, ‘2 Girls, 1 Cup,' of two [teenage] girls having sex and they're eating one of them's poop from a cup. It's beyond disgusting. But if you don't watch it, it's like you're afraid, or you missed out on what everybody's talking about.”

“A girl I know was bragging to me about how she and her friends were watching porn of this girl they tied up and rammed in the butt,” said a thirteen-year-old girl in Los Angeles. “She was laughing about it. It really creeped me out.”

“Porn is not going away,” says Soraya Chemaly, a writer and the director of the WMC Speech Project, an initiative by the Women's Media Center dedicated to fighting the online harassment of women and girls. “I don't know if people are fooling themselves or burying their heads in the sand. I was talking to a high school principal and he said, Really, you think our kids are looking at porn? And I just didn't even know what to say. Our kids are not only consuming porn, they're producing porn”—by taking and sharing nudes. “I don't really care if a person has a sex-positive view of pornography,” Chemaly adds, “but no one is talking about any of it to kids in terms of how it affects their behavior. Whether or not they're looking at it, our culture is permeated by a porn aesthetic.”

So what is it like to be a girl growing up in a world inundated with nude and pornographic images of women and girls? How does it affect her conception of her body, her self, her self-worth? Her relationship to boys and other girls? In the spring of 2014, I went to James City County, Virginia (established in 1634 and located on the Virginia Peninsula, some thirty-five miles inland from the Chesapeake Bay), because I wanted to talk to a girl who was in the news after posting nude pictures of herself on Twitter. She had reportedly been arrested.

The legal system seems at a loss to know what to do about children seeing and sharing nudes. It has become so common. The girl, age sixteen, who went unnamed because she was underage, had been charged with a felony, the possession and distribution of child pornography, according to reports in February 2014. That the girl herself was the same child whose naked images were being distributed made no difference under the law. The charge, under a section of the Virginia code, carries a potential prison term of five to twenty years.

When I talked to Nate Green, the Commonwealth's Attorney for Williamsburg and Jamestown (the two cities that make up James City County, population around 70,000), he was already backpedaling from the charge, possibly due to the negative reaction the girl's alleged arrest had been receiving in the media. “We have no interest in criminalizing a juvenile who does something like this,” said Green. “We just want to stop it from happening. We don't want these pictures following anyone to college or making them out as easy prey on the Internet.” He said the girl would just receive some “education and counseling.” Stephanie Williams-Ortery, a spokesperson for the James City County police, told me, “These were fully nude pictures [the girl] tweeted. She acknowledged she was trying to get the attention of some young men. What she did was pretty brazen.”

She was sharing nudes. A nude is a type of sext, an electronically sent message, either in pictures or in words, intended to cause arousal or attraction in, or convey one's arousal or attraction to, another person. Sexting is a kind of virtual flirting, also a kind of sex, cybersex. The results of studies on what percentage of kids sext vary so widely as to make even an educated guess difficult, some researchers say; studies are inconsistent in the age ranges surveyed and in their definition of sexting, which can involve everything from sending a fully naked photo of oneself to sharing a link to a porn site to simply texting “I think your body's hot” with no image included. Studies have found that the number of middle-schoolers and high-schoolers who sext, with either words or pictures or both, is anywhere from just 4 percent to more than 50 percent. It's safe to say that sexting is part of the culture of social media; whether or not a girl is sexting, she's most likely aware of the practice.

Snapchat and Kik Messenger, an anonymous instant-messaging service, are two of the apps where kids say they're most likely to share nudes, as well as by texting. “ ‘Got Kik?' means, Do you want to sext?” said a fourteen-year-old girl in New York. Since its creation by students at the University of Waterloo in 2009, Kik has appeared in the news in stories involving pedophiles who say they used the service to communicate with underage girls. In 2014,
The Trentonian
reported that a twenty-seven-year-old man was arrested after allegedly being found with “14 photographs of a female” he met on Kik, identified as a thirteen-year-old resident of Bensalem, Pennsylvania, “in different stages of nudity and one video of that female masturbating.”

A woman who works at a middle school in James City County told me that in the last few years they've been having trouble with kids getting distracted because they were sexting during class. “We had a twelve-year-old writing to the boy, Do you want me to touch your D?” she said, sounding appalled. “D” meant dick. “And we've seen boys looking at naked pictures of girls in school,” she said. “There was one girl who texted the boy, I'm home watching porn.”

Most states have laws against minors sexting, which prosecutors say is appropriate, given that “lewd” images of children are being distributed, albeit by the children themselves, thereby putting others at risk for being in possession of what is defined by the law as child porn. But the policing of sexting has drawn criticism in recent years. Minors being “prosecuted under child pornography statutes for producing or sending images of themselves or other minors…is not the proper use of child pornography prosecution, nor is it a solution to the problem of minors sexting,” said an article in the University of Michigan
Journal of Law Reform
in 2014.

In
The
Atlantic,
writer Hanna Rosin depicted the busting of a teen “sexting ring” in Louisa County, Virginia, in 2014 as much ado about nothing. The case involved a high school in which a group of boys had posted more than 1,000 nude and semi-nude photos and videos of girls, ages about fourteen to seventeen, on Instagram, without the girls' knowledge or consent. In her piece Rosin described the Instagram page as looking like “a porn site”; but in an interview on NPR, she maintained that the naked images of the girls were equivalent to “baseball cards or Pokemon cards” to the boys, a kind of “social currency” for them, “more than…a springboard for fantasy.”

