American Girls (24 page)

After the incident at the pizza restaurant, Hannah and Zora went and sat on a bench in Central Park. They had found each other by texting. Hannah was crying when Zora joined her.

“I hate Alex,” Hannah said.

They sat for a while and watched the people going by. Couples holding hands. Nannies with strollers. Zora went over to a pretzel cart and brought back two ice-cream bars.

“Oh,” said Hannah, wiping her eyes. “I shouldn't eat ice cream today. I already had pizza.”

“But if I keep holding it, it will melt all over my hand,” Zora said, smiling.

Hannah smiled back and took the ice cream. “Thanks.”

They sat licking the treats and watching a bad balloon clown trying to get tips.

“You know Alex didn't mean any of those things she said,” Zora said finally. “But that's Alex. Alex our friend who says awful things sometimes.”

“And is a snob and a racist,” said Hannah.

“And is a snob and a racist and
kind
of a mean girl.” Zora laughed. “But not really. Like, she's just not being brought up well. Everybody deserves a second chance.”

“Yeah,” said Hannah.

They decided they were going to send Alex a Snapchat. They took a picture of themselves making funny faces—“Oh my God, good one!”—and sent it to her phone. They giggled, waiting for a response. But Alex didn't Snap them back.

She wanted it to be like the scene in the Lana Del Rey video for “Blue Jeans”—“hot and slow and epic.” The scene where strangers meet and fall into an easy intimacy, making love in a pool—“and they look so hot and it's just, like, totally epic.” A boy at her school—she didn't want to talk about him now; he'd broken her heart; but “like, whatever.” She'd “deleted him” from her phone. “I was stalking him too much, seeing him doing fun things on Instagram, and it hurt.”

They'd been instant-messaging on Facebook, and one night he told her he loved her. And then, “I found out he was talking to, like, four other girls.” And now she wanted to do something to get over it, maybe to get back at him. “I mean, I should have known. All men are basically whores.” When he didn't turn out to be her “one true love”—“like Bella and Edward, or Bella and Jacob, you know?”—she decided she had to “lose it to someone,” so why not someone she would never have to see again? And yet, she hoped it would be somehow like the Lana Del Rey song.
“I will love you till the end of time,”
it goes.

The guy she was supposed to meet that day—the guy from Tinder, the dating app—“I know, like, five guys who've done it; girls use it, too, but some pretend like they don't”—he was cute and had tattoos on his upper arms. He looked “James Franco–ish,” but younger. On Tinder you could meet people in your age group. Emily was sixteen; the guy was seventeen.

Alone in her room the night before, reading her friends' Twitter feeds and watching YouTube videos (Selena Gomez and “baby animals being cute”), she had started feeling lonely, restless, and bored. “Sometimes I just want to talk to a guy so bad.” So she downloaded the app and started swiping through the pictures of boys in her area. She “hearted” his picture, and within a few minutes he'd hearted hers, and then they were instantly texting.

“Ur hot,” he wrote. “U wanna meet?”

“When?”

They arranged to rendezvous at a shopping mall in Los Angeles not far from the neighborhood where they both lived. “Of course it was going to be a public place. And if it turned out he was really some gross old man, I'd just run away.” But there he was, standing by his car, looking almost like his picture…Almost. There was something different about his face—it was “squishier. Like, he was almost fat.” But now here they were, and she didn't know quite how to get out of it.

He smiled and kissed her on the cheek. He smelled like Axe body spray. She was sorry she'd spent so much time getting ready for this. “I even waxed.” He wanted her to get in his car, but she knew she shouldn't. They started walking around the mall, “talking about nothing, nothing. It was awkward, totally weird.” He asked if she wanted to sit down, but there was nowhere to sit except in restaurants, so they wound up going inside a Pottery Barn and making out on a couch. Later she posted something on her Tumblr blog about the difficulty of finding love.

