American Girls (16 page)

“It's so easy for older predators to go online and just find a girl; it's so easy for them to do, because girls want the most friends and they want the most followers and likes, so if someone tries to friend them they'll just friend them back right away without even knowing who they are. So even if it's a serial killer, they still friend them back and maybe even start talking to them. It's scary. Especially since a lot of girls will post pictures of themselves like in their bras and bathing suits, and the people they friend back can see those pictures.

“
I
don't do that,” she added. “I know that colleges can see that—anyone can see that; that's one of the good things about going to a school that educates you about all this stuff, they tell you what everyone can see and what's appropriate to put online. But some girls don't know about that and they just put it all out there and they're not educated enough to know that everyone can see that and anyone can get the wrong idea and just
stalk
you. Especially with, like, Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, where you, like, tag your location, people can see where you are; and girls tweet out exactly where they are on Twitter, people just see that and they can go and find them.”

Lily's Facebook and Instagram pictures were mostly selfies; there were many glamour shots of her doing the duckface and “the sparrow,” the name for another selfie expression where the lips are more tightly pursed. There were pictures of her playfully sticking out her tongue to the side, Miley Cyrus–style, and others where she was modestly exposing her cleavage or posing in short shorts. It was as if she were trying to present a sexualized self within the limits of what she knew would be seen as acceptable to parents, colleges.

I asked her why she thought girls posted so many provocative pictures of themselves.

“I think it's just to get attention,” she said, “to get the likes, everything's about the likes.

“Everyone wants to be famous,” she said with a sigh. “It takes a certain kind of person to want to be famous. I don't think I could handle the attention and the cameras.”

Amanda was ten when she made her first video. Sixth grade. She was a little girl who loved fashion. She wanted to be a designer. “I used to design my own clothes,” she said. And then one day, searching YouTube for a video on how to sew, she stumbled on a brightly colored, sparkly world where grown-up girls taught you how to put on makeup and shop and dress. She was fascinated, watching all these pretty girls applying foundation and eye shadow, swirling their brushes around their faces, and speaking so confidently into the camera. She saw how tens and hundreds of thousands of viewers clicked to watch them talk about beauty products and how to make yourself look beautiful. She was particularly taken with Blair Fowler, also known as JuicyStar07, one of the reigning queens of beauty gurudom, who, as of 2014, had more than 251 million views on YouTube and nearly 2 million subscribers. JuicyStar07 became a “role model” for her.

“Watching her,” said Amanda, sitting on a kitchen stool in her family's house, “inspired me and made me want to do my own.” She set up a camera in her bedroom and made a video on how to do “a brown smoky eye.” She had already practiced a lot with makeup, she said. “I had more makeup than my mom…I was still only ten, so the video wasn't that great. I got, like, a lot of hate. I stopped making videos for a while after that just because people were kinda mean.”

Commenters on her early videos wondered why such a little girl was wearing makeup at all: “Lol I'm 11 and I'm only allowed to wear lip gloss or babylips and CLEAR mascara…but some girls are like 8 and go to school with dark eyeshadow and eyeliner and foundation and red lipstick and there I am just like ‘Wahh.' ” And how did Amanda have so much “high-end makeup”? some asked: “When I was 10 I had no idea what Mac was!”

Still, there were girls who seemed to like seeing someone their own age talking to them from the intimacy of their screens. Reading these girls' comments, Amanda felt emboldened. “When I first started doing this,” she said, “there was no one my age on YouTube. I think that's why they related to me more…they were like, Oh, wow, this girl's just like me.

“I also just kind of got lucky,” she added. “When you searched ‘Middle School Makeup Tutorial,' mine was one of the first ones that popped up, so that really helped. A lot of people watched that video”—well over a million. Amanda's mother was all for her new hobby. “She was like, Yeah, you should do it.” And Amanda was off and running, making videos every week.

Her early videos show a calm and confident little girl, very natural in front of the camera, curling her eyelashes and talking about covering up pimples with foundation—not that she ever got pimples, she was quick to mention. In real life, she had always been popular, was a cheerleader and a softball star—her jersey number was 24, hence the name she chose as her handle: MakeupbyMandy24. After that first video came hundreds of others. She went from makeup tutorials to fashion tutorials to hauls. She said, “I love watching hauls.”

And then came what she describes as the “lifestyle” videos that were just about herself, Amanda, “real and raw.” There was “My Summer Morning Routine” from 2014, where she eats her breakfast and brushes her teeth; it got more than a million views. “When I wake up, I grab my phone and go on Twitter, Instagram,” Amanda says on-screen, “and realize I should get out of bed and actually do something with my day.” Then she gets out of bed and puts on her makeup.

