American Girls (26 page)

“Misogyny now has become so normalized,” says Paul Roberts, the
Impulse Society
author. “It's like we've gone back to the
Mad Men
days. We can't even see the absurdity and the inequity of it, it's so pervasive. When the male gaze was digitized, it was almost as if it was internalized. With smartphones and social media, girls had the means of producing the male gaze themselves, and it was as if they turned it on themselves willingly in order to compete in a marketplace in which sex was the main selling point.

“And the social media companies aren't going to do anything about it, as long as it's driving traffic. It has so much to do with the drive for the fastest return that can possibly be generated, which has been the [corporate] mentality since the eighties. All you need to know about a social media company is that it's the hits, the clicks, the number of images seen is all you care about, as long as you're driving traffic; and if that traffic involves teenage girls doing self-destructive or character-eroding things, well, we won't think about that. It's people running around looking for anything to generate volume: Oh, teenage girls are taking their clothes off? And that's getting a lot of hits? Then let's turn a blind eye to the consequences. Oh, your daughter's on Tinder? Well, she's just meeting friends. It's all about high-volume usage. I don't think it's necessarily a cynical, let's destroy women thing—it's how can I get my next quarter's bonus?

“And I think that to the extent that the digital social media society normalizes impulses—think it, post it,” Roberts says, “we've also created a context for more and more provocative propositions, whatever they are: Look at my boobs. Do you want to hook up? It's moved the bar for what's normal and normalized extreme behavior; everything outrageous becomes normalized so rapidly. You realize how insane things are today when you think about the relative rate of change. When I was in high school, if I had gone around saying,
Here's a picture of me, like me,
I would have gotten punched. If a girl went around passing out naked pictures of herself, people would have thought she needed therapy. Now, that's just Selfie Sunday.”

When I returned to my hotel that night after talking with the girls at the Grove, we started exchanging messages on Facebook. They were having a birthday-party sleepover (it was Melissa's birthday), so they would type something on the thread and disappear and then return. When I asked them what they were doing, Padma said, “Having cake.” Greta said, “Of course we're all on our phones.” Whenever they were free, they would tell me more about their experiences on social media.

“O.K. so my freshman year of high school,” Padma wrote, “this sophomore Jaden (ya I regret even his stupid name) messages me on Facebook saying, Hi, because he knows me through mutual friends, and he would talk to me every single day. And one day he asked for my phone number and because I talked to him so much and got to know him I gave it to him. And so then we were texting and he asked if it was going anywhere, like what type of relationship, and I asked him back, and he said he would like a relationship with me, so I said we could try. And that led to us being kinda flirty and talking in person and seeing each other round school, and then he kinda kissed me and then he told everyone else that I kissed
him
and all he wanted was a hug.

“And I was beyond pissed at him,” Padma wrote, “because of all the lies he told me and I still hate him to this day…And at the time he was telling me all his ‘feelings'? He did the same thing to two other girls. And he hurt me so bad that I made Melissa talk to him, to hurt him, like to get a little taste of his own medicine. But then he ended up doing the same thing to her and he caused friction with us as friends.

“And he still does cause friction between us,” Padma wrote, “and he's now a major man whore and he needs to leave my school because he has hurt so many girls that I didn't know of before. I've blocked him on Facebook and deleted his number.”

“Last year,” Melissa wrote, taking up Padma's story, “I met Jaden through Padma. She liked him. Later he hurt her and lied about kissing her. I wanted to help her. So to help her get back at him, I added him as a friend and started talking to him on Facebook. I was planning to play him the way he played Padma and a bunch of other girls. We talked every day for months and he ended up asking me out. So then I started ignoring him and going offline whenever he started to message me. I was messing with him the best way I could…

“But after a while,” Melissa said, “I fell for him too.” Why? “I don't know…We had a thing for a while. We talked every day, and he called me every night to say goodnight. He told me that he loved me and I was completely into him. Buuuuuttttttt I didn't want to hurt Padma because she's one of my best friends. And then when I was finally ready for a real relationship with Jaden, he decided to hook up with this girl Skylar. He started going out with her to make me jealous. I found out on Facebook.

“I was upset,” Melissa wrote, “but Jaden convinced me to continue our thing at the same time.” How? “I don't know,” she said. “He said he didn't want to be tied down by one person and he couldn't choose and this was what everybody did,” seeing more than one person, that is, “and I guess I didn't want to lose him.