Technological innovations have always made their way into how teenagers have sex, fall in love, and date. The quill and the pen begat the love letter. “Don't ever think of the things you can't give me,” Zelda Sayre wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom she met at age seventeen at a country club dance in Montgomery, Alabama. “You've trusted me with the dearest heart of all—and it's so damn much more than anybody else in all the world has ever had.”

“[Your] photograph is all I have,” Fitzgerald wrote to Zelda (he was twenty-one when they met). “It is with me from the morning when I wake up with a frantic half dream about you to the last moment when I think of you and of death at night.”

The telephone enabled teens to talk with their crushes into the night, telling them of their hearts' and bodies' desires. The car made it possible for them to go on drives and “park” in remote locations where they could neck, and more. Movies led to the creation of spaces where teenagers could neck in the dark, while before them on giant screens, implausibly beautiful human beings played out romantic scenes, kissing and falling in love and sometimes having sex.

“Is this what it's like to love somebody?” Natalie Wood's character asks James Dean's in a tender moment from
Rebel Without a Cause.
(Wood was sixteen when the movie was shot.)

“I don't know,” Dean says.

“What kind of a person do you think a girl wants?” she asks.

“A man,” he says.

“Yes, but a man who can be gentle and is sweet, like you are,” she tells him.

He softly laughs.

“And someone who doesn't run away when you want them, like being Plato's friend”—Plato being the vulnerable boy played by Sal Mineo—“when nobody else liked him. That's being strong.”

He says, “Oh, wow.” And then: “I'm not gonna be lonely anymore—ever, ever. Not you or me.”

“I love somebody,” she says with wonder.

Our Western idea of romantic love stems from the Middle Ages and courtly love, a literary conceit in which chivalric knights wooed noble ladies through poetry and acts of bravery. The notion is full of questionable class and gender norms and not mentioned here in a nostalgic sense; but it's important to note when thinking about the changes in our idea of love and romance brought about by our use of technology, as well as changes in the ways we have sex. What are sex and love in the Internet age? And what does this mean for girls?

When the Internet and social networking became widely adopted by teenagers in the 1990s, it affected how they connected with each other sexually in unprecedented ways. “We are in uncharted territory,” when it comes to sex and the Internet, says Justin Garcia, a research scientist at Indiana University's Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. “There have been two major transitions” in heterosexual mating, Garcia says, “in the last four million years. The first was around ten thousand to fifteen thousand years ago, in the agricultural revolution, when we became less migratory and more settled,” leading to the establishment of marriage as a cultural contract.

“And the second major transition is with the rise of the Internet,” Garcia says. Suddenly, instead of meeting through proximity, community connections, and family and friends, people could meet each other virtually and engage in amorous activity with the click of a button. Internet meeting is now surpassing every other form. “It's changing so much about the way we act both romantically and sexually,” Garcia says. “It is unprecedented from an evolutionary standpoint.”

And yet this massive shift in our behavior has gone almost completely unexamined, especially given how the Internet permeates modern life. While there have been studies about how men and women use social media differently—how they use language and present themselves differently, for example—there's not a lot of research about how they behave sexually online; and there is virtually nothing about how girls and boys do. While there has been concern about the online interaction of children and adults, it's striking that so little attention has been paid to the ways in which the Internet has changed the sexual behavior of girls and boys interacting together. This may be because the behavior has been largely hidden or unknown, or, again, due to the fear of not seeming “sex-positive,” mistaking responsibility for judgment.

And there are questions to ask, from the standpoint of girls' and boys' physical and emotional health and the ethics of their treatment of each other. Sex on a screen is different from sex that develops in person, this much seems self-evident, just as talking on a screen is different from face-to-face communication. And so if talking on a screen reduces one's ability to be empathic, for example, then how does sex on a screen change sexual behavior? Are people more likely to act aggressively or unethically, as in other types of online communication? How do gender roles and sexism play into cybersex? And how does the influence of porn, which became available online at about the same time as social networking, factor in?