“People like it when you're just, like, being yourself,” Amanda said. “I think that's what my channel is mostly like. Some people spend a lot of time editing or filming their videos to make them really professional. I don't do that as much”—although she does use a professional video editing program, Final Cut Pro. “I think people watch my videos more for my personality,” she said.

“It's totally crazy how more and more people are coming onto social media,” to find their favorite stars, “and so many people can get”—air quotes—“ ‘famous' off it now, like with all the platforms,” she said. “It's just, like, gotten so much bigger, and people are just realizing how cool it is, being more into someone you can actually relate to rather than a TV character.”

For example, there was Amanda's “A Day in My Life” video from 2014, where she filmed herself going to a shopping mall with a friend who “just got her eyebrows done.” “And I am super lazy,” Amanda says on-screen, now lying on a couch with her computer. “So I'm just chilling on Netflix. Netflix is my life. Netflix is my bae”—meaning friend or boyfriend, crush. “I'm watching
Desperate Housewives
right now,” she says, referring to the 2000s dramedy about rich women who are frenemies. This video of her essentially just watching a television show got more than a million views.

“My whole YouTube/social media thing is all around what people want from me,” Amanda explained. “At the end of my videos I'll always ask, ‘What do you want to see next?' 'Cause they're everything to me,” meaning her followers and fans. “They're all my views…so I definitely want to do what they want…You have to understand what the audience wants, what attracts them,” to be successful on YouTube, she said.

“I think there's a lot more to it than people think,” she said. “You're really all about pleasing the audience, but sometimes people will also judge you no matter what you do; so it's always, like, an inner thing, like, Should I put myself out there, being totally myself? Or should I kinda lean toward what people want to see more? So it's hard work,” she said—that is, figuring out if people will like who you really are, or if you need to be who they want you to be in order to get their attention and likes.

“And now it's this huge thing,” she said brightly, meaning herself and her success. She smiled. “YouTube has taken over my whole life…Everything about my life now is from the Internet.”

As Amanda's following grew, her on-screen persona began to change; the cool and collected, matter-of-fact little girl gave way to the perky “personality,” a girl whose flirtatiously awkward style was reminiscent of the legendary YouTube beauty gurus who had come before her. She took on the smiley sunniness of a daytime talk show host—in fact, she became the host of her own online talk show,
The Meetup.
On-screen, she transformed into a charmingly flibbertigibbet girlie girl, the granddaughter of Sally Field's Gidget and Annie Hall.

Her fans seemed to like this new Amanda, as they did the girl on Amanda's Instagram, who seemed to be a still different girl. On Instagram she was “aesthetic” Amanda, a fashionista and glamour girl who could make an unabashed duckface look good. She was an edgier girl—now with dyed platinum hair—who might show off a suggestive knee in ripped jeans, or her torso in a bathing suit top. (“You're 15…15…calm tf [the fuck] down,” one follower commented.) She was a girl we'd see spending a night out dining at Nobu in Malibu, or partying at what looked to be a nightclub; there she was posing with other pretty girls; there she was on red carpets, having an awesome, FOMO-inspiring time. “I wanna be her wtf [what the fuck] this isn't fair,” someone commented.

“Shopping is my cardio,” Amanda wrote on an Instagram picture of herself looking dead-eyed in a high-end store. Her Instagram suggests the lifestyle of girls growing up in Beverly Hills, girls who shop on Rodeo Drive and will grow up to be Desperate Housewives.

“She's trying to be Kylie Jenner,” commented a persnickety fan.

“It's hard being my age and having girls attack you all the time,” Amanda said, “but you have to learn from it—I've become more confident, it makes me stronger; if I didn't have all this, and I hadn't been through it, I don't know what I would be like. It definitely makes you grow up.”

She still couldn't completely understand why girls did like her, she said, because she was so “normal.” “When I have a meet-up or I go to an event where there are people waiting for me, I'm still so amazed. I don't get it, it's crazy. I'm so, like, normal—I'm literally just like you. Like, I could be best friends with all of these girls that are coming up to me, but they still, like,
fangirl
over me”—she did jazz hands, depicting fangirling—“and I'm like, What?” She smiled again. In 2015, she would have more than 2 million followers on Instagram and nearly 800,000 on Twitter.

She added that she wasn't actually friends with any of her fans, although every now and then she would follow one of them on social media or like one of their tweets or posts. “It's exciting for them,” she said. She said that she wasn't really friends with anyone anymore except for other kids who were Internet famous. “All my friends now are from the Internet and it's really awesome,” she said, “ 'cause we all relate to each other…and we all get along so well, 'cause we all just
get
it…We get what it feels like” to be Internet celebrities.

