American Girls (14 page)

“It's not an organic thing that happens to girls, this desire for a perfect image,” says Joan Jacobs Brumberg, author of
The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls.
“It's foisted on them. The obsession with the perfection of looks and of the body has happened because of advances in technology and the spread of commercial culture and articulations of the beauty industry.”

“Girls start out life now being immersed in princess culture,” says Rebecca Hains, author of
The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls Through the Princess-Obsessed Years,
referring to the obsession with princesses seen in little girls since the launch of Disney's multibillion-dollar line of princesses and princess toys in 2000. “I think princess culture is part of the overall backlash against feminism,” says Hains. “This obsession with princesses is concurrent with a cultural pendulum swing that happened when the Republicans got back power in the 2000s and [in the 2010s] launched the War on Women,” meaning efforts to roll back reproductive rights and restrict women's rights in other areas. “What became appropriate for girls again was to be pretty, sweet, passive—clearly this is part of a culture shift in our political landscape,” Hains says. “What girls learn from princess culture is that how they look is very, very important. If you're hooked on external validation at age four, that plays into self-objectification and self-sexualization.”

“When girls say, ‘I want to be a model,' they're putting beauty over any other value, like brains,” says Jennifer Sky, an actress and former model who is now a vocal critic of the fashion industry's treatment of teenage models. “Not that one is exclusive over another. But being a fashion model, you're a commodity, your body is turned into an object; you're a salesperson to sell somebody else's products. You are not a person with a mind or a voice. I think it's interesting that when women got the right to vote in America is when some men got together and created the first Miss America pageant,” in Atlantic City in 1921.

It was the day of the night of Lily's first date, and she was worried about the eyeliner she ordered arriving from Amazon on time. It wasn't exactly her
first
date, she said—she had been on dates, of sorts, since seventh grade, but this was the first one where she “really liked” the boy. He was “really smart, really funny, really athletic, really tall,” she said, eating chips at the long wooden table in the kitchen of her home, an eight-bedroom house on a leafy street in Garden City. “And he's been my friend for a while”—since the previous summer, when they went to science camp together at an Ivy League university (“it sounds really nerdy, I know, and it
is,
but honestly it's fun”)—“and I really like him and he really likes me so I think it's…yeah.” She nervously rearranged her hair.

Lily said she wanted the date to be “perfect,” so she really wanted this certain Lancôme eyeliner to come before she had to start getting ready to go out. “It goes on the best and you can make wings like Audrey Hepburn's. I saw it on a beauty tutorial. I watch
tons
of them 'cause they give you really good information.”

She had ordered the eyeliner on Amazon the night before for next-day delivery. “My mom's credit card is on there,” she said, “so we can just, like, get whatever we want. She never notices.”

The doorbell rang and some packages came—the UPS man had two: some squishy neon-colored balls for Lily's younger sister, Olivia, ten, and Lily's eyeliner. “Oh, thank you!” Lily told the UPS man, signing for them.

“Don't tell Mom,” she told Olivia, the package under her arm. “Where is Mom?”

“She took Henry to the Apple store,” Olivia said, tearing open her box of squishy balls. Henry was her brother, age twelve.

“Why?” Lily asked.

“To buy him a new iPhone,” Olivia said. “He broke his. He threw it at the wall when he got mad at the game he was playing. He threw it twice.”

Lily was glad Henry wouldn't be in the house while she was getting ready to go on her date; he was always saying things to try to make her doubt herself, always comparing himself with her, saying he was better at sports and she was “dumb” for caring about things like clothes and makeup. “Little brothers, you know?” She shrugged. “He's a pain. He's just jealous because I'm older and he's immature. He has ADHD; he never wants to do his homework. And sometimes he smells.” Lily had ADHD, too, she said, but the prescription drugs she took controlled it and she could concentrate. “And I'm just, like, very driven,” she added. She said she also suffered from anxiety and took medication for that.

She was one of the top students in her grade at a competitive Manhattan private school. She was also an athlete, good at many sports. “My whole family's good at sports,” she said breezily. “That's one of the reasons we moved out here to Garden City, so my brother could play soccer.”

Garden City is a village of some 22,000 people, about an hour's drive from Manhattan, an affluent community with many beautiful churches, a place centered on raising kids, raising them to be successes. An estimated 99 percent of Garden City High School graduates go on to college, many of them high-ranking. The school district is known for its strength in sports; in the afternoons, the playing fields are dotted with kids in team uniforms, running up and down. “Garden City kids are sick at sports,” said Matt, a seventeen-year-old boy at Roosevelt Field, a mall in East Garden City, the tenth-largest mall in America; it used to be an airfield.

