American Girls (2 page)

What do we mean when we talk about the culture of social media? I think it's important to talk about it, because, for most American girls, social media is where they live. “We're on it twenty-four/seven,” said a thirteen-year-old girl in Montclair, New Jersey. “It's all we do.” As a teenage girl might say, this isn't
literally
true. Girls go to school, they play sports and hang out with their friends, they take care of siblings; many have jobs; they volunteer and pursue hobbies and read—although kids are reading a lot less, which some studies blame on their increasing engagement with technology.

The complaint you hear from parents and teachers is, “They're on it all the time.” When pressed, many of these same adults will admit that they're checking their social media quite often, too. We've all become tethered to our mobile devices in ways we never would have imagined possible just a few years ago. But of all groups of Americans, teenage girls are in fact the number one users of social media.

In 2015, 88 percent of American teens ages thirteen to seventeen had access to a mobile phone, and 73 percent had smartphones, according to the Pew Research Center. Ninety-two percent were going online from a mobile device daily, and 24 percent were online “almost constantly.” Girls ages thirteen to seventeen are slightly more likely than boys to have access to a smartphone, computer, or tablet; and “teenage girls use social media sites and platforms—particularly visually-oriented ones—for sharing more than their male counterparts do,” according to Pew. The numbers of girls on social media on a daily basis run high regardless of race, education, and household income, or whether they are living in urban, rural, or suburban areas. In 2015, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and online pinboards such as Pinterest were the most popular sites for girls. Girls in 2015 were exchanging anywhere from 30 to more than 100 texts per day, according to studies.

Just why girls are on social media “all the time,” and what they're doing there, are the subjects of my investigation; but that they're on it an inordinate amount of the time is important to note before beginning to explore these questions. Are girls addicted to social media? If you ask them, many will say they are. The words “addicted” and “addiction,” “obsessed” and “obsessing,” came up again and again in my interviews with more than 200 teenage girls as they talked about their use of their smartphones and consuming media and using social media. How else can you characterize an activity that, depending on which study you reference, occupies from nine to eleven hours of your day?

Among researchers, the jury's still out on whether social media addiction is truly an addiction in the way of dependence on drugs and other substances, although it's becoming increasingly well established that social media use lights up the reward centers in our brains, causing our hormones to dance. Girls talk about the “dopamine jolt” some researchers say their brains experience when they get “likes” on their posts and photos; and if they don't know of the studies, they know the feeling of pleasure associated with seeing their pictures reap online rewards; they also know the feeling of letdown they get when their posts are ignored or, worse, are ridiculed or attacked.

It's an extraordinary new reality, and it's happened so fast; for the first time, most American girls are engaged in the same activity most of the time. And this seismic shift in how girls spend their time is having a profound effect on the way they think and act, as well as on how they make friends, the way they date, and their introduction to the world of sex. But what are the effects? When we talk about social media, we say we're “going on” it, similar to the way we talk about going on a trip. We seem to experience it as a sort of mental journey to another place; but this isn't a neutral place, it's one created by businesspeople, and much of it emanates from Silicon Valley.

I don't think we can talk about the culture of social media, this place where girls are spending most of their time, without talking about the culture of Silicon Valley. In popular myth this is a place where boy geniuses create magical communication tools which bring us all closer together, tools which prove so irresistible to masses of people across the globe that the boy geniuses earn millions and billions of dollars—money with which they then invest in the ideas and futures of other boy geniuses. The popular myth isn't very far from reality. According to the Department of Labor, 70 percent of the workforce at the top ten Silicon Valley firms in 2012 was male and 63 percent was white. Of the executives and top managers at those companies, 83 percent were male and white.

A 2015 study by LinkedIn found that “software engineering teams in tech have proportionally fewer women than several non-tech industries: namely, healthcare, retail, government, education, and nonprofits.” In 2009, the National Center for Women & Information Technology reported that 56 percent of women with STEM expertise leave the industry midway into their careers. “They are seeing they cannot have the careers they want in this industry,” Karen Catlin, a former vice president of Adobe Systems, told
Fusion
in 2015. With the exception of some notable examples, such as Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook; Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo!; and Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett Packard, there are few highly placed female executives in Silicon Valley. In the digital revolution, which has provided so many job opportunities and seen the start of so many businesses and empires, men have reaped most of the profits.

And the culture of Silicon Valley is a male-dominated culture, some say a “frat boy” culture, populated by “brogrammers” and “tech bros.” “In inverse ratio to the forward-looking technology the community produces, it is stunningly backward when it comes to gender relations,” wrote Nina Burleigh in a 2015
Newsweek
piece, “What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women.” “Google ‘Silicon Valley' and ‘frat boy culture' and you'll find dozens of pages of articles and links to mainstream news articles, blogs, screeds, letters, videos and tweets about threats of violence, sexist jokes and casual misogyny, plus reports of gender-based hiring and firing, major-league sexual harassment lawsuits and a financing system that rewards young men and shortchanges women.” In 2014, a group of female leaders in the tech industry penned “An Open Letter on Feminism in Tech” in which they described the hostile atmosphere they'd encountered in the industry. “We've been harassed on mailing lists and called ‘whore'/‘cunt' without any action being taken against aggressors,” the letter said. “We're constantly asked ‘if you write any code' when speaking about technical topics and giving technical presentations, despite just having given a talk on writing code. We've been harassed at these same conferences in person and online about our gender, looks, and technical expertise.”

