American Girls (22 page)

The Education Sector report tried to put things in perspective: “While most of society has finally embraced the idea of equality for women, the idea that women might actually surpass men in some areas (even as they remain behind in others) seems hard for many people to swallow. Thus, boys are routinely characterized as ‘falling behind' even as they improve in absolute terms…Some blame ‘misguided feminism' for boys' difficulties, while others argue that ‘myths' of masculinity have a crippling impact on boys…But the evidence suggests that many of these ideas come up short.” The report also noted that “Hispanic and black boys and boys from low-income homes” continued to be disadvantaged, but “closing racial and economic gaps would help poor and minority boys more than closing gender gaps.”

In June 2012, the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights published a survey on “Gender Equity in Education,” reporting that the gender gap between boys and girls in American schools still had not been closed: “Despite the enormous progress made in ensuring equal education opportunities since the passage of Title IX in 1972…much work remains if we are to achieve full gender equality among our nation's students.”

“It's become a way for people to dismiss sexism,” says Laura Bates, talking about the evolution of the notion that “girls are mean.” Bates heads the Everyday Sexism Project, a feminist website she founded in 2012, at the age of twenty-six. In 2015, she was awarded the British Empire Medal for services to gender equality.

“When I start talking about sexism in schools,” she says, “people interrupt and say, Well, but girls can be mean to each other. Oh, but women are their own worst enemies. I don't believe it. Of course there are instances of meanness in everyone, but we have bought into wholesale this idea of the bitchy, competitive woman who can't bear other women's success. Competitiveness is a difficult human trait. Bullying comes from all kinds of people. I don't believe it's some ingrained genetic trait in women or girls.

“So many of these instances where there is this kind of competitiveness and girls being mean to other girls,” Bates says, “it's being driven by societal messages of who they are and how they're supposed to be. It's
caused
by sexism—but then people try to turn it back on women and use it as a reason to not support feminism. In a world where there is such sexualization of women and oppression of women, it just feels like it's too easy to blame girls for meanness. And it's such a clever attempt to create a diversion. Why is it that everybody loves to talk about ‘mean girls'? It's another attempt to stymie the feminist movement.”

Sierra had tried to kill herself more than once with pills she found in the bathroom cabinets at home. She said, “I'm not even sure what they were.” Something “bad” would happen and she would feel that she just wanted to “stop it,” and so she would gather up all the pills she could find and, as she had seen people do in the movies, swallow a handful.

Most of the time she would “just wake up” with a terrible headache and a queasy feeling in her stomach. She would throw up. Once, she had to go to the hospital and have her stomach pumped. She had tried to kill herself another time by jumping in front of an oncoming car when she was walking home from school, but a friend had grabbed her by the arm and pulled her back.

She had scars on her wrists and the insides of her arms from cutting herself. “I had to get on depression pills to stop” the cutting, she said. But the pills weren't really helping her, so she had started cutting again. There were hatched red lines up and down her arms. “I was eating a lot of food, to feel better,” she said. “I started eating ice cream all the time to not let it all get to me, but I don't want to get fat. So I just solved it by cutting.”

The Mayo Clinic defines cutting as “self-injury,” also called “self-harm,” as “the act of deliberately harming your own body, such as cutting or burning yourself,” “an unhealthy way to cope with emotional pain, intense anger and frustration.” Cutters typically say that they do it to alleviate their emotional pain, which is sometimes hard for others to understand, since cutting itself is painful. But “while self-injury may bring a momentary sense of calm and a release of tension,” the Mayo website says, “it's usually followed by guilt and shame and the return of painful emotions. And with self-injury comes the possibility of more serious and even fatal self-aggressive actions.”

A 2008 study in the
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology
found that 56 percent of adolescent girls reported doing some form of self-harm in their lifetimes. This number is staggeringly higher than the results of studies in the 1990s, which found self-harm among girls to be as low as 3 percent in a given year.

Sierra said she was not the only girl she knew who was cutting. “So many girls do cutting in my school. This girl and me, we were cutting together. She got in a fight with another girl and the girl told her, Go kill yourself. And so she posted on her Facebook page that she was done and she was going to do it. They called the cops and she ended up in the hospital.”