“So I would see all his relationship with Skylar, their relationship pictures and statuses about how much they love each other on Facebook,” Melissa wrote. “And it was awful to see them post on each other's walls. After months of him cheating on her with me—and, I found out, like four other girls—he started going offline on me and ignoring my Snapchats and texts. Then all of a sudden, he would call and Snapchat me until I answered. And then he would stop responding again. He messed with my head so much. He still does. He still tries to talk to me.

“But now I have a boyfriend who actually cares about me,” Melissa said. “But when Jaden found out about my new boyfriend, he started talking to me again and started picking up the way we left off. He's still trying to mess up my relationship. And yet he STILL hasn't broken up with her,” meaning Skylar, the other girl. “He made my entire 10th grade year horrible and filled with DRAMA.”

Padma wrote: “It's been hard for Melissa and me to stay friends and trust each other again. But we are better now and we see we must unite against THE MAN WHORES.”

What's not often talked about in discussions about the hypersexualization of girls is how this trend has been concurrent with the hypermasculinization of boys. In 1984, psychologists Donald L. Mosher and Mark Sirkin published one of the first studies using the term “hypermasculinity” to describe the behavior of college-age men who associated masculinity with “calloused sexual attitudes towards women,” “violence as manly,” and “danger as exciting.” Since then, hypermasculinity has come to be understood more broadly as beliefs and behaviors which betray an exaggerated observance of traditional male gender roles. Further research has found that images in the media have an influence on hypermasculine behaviors and beliefs. In movies, video games, TV shows, advertising, and other forms of media, boys and men see images of males being strong and successful in the context of overpowering or degrading women. There's probably no better example than the punishing, unfeeling men seen in the most popular online porn.

Hypermasculinity has also been shown to have an influence on men's physical aggression toward women. A study published in the journal
Psychology of Men & Masculinity
in 2002 found that “hypermasculinity may be a risk factor for perpetrating violence against women and that these men [‘high-hypermasculine men'] may have a lower aggression threshold.” Meanwhile, intimate partner violence has been increasing on college campuses at a time when the rate of domestic violence nationwide has been in decline. According to the Justice Department, “estimates of dating violence among college students range from 10 to 50 percent,” with women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four at the greatest risk for intimate partner violence overall.

Machismo is nothing new. It seems no accident, though, that it became such an exaggerated part of American pop culture during the backlash against feminism of the 1980s and '90s. In Hollywood in those years, women were being demonized in ways rarely seen before in the history of film. There was a wave of hit movies about sinister, often lethal women:
Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, Misery, Single White Female, The Temp, Disclosure.
Meanwhile, men in the movies in those same years were near caricatures of hypermasculinity. The films of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger provide plenty of examples on their own, from the Rambo movies to
Cobra
to
Conan the Barbarian
to
Predator
to
The Terminator.
Pro-military movies came into style for the first time since the Vietnam War, with
Top Gun
and the
Iron Eagle
films.

Online porn consumption soared, as did the popularity of video games such as Grand Theft Auto, which debuted in 1997. The game has managed to cause controversy with each new installment; versions III through V allowed players to murder prostitutes. In 2013, Carolyn Petit wrote on Gamespot.com, “GTA V has little room for women except to portray them as strippers, prostitutes, long-suffering wives, humorless girlfriends and goofy, new-age feminists we're meant to laugh at.”

The 1990s also saw the rise of “bro culture,” a term once used to describe the lifestyle of frat boys, but now a fairly common young male ideal. The definition of “bro” is fluid, but the typical image is one of a politically incorrect, flippantly sexist, porn-consuming, booze-guzzling young man who seems determined not to grow up. Lad culture, bro culture's cousin in Britain, brought soft-core porn magazines such as
Maxim
and
FHM
to American shores, with cover images of young female celebrities in porn-star poses, from Jennifer Love Hewitt to Danielle Fishel, Topanga on
Boy Meets World.

In music, gangster rap became a best-selling genre, glamorizing a view of women as “bitches” and “hos,” the dancing eye candy in hypersexualized music videos. By the 2000s misogyny had become so unremarkable that rape jokes were mainstream comic fare. Comedian Daniel Tosh—host of the bro-ish Comedy Central show
Tosh.
0
—ruffled some feathers in 2012 when he said of a female audience member who had heckled him for making a rape joke, “Wouldn't it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now? Like right now?” Many comedians defended him.