“It's a community in which the porn-inspired, ‘drading,' ” or drunken, “college tweets of Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snapchat, go public,” Burleigh wrote, “where a CEO's history of domestic violence has no repercussions but female executives get fired for tweeting about sexist jokes they overhear. It's a place,” she continued, “where companies routinely staff conference booths with scantily clad ‘code-babes' and where women are so routinely sexually harassed at conferences that codes of conduct have become de rigueur—and the subject of endless misogynistic jokes on Twitter.” Burleigh likened Silicon Valley today to the egregiously sexist world of the go-go '80s depicted in
The Wolf of Wall Street,
noting that while Wall Street these days seems “tamer,” in Silicon Valley, “misogyny continues unabated.”

So what impact does the culture of Silicon Valley have on the place that girls are experiencing all day, most days, on their phones? While not every one of the thousands of social media sites and apps reflects the tech industry's frat house atmosphere, of course, it would be blind to say that none of them do; and it would be naïve to say that some of the most popular apps, some of the ones most often used by girls, don't.

You could start with the concept of “hot or not.” “Hot or not” is a prevailing social media conceit, first seen online in 2000, with the launch of the photo-rating site Hot or Not by two Silicon Valley–based software engineers and Berkeley graduates, James Hong and Jim Young. The site grew out of an argument the two were having about whether a certain woman was attractive, or “hot.” Hong and Young created a way for strangers to look at a picture of a woman's face and vote on how she measured up. The idea was also the basis of Facemash, the precursor to Facebook, a campus rating site created by Mark Zuckerberg in 2003, when he was still a Harvard sophomore. Two of the founders of YouTube, guy Silicon Valley software engineers who met at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, have said that Hot or Not was the inspiration for what they originally thought would be just a video version of the game, as well. Much of the culture of social media is, in a way, an ongoing expression of “hot or not,” liking or rejecting people and things, and the physical appeal of women and girls.

So embedded in the culture of Silicon Valley is “hot or not” that it became the subject of satire with Titstare, a fictional mobile app that was presented at TechCrunch's annual Disrupt Hackathon in San Francisco in 2013. Its creators, two young men in their twenties, described Titstare as “an app where you take photos of yourself staring at tits.” Titstare incited a brief uproar online for its outlandish theme, but some on Twitter called the joke “brilliant” and “pretty funny.” “Sexism is a major problem in the tech industry,” acknowledged TechCrunch, the tech industry news website owned by AOL, apologizing for the “misogynistic” presentation.

“Beautiful,” “gorgeous,” “sexy,” “hot” are conventional responses to selfies in the culture of social media, responses which many girls seek as they spend minutes or hours of their day preparing themselves to be photographed and photographing themselves to the best advantage. There are typically more graphically sexual comments, too, which many girls feel they are expected to show appreciation for, or just ignore. And then there are different kinds of comments, critical or degrading assessments of how a girl appears on-screen, all based on an array of motivations, from personal animus to jealousy to slut-shaming.

For many girls, the pressure to be considered “hot” is felt on a nearly continual basis online. The sites with which they most commonly interact encourage them to post images of themselves, and employ the “liking” feature, with which users can judge their appearance and, in effect, rate them. When girls post their pictures on Instagram or Snapchat or Facebook, they know they will be judged for their “hotness,” and in a quantifiable way, with numbers of likes. Social media, which gave us selfies, seems to encourage an undue focus on appearance for everyone, but for girls, this focus is combined with a pervasive sexualization of girls in the wider culture, an overarching trend which is already having serious consequences.

A landmark 2007 report by the American Psychological Association (APA) found girls being sexualized—or treated as “objects of sexual desire…as things rather than as people with legitimate sexual feelings of their own”—in virtually every form of media, including movies, television, music videos and lyrics, video games and the Internet, advertising, cartoons, clothing, and toys. Even Dora the Explorer, once a cute, square-bodied child, got a makeover to make her look more svelte and “hot.” The APA surveyed multiple studies which found links between the sexualization of girls and a wide range of mental health issues, including low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, cutting, even cognitive dysfunction. Apparently, thinking about being hot makes it hard to think: “Chronic attention to physical appearance leaves fewer cognitive resources available for other mental and physical activities,” said the APA report.

It isn't that girls and women haven't been exploited for their sexuality before; of course they have; but sexualization has become a prevailing mode, influencing how girls see themselves, as well as how they present themselves. The APA did not account for why this damaging sexualization of girls has occurred; it's another one of the questions I'll be exploring here; but the immediate and most prominent influence to consider, I think, is online porn.

The adoption of the Internet in American life is inextricably tied to porn, an industry with revenues that jumped into the billions of dollars when it moved online. In 2015, porn sites were among the most popular in cyberspace, accounting for up to 35 percent of Internet traffic. Porn is more available now than it has ever been, and for the first time it is readily available to everyone, including kids. Studies have reported that American children start seeing online porn as young as age six, and the majority of boys and girls have watched it before they turn eighteen. Some research says the number of kids who have viewed online porn, either deliberately or accidentally, is about 40 percent, while some puts the number as high as in the 90 percent range for boys and the 60 percent range for girls. No one seems to think the size of porn's underage audience is insignificant.

A normalizing trend minimizes porn's effects. American researchers, hindered in conducting studies by the fact that in the United States it is illegal for children to view porn, argue that not enough is known. “We need a lot more research to keep tabs on this phenomenon and to separate hype from reality,” sociologist David Finkelhor, director of the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center, said on the APA website. Finkelhor pointed to positive developments in teenage behavior by way of questioning whether viewing porn has an adverse influence on kids; for example, the teenage pregnancy rate is down, and some studies say that teenagers are having less sex.