Sierra was a tiny white girl with cornflower-blue eyes and limp platinum hair streaked with brown highlights; she had a southern drawl and made a soft slurring sound when she spoke, an effect of her retainer. She sat on her bed, wearing jeans, a dark T-shirt, and many bracelets and rings, her arms clasped around her thin legs. The afternoon sun was coming through the windows and shining on her face, showing up the powder she had sprinkled over the tiny pimples across her chin.

Her stepfather, Donny, was sitting somberly on a straight-backed chair against the wall; he was tall and lanky with long salt-and-pepper hair, which he kept in a ponytail. He used to be in a band in the '80s, he said, but now he was a truck driver. Sierra's mother was the hostess at a restaurant. Her father was back in Michigan.

Sierra said that when she was a little girl in Michigan, her mother doted on her, dressed her up in Disney princess dresses, and showed her off. She couldn't account for why—for as long as she could remember, as far back as kindergarten—she had been bullied. “All my life. And I'm just like, What did I do wrong?” Her voice cracked. “Is there something I don't know about myself that everybody else does? It just started happening and it never stopped happening and it is still happening now.”

In fifth grade, her parents divorced, and she moved to Virginia with her mom and Donny. She thought it might be different there, but it wasn't. “These girls would pick on me and shove me and say I was buck-toothed because I had, like, big teeth, and they called me Rat Face.”

The bullying got worse when she went on social media. It was in fifth grade that she went on Facebook for the first time. She couldn't say what it was about social media that she loved so much; she just did. “I like joking around with my friends,” she said. “And, like, you get to show people pretty pictures of yourself, and even if they say you're ugly, you can be like, Oh, really? Well, here's the proof. I am not. I look good.”

She was on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Ask.fm, as well as other sites. While we spoke, she kept going on her phone and checking to see if anyone had liked anything she'd posted, or if anyone was saying anything mean; if so, she would delete those comments.

It was “a lot of work,” a constant chore, she said, as there were often mean comments, usually from girls. Social media caused her a lot of “stress,” she said, as she was constantly having to edit away the wrong kind of attention and let through only the right sort, such as comments from “nice” girls who called her “pretty” and “funny” and said, “We need to hang out.”

But even when people were mean to her on social media, she said, she still felt its draw. Despite all the “drama” she endured online, she put herself out there again and again. It wouldn't seem that someone with Sierra's experience of bullying would want to rush to join a site like Ask.fm, with its reputation for attracting bulliers, but that's just what she did.

“I get these things on there like I sleep around and all that,” she said. “Like, You fucking sleep around too much. You're the school prostitute. Or, You're really fucked-up. Or, Oh, you have a boyfriend? Better warn him you're a fake ho. Just like your mom, why is she so obsessed with Disney? I think you get your obsession from her. They said they were going to come and kill my whole family. They said, Nobody likes you, go kill yourself. They kept saying, Go kill yourself, go kill yourself. Please do us all a favor and kill yourself. And I was like, Why would you say something like that, especially if I actually went and did it?”

“I was working two shifts,” Donny said, “and her mom was working, too, and we didn't know what was going on. We knew she was being picked on, but we didn't know the extent. And then they said they were gonna kill her. And, you know, there's just no excuse for that.”

After she finally told her mother and Donny about the death threats she'd received, they reported them to the police. (This was after months.) “It stopped for a while and then it just kept going,” Sierra said. “Like someone will say something I said, or they think I said, and then it will just start up again, and they'll say stuff to me online.”

The “rumors” about her that started online spilled over into gossip at school, “and nobody likes me because they think they're true. They say like I smell like fish. My ex-boyfriend, he started the rumor saying that I had AIDS and herpes and that I gave him herpes and had sex with him and I was like, No, that's not true.”

It had all made her defensive, apt to fire back quickly and sometimes be mean herself, she admitted. “Sometimes I will just say something kinda mean 'cause I expect they're gonna say something to me first.” And it had made her want to post “cute” pictures of herself, so her “haters” could see how wrong they were about how she looked.