One of the most seductive and influential expressions of hypermasculinity in pop culture has been
Entourage,
which ran from 2004 to 2011. The life of the fictional main character, Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier), seemed to function for many boys and young men in the same way the world of Kim Kardashian does for girls—“Vince” was a fantasy of fame culture, a Hollywood movie star, handsome, rich, and decked out in spiffy clothes, spinning around in luxury cars and hanging out with his bros in his Hollywood Hills mansion, where he had lots of casual sex with a steady stream of models and “perfect 10s,” none of whom had much personality and to whom he bore no responsibility.

“For teenagers everywhere, the show acted as a live-action
Maxim
magazine, delivering hot women, broad humor, and escapism in popcorn-light doses,” wrote Brendan Gallagher on Complex.com. “This series is a celebration of masculinity in its most shallow manifestations. Money and power buy sex. If you don't have these things, you are worthless. When women or gay men get power, they must act ‘straight' or their ‘weakness' will be mocked. Once they do conform to heteronormative power dynamics, the show labels them icy bitches and bitchy queens.”

On another cable channel, Don Draper was using and abusing women, and critics were celebrating the show for exposing the sort of sexism that women had endured in the past, and had supposedly overcome.

In the months after I met the girls at the Grove, I followed them on Facebook and some of their other social media accounts. In just a short time after I left L.A., I was surprised to see the change in Padma's selfies. It was especially unexpected since she had been so vehement in her disapproval of girls who posted pictures which she said made them look like “sluts.” She'd called such girls “attention whores” and said that seeing them post provocative pictures “kills me inside.” But she'd also said, “Boys call it hot.”

Ever since she'd joined Facebook in 2009, when she was in sixth grade, Padma had always posted pictures that could be described as wholesome; they'd showed the life of an American girl who participated in dance recitals and soccer games; there were pictures of her with her fresh-faced friends, all dressed in casual clothes, smiling and hugging and mugging for the camera. These pictures would get a few likes, or no likes.

And then one day a picture appeared of Padma wearing what looked to be a lacy bustier. Her hair was cascading down over her cleavage. She was staring into the camera with a defiant, sultry expression. She wore a lot of makeup.

“The hotness though,” said the comments from both boys and girls. “Looking good!” “Sexy.” “Hot.” “Gorgeous,” “Gorgeous,” “Gorgeous.” This picture got almost 100 likes.

After that, the pictures on Padma's feed showed her in increasingly provocative poses. There was a picture of her at the beach in a bikini. “#pornstar,” wrote a boy. “Put on some clothes,” wrote another boy. “I didn't say you could post hot pics.” “You're not my dad,” Padma flirted back. She posted a picture of herself in a T-shirt which said “FLAWLESS.” “Photolicious,” commented a boy. These pictures would get between 50 and 100 likes.

I wondered if Padma's seemingly conflicted feelings had anything to do with the fact that she'd been cyberbullied. She'd told me that, in sixth grade, she'd been harassed by a girl on Facebook. “It's one thing when people bully you in person,” she said, “but then when you go on the computer it's kind of like you can't escape. They can find you anytime, anywhere; they always have you there to bully. There's people who just take it too far, like as if torturing you in person isn't enough—they have to do it when you're not even near them. Like this one girl called me all these names and then she'd go on her Facebook and get everyone on her Facebook to unfriend me.” She was emotional when she talked about it, causing the other girls at the table to grow quiet.

And even though this had happened years ago, I wondered if it had left a kind of scar; and if, like Sierra in Jamestown, Padma had finally broken down and wanted to somehow prove to everyone how “hot” she really was. Was this part of how girls become hypersexualized, first by having their self-esteem destroyed? And what lasting effects was this going to have when these cyberbullied girls became women?

The picture that got the most likes of all was the one where Padma tamed her beautiful black hair. It no longer looked like her natural hair, thick and full. It looked flat and thin and unnaturally shiny, as if it had been submitted to many treatments in a salon. It looked like TV hair.

Commenters wrote: “Your hair looks so much better like this.” “You look so good.” “Oh please keep it this way.” “You are so perfect now my little slut.”

“SLUTTTTTTTT,” Padma wrote. “I LOVE YOU.”