“You work hard, you excel at sports,” Matt said, “you get into an Ivy League school, or even like an NYU or a Boston College, you make your parents look good, and they, like, pay you for your time. They see everything in terms of money so that's how they show their love—through money.” “But a lot of kids who are fuck-ups get whatever they want, too,” his friend Roxanne, sixteen, observed.

During the financial crisis of 2008,
The New York Times
ran a story about how the residents of Garden City were coping; one resident, a wealth manager, told the paper, “Someone from Des Moines might not feel bad about well-off people like this losing their money, but people get used to an income level.” The number of Garden City residents who work in finance and real estate has been estimated at 20 percent.

Lily's father was a lawyer who worked in Manhattan and her mother was a stay-at-home mom. As the oldest of five, Lily said she never felt she had her parents' full attention; the littler kids took up so much of her mother's time and “my dad is, like, never home.” Her mother did pay her attention, she said, but she was “always, like, managing me and making sure I'm doing everything right.” So now it was nice—“so nice,” she said—to have someone in her life like Josh, her date, who would just talk to her and listen to her, and tell her she was pretty, “Oh my God, like all the time.”

They hadn't actually seen each other in person for about a year. After camp, they started gradually making contact through Facebook messaging, occasional texting, favoriting each other's tweets, and liking each other's pictures on Instagram. “I just thought of him as a friend after camp until a month or two ago,” Lily said. And then something happened when they Skyped. “We just talked and talked for like four hours and he really liked talking to me and I really liked talking to him so…yeah.” Again she nervously rearranged her hair.

Ever since then, she said, she and Josh had been Skyping most nights for about an hour, and then for three- or four-hour stretches every weekend, only stopping “when we have to, like, go to the bathroom or take a shower.” Now they were texting all day, every day, even during school (“We just talk about whatever we're doing, or we'll say like, Hey, what's up, hi, bye”). He was the last person she talked to at night before she went to sleep and the first person she talked to in the morning, “when I open my eyes.

“He kept asking me out,” she said, “but I said no, because there's just so much going on in my life right now and I just didn't feel like I had the time. My school is a lot of pressure, a lot of stress. We have hours and hours of homework a night, and it's a lot to deal with, all the work. It's partly the pressure I'm putting on myself and partly the pressure that my parents put on me to do well—all this pressure combined, to take this education and do something great with it, it can all make you feel really overwhelmed. Of course I want to amount to great things,” she said, “but when everyone's telling you and constantly badgering you about it, it can be really stressful. At the school I go to, one bad grade can, like, crush a person.”

And so she wasn't sure whether she could fit “a relationship” into her jam-packed schedule. Josh lived on Long Island, too, in a town nearby, but through all of this texting and Skyping and favoriting and liking, they had never managed to actually see each other in person. “And that's why I wanted it to be a
movie
date,” Lily said, rambling along in her restless way, “a
double
date, because if it's weird to see each other again there will be other people there.”

She had enlisted the help of her best friend, Priya, to come along that night “in case it gets awkward,” and Josh was bringing another boy as Priya's date. They were going to see
22 Jump Street,
rated R. “My dad will buy the tickets and sit in the car or something while we watch the movie. My dad is
crazy
—he has to, like, thoroughly check out the guy.”

So tonight was “kind of a big thing,” Lily said. “Well, not really a
big
thing, I mean, I'm just seeing if I really like him in real life, right?” Still, she was glad that the eyeliner had come—“thank
God.
” There was a five-tier makeup tray in her bedroom, overflowing with shiny, colorful cosmetics.

Now that she had the eyeliner, the next thing was to figure out what to wear. She searched in her closet and among the heaps of clothes strewn everywhere. Her room was messy, crammed with things: a bed, a desk, a chair, clothes, books, shoes, discarded toys, and an elliptical exercise machine she used to “stay in shape.” “Sometimes when I'm stressed out I just go on it for like an hour and it takes the stress away.”

