American Girls (15 page)

She decided that in order to make a decision about which outfit to wear she would have to put on both and text pictures of herself in them to Priya, to get a second opinion. She went into her bathroom and came out wearing the short white skirt and black tank top. “How's this?” she asked, turning around to look at herself in her bedroom mirror. “Do you think this is like a
date
outfit, or do you think it looks too casual?”

I asked her if she thought this could be an example of the very thing she was just talking about, clothing that was sexualizing.

“Well, I don't feel compelled to go out
naked,
” she said, “but when you see every girl dressing sexy, you do feel compelled to do it, too. The media, like, completely oversexualizes everyone now—in every magazine you see everyone in some sexy outfit. That's just what we're shown, and what we're shown is what we
do.
A lot of girls my age look up to these older girls in the media who wear all these sexy things—basically anyone you see in a magazine, all the big movie stars. Everyone loves Mila Kunis. Rihanna. I mean, I would say Miley Cyrus, but it's kind of controversial. A bunch of people are like, Go Miley, and a bunch of people are like,
No,
Miley.” She laughed.

“The people who support Miley love her because she's being her own person now, and good for Miley for that. But Miley's own person is not what some people would
like
her to be—and some people consider her a role model. So the people who are saying No, Miley are saying that because she wears these revealing bathing suits onstage and twerks with teddy bears,” a reference to Cyrus's controversial 2013 performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, “which is weird. She's expressing herself, but not in the way that we want our kids to see.”

There was a
Hannah Montana
DVD on her shelf, a relic of yesteryear. A One Direction pillow on her bed. “I know, embarrassing,” she said.

Lily took pictures of herself in the white skirt and tank top and texted them to her friend Priya. “She'll tell me what she thinks,” she said. “She's
very
blunt.” Then she went in the bathroom again and changed into the black minidress. She took more pictures and sent them. Priya texted: “The black kinda looks like what a mom would wear to a wedding.” “So I guess that settles
that,
” Lily said with a laugh. She texted Priya emojis of a face laughing so hard there were tears running down its cheeks.

She said that the “pressure” about how to look and what to wear came from other girls, too. “If you don't wear the right thing, they just
look
at you and you can get ostracized,” she said. “Boys are a lot less
cattier
than girls and they're a lot more laid-back, so that's why I like to hang out with them. I'm kind of a
guy's
girl, not a girl's girl. I have a lot of guy friends.”

Did the “pressure” ever come from boys, too? I asked.

“Oh, definitely,” Lily said. “When I'm in school with boys, I definitely do feel inclined to wear makeup and dress up, 'cause if there's a boy you like there's all these other girls around and
they're
wearing makeup and fancy clothes and looking really nice and you can't kind of just slack off. You feel like you have to do it; it's definitely an additional pressure; you want to look nice, you want all the boys to think you're pretty, and so you feel like you need to wear makeup. But I'm pretty sure you don't…,” she added, her voice trailing off.

“It
is
distracting,” she said, “especially if the boy likes you back, you'll be, like, looking at each other and you don't really focus—it does distract you if you like a boy and you're in his class. You're like, How can I talk to him? How can I make him notice me? I'm pretty sure most girls do that.”

Lily said that she first started “dating” boys in seventh grade. “I had my first boyfriend then. I think I would have little crushes, like cute little crushes from fourth grade, but I wouldn't go on dates. I don't have serious relationships now, because what's the point, what's the rush? You can be young and have your fun. But a lot of girls my age have serious boyfriends, serious dates. They'll go to fancy restaurants together in the city, go to parties together. It's crazy. They have, like, serious plans for the future, like what they'll do when they go off to college or something, and I'm like, How can you even
think
of that at this moment?

“Girls in my school and girls on Long Island where I live,” she went on, “they do the same thing. There will be pictures on Facebook of girls my age out at these fancy places in fancy dresses, like they're going to get married next week or something. They put pictures on social media—it's a huge thing, boyfriends and social media. Girls that have boyfriends show them off on Facebook and Instagram. It's not like they're
maliciously
wanting people to think, Oh, look at my boyfriend, he's so much hotter than your boyfriend, it's just they want to show off what they're doing, and the boys want to show off what they're doing, too; so you'll see all these photos on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, status updates twenty-four/seven—maybe to, like, even make people jealous.

“In seventh grade, that's when it picks up,” she said. “They would have these little dances in seventh grade for private schools; I met my first boyfriend at one of those. It was cute, a little kiss on the cheek and stuff; sometimes we'd go out for ice cream. And seventh grade is when things really heat up on social media. That's when boys start liking all your posts to get your attention. If a boy likes a lot of your posts, then he likes you. Especially if he likes your profile picture, 'cause that's how you're represented online—if he likes your profile picture, that's how you
know.

“Social media is ninety-five percent of what happens in all relationships now,” she said. “How we talk is on social media. A lot of people don't even meet; they just have boyfriends online. Girls meet their boyfriends online. That's really scary to me; like, I have a friend who just recently met a guy on social media—she never met him before in her life—and they were dating, and, like, that freaks me out, because what if he were a serial killer or something? I mean, good for her for having a boyfriend at all, but, I mean, she never even really met this guy, she met him on iFunny—it's this place where you share pictures and stuff, you make funny captions for pictures; they opened up a chat room and started to chat and Snapchat. It's creepy to me to think, Well, what if he's a
rapist
?”