When boys and girls having sex online is depicted in pop culture, it's almost always in a comical way, as in 1999's
American Pie,
in which teenage boys are seen watching on a webcam an unsuspecting girl (Shannon Elizabeth) getting undressed. “God bless the Internet,” says one of the boys. This mega-hit movie set a normalizing tone for how many Americans were to view teenage cybersex ever since: boys will be boys—even when doing something unethical and creepy—and girls just laugh along with it, which they are seen doing in the movie.

Psychologist John Chirban believes that sex via screens makes boys more likely to objectify girls, and to see them in much the same way they view the women in porn. “Girls are more often driven to develop relationships and personal connections, and boys don't quite get that as early as girls,” Chirban maintains. “Boys might get interested in the pleasure of a sexual orgasm, and they are more likely to see the girl on the other side of the screen as a means to that end than the girl is likely to see the boy that way. If the boys are also watching porn, they're used to the idea that images of women on a screen are there to use as an excitement toward having orgasms.”

As soon as social networking was being widely used by teenagers, in the mid- to late '90s, they were using it as a place to “cyber,” or have cyber sex. Teenagers have always been interested in sex, of course, but now there was a way for them to have sex, a new kind of sex, without having to actually arrange dates or engage in the often complicated and difficult business of having relationships. “Everybody cybered in AOL chat rooms,” says a young woman in New York, age thirty-three, talking about the private online spaces one could create on AOL Instant Messenger, which appeared in 1997. “We would spend hours chatting with boys, sometimes more than one at a time. It got really steamy in those rooms. Nobody's parents had a clue what we were doing.”

Parents might have had some idea, if they'd only looked into it, as adults were doing exactly the same things. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, adults were cybering in AOL chat rooms, too, finding sex partners on Craigslist, and hooking up with people they met on online dating services such as Match.com and Kiss.com. “On AOL, it was kind of a game with your friends to try and ‘hot chat' with adults and make them think you were older,” says a young woman in L.A., age thirty-one. “My girlfriends and I learned a lot from doing that,” she adds with a rueful laugh. “These guys had no idea how old you were—there were no pictures or controls on who you talked to.”

When webcams came out, kids started putting on shows for each other and participating in mutual masturbation, live. “We did webcam shows on MSN,” says a young man in New York, age twenty-five, referring to the now discontinued instant-messaging service MSN Messenger, which appeared in 1999. “It started in seventh grade. You'd show your weiner in the webcam. We played strip poker. It was always about playing games. But then it would get too exciting and somebody would bust a nut.”

On the feminist website Broadly, in 2015, the U.K.-based writer and musician Alanna McArdle wrote of her experience webcamming as a middle school girl. “I had an arrangement with around five or six boys in my year at school when I was 13 years old,” McArdle wrote. “I would log on to MSN Messenger almost immediately after I got home from school. They would usually ask me to strip, sometimes half-naked, sometimes completely.

“After a blissful year of camming,” which her parents knew nothing about, one of the boys in her school told others of their online interaction and, she said, “I was a pariah…I began to self-harm and developed the body dysmorphia that planted the seeds of disordered eating in my late teens. I had been a confident and precocious child, but suddenly I questioned everything about myself…The boys around me were expected to be sexual. But my own desires and enjoyment? They were unacceptable.”

It was the judgmental reaction to what she had done “that destroyed my perception of myself and my sexuality,” McArdle said. “I
wanted
to be sexual. I
chose
to engage in sexual activity. To me, stripping on webcam wasn't just an informed choice that I made, but one that was affirmed by informed consent.”

One can respect McArdle's feelings about her own experience while still noting that it was she who was the one doing the stripping for the boys, and not the other way around; and one can wonder whether exposure to online porn was informing the boys' choice to ask her to perform for them nude.