“A lot of them are YouTubers or on Vine or other social media,” Amanda explained. “We meet at conventions and meet-ups all over the country. There's conventions all over—in L.A. there's VidCon,” a gathering of online celebrities from many platforms, established in 2010. “That one's huge. There's like twenty thousand people and stages for people who perform on social media. There are YouTube personalities and the Magcon guys,” a fraternity of Vine star boys who then were touring together and hosting their own conventions. Amanda was now part of a coveted circle of about 100 young people, all social media stars; each had no less than about 500,000 subscribers on his or her YouTube channel—it was the unspoken minimum number required for admission to the group, she said.

“It's like this amazing thing and it's so awesome to be a part of it,” Amanda said. “I like being friends with so many people that are in the same position as me…They come from all different states but now they're all moving to L.A. to pursue their careers.” She said she envisioned a career for herself that would capitalize on everything she was doing now; she wanted to go into modeling or acting, have her own clothing line. “I wanna try everything. I wanna have a brand someday.

“So I do online school now,” she said. “I had to leave my other high school. I was just traveling too much and working too much to be there. It would be cool to just be a normal girl going to high school, but I really like how my life is now.”

“She can't go to school,” said Amanda's sister, Lauren. Lauren had joined us. She was home from college for the summer. She had long dark hair and a nose ring and wore a ripped rock 'n' roll T-shirt over a black bra. Lauren often appeared in Amanda's Instagram pictures as her edgy-older-sister sidekick. “People are intimidated by her,” Lauren said. “Meanwhile, she's the shyest person. Most fourteen- or fifteen-year-old girls dress sloppy and she's so clean and well put together. She can't be friends with kids at school. She presents herself better. They're jealous of her.”

Amanda said nothing, listening.

Later that afternoon Amanda went out back and filmed herself by the pool. She set up her Canon DSLR with the fluffy mic on a tripod and did a fashion shoot, showing off her look. “Hey, guys, it's Amanda,” she said, waving to the camera with a smile. “So today I'm going to be doing my outfits of the week…” She modeled her shorts, her nails, her shoes, her wrap. She wriggled and bounced. She acted a little seductive, blowing a kiss to the camera. When she was done filming, she sat down on the living room couch and took some selfies. She stuck out her tongue and pursed her lips and smiled and winked at her image in her iPhone screen.

When I asked girls around the country why they thought some boys acted like “savages” and “fuckboys,” many of them said: “Vine.” “Vine stars.” “They wanna be like Nash Grier and all those guys that are big on Vine.”

Vine, which was founded in 2012 by three male Web developers based in New York and acquired by Twitter just before its launch, has become one of the most popular online services, with 200 million monthly active users in 2015 and 1.5 billion Vines played daily, according to the company. It's an unending stream of ordinary moments: people talking, shopping, driving, eating, walking, playing with their babies and dogs, existing, often trying to make viewers laugh. When they can make them laugh a lot, they can become famous. They can become “Viners.”

The biggest Vine stars are mainly men and boys. In 2015,
Business Insider
posted a list of the thirty most popular Viners based on numbers of followers; only five were female. The most beloved Viners are comedians and pranksters, exuberant American boys who do rambunctious stunts and make irreverent jokes. They have a certain swagger. They're cute and silly, and millions of girls love them in the way girls once loved John, Paul, George, and Ringo—in fact, many of their Vines owe a debt to the high-spirited style of the Beatles movie
A Hard Day's Night
(minus the genius filmmaking). Most of their antics are innocuous enough: they slide around on snowboards, ride on shopping carts, dance in their living rooms to rap songs, and generally cut up.

However, there's a pernicious strain in male Vine culture that often goes unremarked in the increasingly glamorizing media profiles of Vine boys that have appeared as their online popularity has translated into offline celebrity, with the inevitable clothing lines, and movie and TV deals. There's almost a genre of Vines in which Vine boys make fun of girls—the way girls talk, dress, act, dance, and relate to boys. But there's also a sense that this is all in good fun—that “Vine boys will be boys,” and don't really mean any harm—and if you object, well, then you might be one of those girls that Vine boys make fun of.

There are Vines where Vine boys are wolfish, “savage,” in ways that are plainly offensive. In one of his Vines, Carter Reynolds, a nineteen-year-old boy from North Carolina, is told by a girl that she enjoyed their date, to which he responds, “I can't wait to see those big beautiful nipples, uh, dimples of yours!” Sam Pepper, twenty-six, a British YouTube star and Viner, released a “prank” video in 2014 in which he walked around filming the reactions of unsuspecting women as he groped their behinds. And there have been offline incidents involving Vine stars which are more disturbing. In 2014, Viner Curtis Lepore, now thirty-two, pleaded guilty to felony assault of Jessi Vasquez, now twenty-two, a popular Viner known as Jesse Smiles, who had claimed Lepore had raped her (the rape charge was dismissed). “I don't feel like living on this planet today. Good bye,” Smiles tweeted after Lepore's arrest. She seems to be doing better now. As is Lepore himself. “In other news,” he tweeted, after he took his plea deal, “I just hit 3.9 million followers on vine. Despite the obvious setbacks I'm still doing just fine.” He added an emoji of a hand doing the symbol for “O.K.”