Concerns about kids being approached by predators online have existed since children started going online. Over the years such fears have been stoked by dramatic cases in the news, such as that of Kirsten Ostrenga, famous on Myspace as “Kiki Kannibal.” Ostrenga was the fourteen-year-old Florida girl who was raped by an eighteen-year-old boy she met on Myspace in 2006. After the boy, Danny Cespedes, killed himself at the scene of his arrest, the story became a sort of Internet legend. And yet such stories have become increasingly routine and pass without much comment. In 2011, Michael Downs, a twenty-year-old from Santa Clarita, California, was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for sexually assaulting fifteen underage girls (one a twelve-year-old), many of whom he met on Facebook. In 2015, twenty-year-old Cody Lee Jackson, of Blue Ash, Ohio, abducted a fourteen-year-old girl he met on Facebook, then repeatedly raped, sexually abused, and later impregnated her, all while under charges he had kidnapped two other teen girls, according to authorities. These cases received scant attention.

In her book
It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens,
danah boyd (who uses no capital letters in her name), a principal researcher at Microsoft and visiting professor in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, likened the fear of online predators to the “moral panics” surrounding teens' engagement with other “new genres of media” such as novels in the eighteenth century and comic books in the 1930s. “American society despises any situation that requires addressing teen sexuality,” wrote boyd, “let alone platforms that provide a conduit for teens to explore their desires.” Similarly, in
Kids Gone Wild: From Rainbow Parties to Sexting, Understanding the Hype over Teen Sex,
coauthors Joel Best and Kathleen A. Bogle wrote, “The 1950s witnessed warnings about the new practice of
going steady…
Each generation's critics have managed to warn about a revolution in sexual manners, even as they often failed to acknowledge the longer history of concern about youthful sexual play.”

What this point of view fails to acknowledge, however, are the ways in which the sexual behavior of teenagers actually is being changed and shaped by thoroughly new technology, smartphones and social media, not to mention the influence of online porn. What's being avoided are the hard questions about whether these behaviors are in fact healthy or abusive or even legal, from the perspective of the age of consent. And one reason for this may not in fact be “discomfort with teenage sexuality,” as boyd suggests, but the fear of seeming less than “sex-positive” or raising a moral panic. boyd claims a connection between anxiety over teens being sexual on social media and an uneasiness with teenage sexuality in general. But this is a type of analysis and even a moral judgment of its own, which also has a history, going back at least as far as the 1960s, when parents who didn't “get” the new sexual mores of their hippie children were deemed “squares.” It's a thesis which ignores the interactive nature of social media and dismisses the salient question of whether the person on the other end of the interaction, sometimes in fact a stranger, is an emotionally and sexually healthy person—a person who respects boundaries, and who is aware of the law, which varies from state to state, but does set limits on who is sexually available in order to protect children from being abused and exploited.

In 2014, researchers at the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire found that one in eleven young people said they had experienced an unwanted sexual solicitation online within the previous year. An earlier study by the same group found the number to be higher, one in seven. “Internet sex crimes involving adults and juveniles,” said this earlier study, “more often fit into a model of statutory rape—adult offenders who meet, develop relationships with, and openly seduce underage teenagers—than a model of forcible sexual assault or pedophilic child molesting.” In other words, it isn't the classic, horrific scene of a “dirty old man” jumping out from behind some bushes that kids are most commonly experiencing; it's interactions between themselves and adults, sometimes young adults, whom they may not view as predatory because they have “relationships” with them on social media. This begs the question of whether some kids would even see overtures by potential predators as “predatory,” if asked, since it is part of the culture of social media to seek out and develop relationships with strangers.

This all becomes very complicated in an atmosphere of heightened sexual display, in which sexting and the sending of dick pics and nudes have become normalized. Much of the new normal would have been considered predatory or unhealthy in the past. For example, many girls have come to feel that the acquiring of likes and congratulatory comments on sexualized pictures of themselves is an achievement, a sign of self-worth—even when the likes and comments come from strangers. The comments about their bodies and beauty they receive from boys and men they know, but also some they don't, are very often valued, not disparaged. Many girls show an appreciation for comments which, if delivered on the street, would be regarded as catcalling or harassment. But in the culture of social media, a girl will most often respond to such comments acceptingly, with grace: “Aw, thank you,” with emojis of kisses being blown, for example. It's not social media etiquette to resist such comments, to be that girl with no “chill” who objects, or who fights back.

“It's happened to me, too,” Lily said, “that guys I don't even know will approach me online and ask me out. This guy who has maybe a few mutual friends with me will start asking me out and saying, Hi, you're really pretty, will you go out with me? Stuff like that; and it's really creepy because I don't know him—it's like, Why are you talking to me? Ew.” She confessed that another boy had once asked her for nudes. “Just some boy my age, I hardly knew him,” she said. “And I was like, shocked, 'cause like why would you think I would send naked pictures of myself to you when I don't even know you?

“I didn't tell anybody except my friends, and some of them were like, Yeah, that's happened to me, too,” she said. “I didn't tell my mom because my parents would freak out and like call the police or something. This one friend of mine she said I should send him a picture of myself nude with my head cut off so nobody would know who I was, but, I mean, I would never do
that…

“I guess it's my fault for friending him back in the first place,” she went on, “and of course I defriended him immediately after he got creepy. I've heard worse things—like this girl in my school, she was on Kik and this older guy who said he was sixteen asked her for naked pictures, and he knew she was fourteen. And like how does she even know he's sixteen? He could be like some forty-year-old man with a big belly.

“I had another situation once,” she said. “There was this really attractive guy who friended me on Facebook and he was really cute, and he said hi to me so I said hi back and we were talking and he was like, How old are you? And I was like, That's a weird question to ask. How old are
you
? And he was like, Well, I'm twenty-three and I live in France and I think you're really pretty. And I was like, Nooooo, I'm fourteen, no. There are guys who friend you who are so much older. I mean, that just can't happen. It's
illegal.