“im cute at least I think so don't giv a fuck wht people think,” said the profile on Sierra's Instagram account. There were close-ups of her in a tank top showing cleavage; selfies staring in the bathroom mirror, making the duckface—“looking cute,” said her own comment about herself. Sticking her tongue out like Miley Cyrus, sticking out her butt on the top of the sink and looking behind at herself in the mirror. The famous sink shot.

Underneath her pictures she posted self-congratulatory comments: “Loving my smile in this one.” “no edit needed cuz im cute.” “looking adorable I really love my smile.” “I'm gorgeous.” “the sexiness.”

She commented on a picture of herself posing with a friend: “With this awesome bitch getting turntup,” meaning drunk or high, “tonight.”

Sierra's Instagram pictures didn't fail to attract appreciative comments from boys, sometimes boys she didn't know: “Them mother fucking titties doeee!!!!” “Damn…” “Can I get it?”

“Have you got Kik?” one boy asked. “Yeah but I don't know you,” Sierra responded. “We can get to know each other,” said the boy.

One evening when Sierra was alone in her bedroom she posted a picture of herself on Instagram, “from the side of me, 'cause I was looking cute. Just like the butt.” In the picture, she's wearing a miniskirt that stops just below her behind and looking over her shoulder at herself in her screen, Kardashian-style.

Soon after she posted the picture, she started getting mean comments from a girl she knew, and they had a fight in the comments section below, which I'm sorry to say is similar to fights I've seen on girls' social media accounts all over—in the meanness, profanity, slut-shaming, and threats.

Sierra read it out loud: “She said, ‘You have no ass girl, stop trying to take pictures like you have one, it's not cute, you look like a ho, O.K. stop, sorry-not sorry…you look stupid, all your pics trying to show off what ass you don't have, that outfit makes you look like a cheap prostitute that stands on the corner.'

“ ‘I'd rather have a small ass than a big one,' ” Sierra responded. “ ‘I may not have an ass but that doesn't matter, I can take pics of whatever angle I want O.K., and no, I don't look like no ho, my skirt rides up so get over it.'

“ ‘Mm hmm,' ” the girl said, “ ‘yes you do and maybe if you pulled down your damn skirt, ever think of that? Trying to be a show-off it's not cute honey take a seat and put on some clothes it's winter not summer.'

“ ‘First of all it don't feel like no wintertime,' ” Sierra said, “ ‘it's warm out and I'll pull it down next time happy, good.'

“ ‘Mmm and you wonder why people don't like you and think you're a ho,' ” said the girl.

“ ‘Just shut the fuck up and grow up,' ” Sierra replied, “ ‘just 'cause you're mad at someone…doesn't mean you have the right to bully them, and fuck you for being mean to someone that's no excuse. You need to grow up.'

“ ‘Really wow that's funny you can talk so much shit on here,' ” the girl said, “ ‘but when I was in your face all you could do was say shut the fuck up. Wow. You're lucky Cameron,” a boy in their school, “grabbed me because I was about to swing on your ass but for real-for real the next time I'm not gonna let him hold me back. Come say something to my face and see what happens. You're gonna be on the floor crying. I'm not being a bully, I'm saying it like it is.'

“ ‘You're the childish one,' ” Sierra wrote. “ ‘I'm not gonna fight you, you're just a waste of my fucking time, bye.'

“ ‘So you a bad bitch, huh? O.K., I got you, you just wait…you're gonna learn how to talk shit about me if you can't back your shit up.'

“ ‘Just get over it, I'm done O.K.?'

“ ‘Then get the fuck off my fucking shit you fucking dumbass bitch, if you're gonna talk, you're gonna take your fake ass somewhere else, dumbass,' ” said the girl.

“ ‘LMAO,' ” laughing my ass off, commented a friend of the girl's, jumping in and commenting. “ ‘Don't tell her to shut the fuck up, she not the one that dress like a damn whore, ho, prostitute, slut, if anyone needs to shut the fuck up then it's you boo-boo, trust me…she'll beat your ass and leave you there to fucking die.' ”

The fight escalated when they went back to school. Other people got involved.

“They must be jealous of her,” Donny said, looking at the picture of Sierra on her phone. “Look at her,” he said, trying to defend her. “Any man would say she looks hot.”