“There's so much free porn out there that these pictures serve a different role,” Rosin said. “These guys look at these pictures for five seconds. They're just not that big of a deal to them. And so sending them along is kind of fun…It seems like a prank.”

But if the circulating of nudes is a prank, then it's one that has had some tragic consequences. In 2008, Jessica Logan, an eighteen-year-old Cincinnati girl, hanged herself after her ex-boyfriend shared nudes of her, and she was labeled a “slut” and a “whore.” In 2009, Hope Witsell, a thirteen-year-old Ruskin, Florida, girl, hanged herself after a boy she liked shared nudes of her.

When the actress Jennifer Lawrence's nudes were hacked, in 2014, she labeled it a “sex crime,” and many people were inclined to agree with her assessment. The danger that sexting may result in cyberbullying, or “revenge porn,” the nonconsensual sharing of nudes, has been established in many studies. Sexting has also been linked to “sexual objectification and violence, to risky sexual behavior, and to negative consequences like bullying by peers,” according to an article in
Cyberpsychology
in 2014; and yet, despite evidence of its negative impact, the article went on, “a normalcy discourse is appearing in the literature that interprets sexting as normal intimate communication within romantic and sexual relationships, both among adults and adolescents who are exploring and growing into adult relationships.”

In other words, teenage sexting has already come to be viewed as normal. Movies and television shows have portrayed teenagers sexting as something romantic and cute, like a kind of cyber-hickey. On an episode of
Keeping Up with the Kardashians,
teenagers Kylie and Kendall Jenner giggled at sexts they found on their mother, Kris's, phone, sexts allegedly sent to a younger man. Even as prosecutors try to make an example of sexting teens, sexting is all but accepted as social behavior.

“How to Take a Tasteful Nude Selfie,” said a post on Allure.com in 2015 (“Highlight your best bits”). There's even a kind of nude selfie feminism. Comedian Amy Schumer seemed to equate nude selfies with female empowerment in a 2015 tweet: “…Spend less time worrying what others have and focus on getting what you want #dicks #nudeselfie”; as did
Rookie
magazine founder and actress Tavi Gevinson in 2013, when she was seventeen, and tweeted: “…as long as there are reddit threads of secret shots of girls' butts,” meaning leaked nudes on the social networking site Reddit, “let them selfie their own butts.”

But some girls and young women aren't comfortable with taking or sharing nudes, as routine as it has become. “When did men obtain the right to ask women for such intimate and over-sexualized requests?” asked Lauren Martin on Elite Daily, a website popular with college students, in 2014. “When did demeaning women to nothing more than a naked photograph become so trendy?” On social media sites such as YouTube, Twitter, and Yik Yak, you often see posts by girls complaining about boys and young men asking for nudes. “I can't handle like 20 year old dudes begging for nudes and shit,” said a Yik Yakker in New York.

“I was in my feminism class” at Hunter College, said Jenna, a nineteen-year-old New York girl, “and we were talking about how girls sending nudes of themselves through Tinder,” the dating app, “or on similar websites made for the exploitation of, often, young women; and most of the people in my class said that it's totally cool to send nudes, because we have the choice to show our bodies to whomever we want—which is true, but everyone thought I was an asshole for objecting and saying, yeah, but it's for a man's benefit. Like, guys don't see nudes and think, Wow, what an empowered woman, good for her for being comfortable with her body. They go like, Great, boobs; or like, She's a slut for sending me pictures but, like, I'll still sleep with her.”

I didn't get to talk to the James City County girl who'd allegedly been arrested for posting nude photos on Twitter (which was of course created by four young men, one an undergraduate at NYU and three Silicon Valley software developers and entrepreneurs, in 2006). I did talk to some boys on the playing field of her high school one cloudy afternoon. They were good-looking white boys, all age seventeen. They seemed like nice young men. I asked them if they knew the girl who'd been in the news. They all pulled out their phones, and one of them showed me a nude picture of the girl, which he said had been forwarded to him by another boy. Each of the boys had nude or semi-nude photos on his phone of girls they knew or had met on social media.

“That's my old girlfriend,” said one of the boys, thumbing through pictures on his phone. “That's a girl who wants to get with me, that's a girl I asked for nudes…”

The other boys laughed, embarrassed.

When I asked them what they did with these pictures, they were sheepish, grinning, and finally said: “Use 'em to jerk off.” “We're horny dudes, you know?”

I went to the New Town mall in Williamsburg one Sunday afternoon and saw a flock of middle-school-age girls from a local church group eating frozen yogurt at the Sweet Frog frozen yogurt store. They were bouncy and loud in brightly colored clothes—a baby-blue hoodie, a pink down vest, lime-green leggings. Almost all of them had cell phones in their hands, which they looked at intermittently, checking and texting, as they obstreperously conversed.

Some of the little girls were sitting at a table, gathered around an iPhone which was playing the trailer for
American Horror Story: Coven,
a critically acclaimed show full of sexual violence whose characters, a coven of witches, include a promiscuous Hollywood starlet and a teenager who causes her boyfriend to have a brain aneurysm by having sex with him.

“
Oooooh,
I wanna see that!” the girls exclaimed. “Oh my gosh, it's
sooooo
good.”

And there was one girl who sat off to the side, scraping the bottom of her yogurt cup with a plastic spoon. She wore aviator shades and a jaunty pink polka-dotted hat. I asked her why she didn't have a phone.

She smiled up at me and said, “It got taken away 'cause I was being a flirt butt.”

A flirt butt? I asked.

She cupped her hand around my ear and whispered hotly,
“Sexting.”
Then she drew back coyly and giggled.