She began piecing together an outfit. “I have a pretty good fashion sense,” she said. “I modeled for like two years, but then I gave up because I fell down on the runway,” in a practice show, “and I didn't like it anymore. I modeled from like eleven to thirteen—I was in a modeling agency. It was cool, it was fun, but it got to be too much, so I quit.” When I talked to Lily's mother, later, she said that Lily “could be” a model, if she were only taller. “The lady at the agency would do our makeup and we would practice doing fake photo shoots and we would practice the catwalk in high heels,” said Lily. “It was fun to feel like everyone was watching you and it was cool to be able to say, like, I'm part of a modeling agency.”

I asked what had made her want to model. She thought a moment. “I guess I wanted to do it from seeing models on TV and in magazines—it was like, Oh, if I can be a model, girls will look up to me like I look up to these girls. Whenever I'd see models in magazines, it was like, Wow, she's really pretty, and if I can be a model girls will be like, Wow, she's really pretty, too. I love
America's Next Top Model.
It's cool to watch what that life would be like. It's such a glamorous life.”

America's Next Top Model,
hosted by Tyra Banks, was one of the most popular shows for American girls for more than a decade. Between its premiere in 2003 and cancellation in 2015, it aired in more than 146 countries. The reality show involves a competition among a handful of aspiring young models with Tyra as their mentor and judge; and Tyra's judgments can be harsh, not just about the contestants' appearance, but their character and motivation—how much they appear to “want it.” Sometimes Tyra makes fun of the would-be models on the show with a corrective zeal; in an infamous episode, the subject of a viral meme, she shouts hysterically at a girl she feels has not exhibited the appropriate level of commitment, making her weep. (“I was rooting for you! We were all rooting for you! How dare you!” Tyra chastises.)

When I interviewed Tyra in 2007, she told me that, growing up in L.A., “I used to be a mean girl. Mean as hell. I was a bully.”
America's Next Top Model
thrives on scenes of meanness between the girls. (A typical catty comment: “She eats candy all the time.”) The contestants are often depicted as shallow and not that bright. It was a favorite show of many of the beauty pageant contestants I interviewed in Houston. “I watch it all the time,” said Bailey, seventeen. “I decided I want to be a model from that.” Livia, sixteen, said, “I'm obsessed with
America's Next Top Model.
”

As for Lily, she said she knew she was being influenced by the media even as it was influencing her—they talked about it a lot in her school; there were speakers who came to educate the girls and group sessions where girls expressed their feelings about media pressure.

“Oh, yeah, it's a big deal,” she said. “We talk about it all the time. Pop culture and the media really influence girls my age—we're growing up, finding out who we are and what we want to be. We're becoming comfortable or uncomfortable with our own bodies, and it definitely plays a role in how we feel about ourselves.

“I'm confident with
my
body,” she went on, “I'm confident with how
I
look, I'm not worried about
that.
But for so many other girls my age it's a really big problem. You have all this anorexia and bulimia from girls seeing girls on TV and in magazines and Instagram and wanting to look like them. It's difficult for girls who
aren't
confident with their bodies because they can develop these terrible things like eating disorders that affect them their whole lives until they're adults.” She said there was a girl in her school whom she “literally had not seen eat in three years.”

I asked her why she thought girls were still influenced by the media, even when they were aware of its pressures. “I don't know,” she said. “It's weird. Sometimes I wonder if it's the parents,” she mused after a moment. “Like I wonder why our parents let us do grown-up things. Like why do they let us go to these parties?” She talked about bat mitzvahs and birthday parties where there were “mocktails,” or faux alcoholic drinks in cocktail glasses. “It looks just like alcohol,” she said. “There's so much adult stuff at these things. We go to these parties with high heels and fancy dresses and we're like twelve and thirteen and we party till one o'clock in the morning. But by the time we're in college, we'll already know what that feels like to party till one in the morning. So what will we do for fun then?”

She talked about a party where there was a “runway show,” and girls could “pick a designer dress and put it on and wear it on the runway, and there was a paparazzi taking pictures so we could pretend like we were famous.

“The way girls dress now is just
ridiculous,
” Lily said.

She was deciding between two outfits to wear that night on her date: it was either going to be a black minidress from Brandy Melville or a short white skirt and black tank top from Urban Outfitters. She was hanging the outfits on her bedroom door so she could get a better look, standing back, evaluating them.

“Like, there was a party for the private schools on a boat and all these girls were wearing cutout dresses, dresses with random cutouts,” she went on, “like a belly cutout to show your belly button; you'll even see, like, twelve-year-olds wearing these things. They were wearing, like, the shortest skirts. Like, why do their moms let them go out like that?”