“It definitely was a rush,” says a young man in New York, age twenty-eight, “to get a girl to take her clothes off on the webcam. It was something that could only happen on the screen. You would never have the balls to ask her face-to-face.”

Jennifer Powell-Lunder, a clinical psychologist who specializes in work with tweens, teens, and young adults in Westchester County, New York, believes that the sexual interaction between girls and boys on screens is largely controlled by boys. “Something about social media is making girls more submissive to boys,” Powell-Lunder asserts. “Boys in our culture are judged on physicality. From research we know that the boy who is perceived as the strong one is the one who dominates. But on the Internet, anybody can anonymously act as if they're the strong one. So the anonymity is awesome for boys because it gives them the opportunity to act as if they're a top dog. It's a very powerful thing for them to have this secret way of being; it's like Clark Kent syndrome—you're Superman on social media, but you're mild-mannered Clark Kent in real life.”

As for girls, Powell-Lunder says, “girls in our culture are judged on their intimate relationships, on their ability to develop intimacy. So because guys are putting it out there that they're the strong ones, girls feel like they can't respond by being dominating. The way they ‘win' is through attracting relationships, so when these guys say, Do this, the girls will do it because they want to attract the guys, and because they have the belief that the guys are top dogs because of how they're behaving online. When girls approach boys online,” Powell-Lunder adds, “even when they do it aggressively, often you see them asking if they can do things for the boys, like give them blowjobs—it's not, Come over here and do something for me.”

Another possible reason for this willingness of some girls to acquiesce to boys' sexual requests and demands online may be the increased availability of girls to boys through social media. I started to think about this early in my reporting, in 2013, when I was on a New York City bus and started talking to a teenage boy I saw Snapchatting. A girl had sent him a provocative picture of herself (not a nude, just a sultry shot of her face). “Gotta wheel the bitches in, gotta wheel the bitches in,” said the boy with a familiar sort of bravado. “Nowadays you can do it so easy,” he said. “There are so many apps and shit that just, like, hand you the girls. They don't even know that's what they're doing, but really they're just giving teenagers ways to have sex.”

Not only ways to have sex, but more people to have it with. When social media moved onto smartphones after 2007, teenagers became more sexually available to each other than ever before. There had never been a way for them to express their sexual interest in one another at any moment of the day, no matter where they were; it was as easy as sending a text. “You can be sitting in class getting a boner 'cause some girl is texting you that she wants to suck your dick,” said a teenage boy in L.A. “It's kind of distracting.”

“Like a kid in a candy store” seems to apply to how some boys I've talked to view the accessibility of girls on their phones. And this increased availability of options, according to many girls, seems to be causing some boys to undervalue the importance of any particular girl, and to treat girls overall with less respect. “Guys you know from just, like, having one class together will be like, Do you like to suck dick?” said a seventeen-year-old girl in New York. “And if you say no, they just move on to the next person.” So how is a girl who is interested in boys to compete for their attention in this crowded space? It wouldn't be surprising if some girls thought pictures that are provocative, nudes and semi-nudes, would be one way of getting their attention.

The effect of the increase in options on dating life can be seen nowhere more acutely than in the changes brought about by dating apps. Mobile dating went mainstream around 2010; by 2012 it was overtaking online dating. In 2015, there were nearly 100 million people on dating apps, according to a study by the research firm Global Web Index. Teenagers don't use dating apps as often as adults—their access to a pool of their peers every day in school seems to make them less likely to seek out strangers for dating and sex—but they are using these services, including OkCupid, Skout, Grindr, and Tinder, in considerable numbers. By Tinder's own account, in 2014 more than 7 percent of its users were between the ages of thirteen and seventeen (the app is designed so that users seventeen and under can only connect with each other, but one might reasonably ask how advisable it is for thirteen-year-olds to be “matching” with seventeen-year-olds). If the total number of people on Tinder is truly close to 50 million, as
The New York Times
reported in 2014, that means that more than 3 million thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds are on Tinder alone.