Carter Reynolds had more than 4 million followers on Vine in 2015; that same year, he was at the center of a scandal after a video was leaked in which he appeared to be pressuring his then girlfriend for a blowjob. In the video Reynolds is seen with his pants down, his erect penis exposed. His former girlfriend, Instagram star Maggie Lindemann, then sixteen, tells him, “I don't think I can…This makes me so uncomfortable.” Reynolds tells her to “do it,” and “just act like nothing is there,” seemingly referring to the camera. She refuses. “Oh my gosh, Maggie,” says Reynolds, sounding exasperated.

In the wake of the controversy surrounding the video, some of Reynolds's fans started a hashtag in support of him: #WeLoveYouCarter. He urged them to tweet it, saying, “Couples do stuff like that all the time.” When Lindemann wound up in the hospital after an overdose, which she insinuated on Twitter was possibly suicide-related, Reynolds tweeted: “maggie is saying I'm the reason why she's in the hospital…lol nah you're just crazy and psychotic.” The scandal seems to have had little effect on Reynolds's popularity; since then he has gained Vine followers.

Nash Grier is the second-biggest Viner of all—the self-described “King of Vine,” with more than 12 million followers. He was on
Time
's list of the most influential teens of 2014 and called a “social media prodigy” by ABC News. In 2015, Grier, now eighteen, a blue-eyed North Carolina native, had a higher social media rating than the White House. Like Reynolds, he was a member of the “Magcon family,” the Vine-boy frat including Cameron Dallas, Jack Johnson, Jack Gilinsky, Taylor Caniff, Shawn Mendes, Aaron Carpenter, and Matt Espinosa (the group broke up in 2014). “Don't worry, the boys' parents come along to make sure the boys aren't doing anything they aren't supposed to,” says a post on a Magcon website. “You may think that these boys are selfish, self-centered, immature boys looking for attention and money. Well, they aren't. Many girls have tweeted, commented, or told them in person that they have saves [
sic
] their life. These teenage boys have convinced many teenage girls that they are worth it and life is worth fighting for. They helped save many teenage girl's lives.”

Grier's popularity seemed as Teflon-coated as Reynolds's in the wake of a 2014 scandal in which he was called out by YouTube king Tyler Oakley for posting a Vine in which he screamed the word “fag.” (Grier apologized for the video, saying he was “in a bad place,” and took it down.) It was then revealed that Grier had used the word—as well as the words “queer” and “gay,” in a seemingly pejorative manner—many other times on Twitter. He had also posted a Vine in which he mocked Asians.

But most puzzling is how Grier has continued to attract fans after a 2013 YouTube video, “What Guys Look for in Girls,” caused an outcry online for its sexist content. In a nine-minute conversation, Grier and two friends, nineteen-year-old Vine star Cameron Dallas and twenty-one-year-old YouTube star Jc Caylen, talk about “what we find attractive in girls,” which does not include good character or intelligence. Grier does say he likes a girl who has her “own ambitions and goals,” but laments how “so many girls these days don't do anything, they're just like a glorified, like…yeah, I'm gonna marry a rich guy.” To be attractive, Grier says, a girl “[has] to be entertaining…Entertain me.” “I hate it when girls are obnoxious and loud and crazy, like, calm down,” he says. He offers this tip for how girls should behave with guys when texting: “If you play too hard to get, then it's just like, Oh, she doesn't even like me, but if you play easy, then it's just like, Oh, she's a whore. Find a balance.” Grier also offers suggestions for girls' attire and hygiene, urging them to remove their facial and body hair: “When you have peach stuff and we're making out, no,” he says. “Wax, shave…Take the hair off.” The video was up for several days and then taken down, but it continues to be seen in repostings.

“That [video] was a big deal,” said Sophia in Montclair. “Everybody saw it. But on YouTube there's a million videos like that.” In fact, a search for “how to get a guy” on YouTube turns up more than 26 million results. “Like, ‘10 Ways to Get a Guy,' ‘How to Get a Guy to Like You,' ‘10 Ways a Guy
Won't
Like You,' stuff like that,” Sophia said. “Boys always post videos on YouTube telling girls how to impress boys—it's all over YouTube, they get millions of views. I always watch them. I wanna know what boys think about me—like, Oh wait, should I flip my hair more, or should I bite my lip more?”