American Girls (3 page)

But teenage pregnancy rates began to drop significantly in the 1990s, with safe-sex education and increased condom use (although American teens are still getting pregnant more often than in other industrialized countries). Moreover, some research has found that respondents in studies are inclined to misreport the number of sex partners they have had, for a variety of reasons, including women's fear of being judged or exposed. And the more important question here may be not how many sex partners teenagers are having, but what attitudes about sex they have, and how they are treating each other in a sexual context, both on and off social media. In other words, how is porn affecting teenage sexual behavior?

Porn itself isn't necessarily the problem; since the 1970s, feminists have argued that female-centric porn can be a source of sexual liberation. But much of the online porn children and teenagers are most likely to see is characterized by what looks like violence against women—not necessarily the violence of bondage or sadomasochistic sex, but violence in which men dominate and control women, insult them, and sometimes hurt them physically. The words the porn industry itself uses to describe the scenes in its videos tell the story: women are “pounded,” “railed,” and “jackhammered,” called “cunts,” “sluts,” “bitches,” and “whores.” Choking, slapping, and “cum shots to the face” are standard moves.

“A lot of online pornography is violent,” said a 2014 article in
The New York Times,
“Does Porn Hurt Children?” “Much of it merely demonstrates the astounding breadth of sexual appetites out there.” Online porn is also characterized by fetishism. When people say, “Kids see everything today,” it's true, they do, online, including, sadly, child porn. A 2008 study in
CyberPsychology & Behavior
found that “considerable numbers of boys and girls had seen images of paraphilic or criminal sexual activity, including child pornography and sexual violence, at least once before the age of 18.” Disturbingly, many of the actresses in popular online porn are in fact teenagers or styled to appear as young as teens. In 2014, the mega porn site Pornhub, with 18 billion visits and 79 billion videos viewed that year, reported that its number one search was for “Teen.”

Rape and gang rape are common scenarios in online porn as well. A search for “violent sex” on the Internet turns up millions of results, including videos tagged “violent rape porn” and “cruel sex.” In 2013,
The Washington Post
reported on Rapetube, a site “urging users to share what it called ‘fantasy' videos of sexual attacks.” Garth Bruen, a security fellow at the Digital Citizens Alliance, said the
Post,
had “discovered dozens of similar sites offering disturbing variations—attacks on drunken women, on lesbians, on schoolgirls—to anyone with a credit card. Some made clear that the clips were fictional, but other sites had the word ‘real' in their titles. At least a few touted videos that he feared might show actual crimes.”

Some psychologists worry about the effects of such porn, or any porn, on boys' attitudes toward women and girls, as well as girls' view of their own sexuality. “Perhaps the most troubling impact of pornography on children and young people is its influence on sexual violence,” wrote Michael Flood, a sociologist and Future Fellow at the Australian Research Council. “A wide range of studies on the effects of pornography have been conducted among young people aged 18 to 25, as well as older populations,” Flood said. “Across these, there is consistent and reliable evidence that exposure to pornography is related to male sexual aggression against women…In a study of Canadian teenagers with an average age of 14, there was a correlation between boys' frequent consumption of pornography and their agreement with the idea that it is acceptable to hold a girl down and force her to have sex…Among U.S. boys and girls aged 11 to 16, greater exposure to R- and X-rated films was related to stronger acceptance of sexual harassment.” This is all the more troubling when considering how, for many teenagers, porn seems to have become a kind of sex ed. In Britain and Australia, researchers have found that kids turn to porn to get information about sex.

There's a great deal of pressure on teenage girls today to be considered “sex-positive,” a term arising from the sex-positive movement encouraging sexual pleasure and experimentation; being sex-positive is often seen as free and feminist. But being “sex-positive” and “porn-positive” aren't necessarily the same things, although they are sometimes conflated by sex-positivity advocates. “You can spin it any way you want, but porn has an effect on how people behave sexually,” asserts John T. Chirban, a clinical instructor in psychology at Harvard Medical School and psychologist who treats adolescents in Boston. “With porn, you're not looking at the meaning and value of a whole human being. Girls take away from it the message that their most worthy attribute is their sexual hotness.” The primacy of hotness can be seen in the familiar popularity among girls of a kind of porn-star look, apparent in selfies hallmarked by glistening pursed lips and the exposure of butts and cleavage, or “booty pics” and “tit pics.”

In many other countries, the effect of online porn on children is of widespread concern. In 2013, Britain's four largest Internet service providers agreed to institute “family-friendly filters” that automatically block pornographic websites unless households chose to receive them. The initiative was inspired in part by studies done in Britain on the impact of porn on kids, and promoted by the government of Prime Minister David Cameron, who in 2013 gave a controversial speech in which he spoke of an alarming “corrosion of childhood” he claimed was the result of children being exposed to pornography. Whatever one thinks of Cameron's conservative politics, his speech echoed talks I've had with teachers and school administrators across the country, including a Brooklyn principal, Maura Lorenzen, who lamented, “Childhood is gone. They have access to this world of adults they feel they have to participate in.” Cameron also spoke of the trend of “young people who think it's normal to send pornographic material as a prelude to dating.” What he was referring to, I think, was a link between porn and the culture of social media.

Is there sexism in the lives of American girls? I wasn't aware of just how much until I started talking to girls about their experiences online, which happened sort of by accident one night in Los Angeles in 2013. I was there on a reporting trip after my boss, Graydon Carter, the editor of
Vanity Fair,
asked me to do a story on girls for the magazine. There had been a run of high-profile stories in the news about the cyberbullying, campus rapes, and suicides of girls, often with their victimizers filming their crimes and sharing the footage online. Were these isolated cases, we wanted to know, or indicative of a more widespread, menacing atmosphere? Was there a crisis in the world of girls, and if so, what were the factors behind it?

When I sat down with some girls at the Grove, a shopping mall in L.A., all they wanted to talk about was social media. “Social media is destroying our lives,” one of the girls said, as you'll read in these pages (where I've included some of my reporting from that story as well as another in
Vanity Fair
on dating apps and their impact on love, sex, and romance). “So why don't you go off it?” I asked. “Because then we would have no life,” said another girl. It was one of the first things that was said to me at the beginning of my reporting process, and I think it could still sum up the conundrum many girls today feel they're facing.

As a side note, I use the word “girls” here to refer to interview subjects, again, between the ages of thirteen and nineteen. There's been some debate of late about the meaning and validity of words describing gender; some argue that we should select from a range of choices that would avoid treating gender as an immutable binary. And I get that. And while I acknowledge the feelings of those who say we could even debate what “female” is, I use “girls” in a purely descriptive if not positive way, and with the permission of the girls I interviewed. In considering the effects of sexism and misogyny on the culture of social media, I focus mostly on issues and questions surrounding heterosexual norms of behavior; for while not all the girls I interviewed were heterosexual, they were still dealing with a culture in which these norms exerted influence.

Over the two and a half years I spent reporting, I spoke to girls from different socioeconomic backgrounds, of different races, sexual orientations, and gender identities. I identify their races per the U.S. Census: black, white, Latino, Asian, Asian Indian, Native American, and again, with the permission of the girls so identified. When the subject of race came up in our conversations, I included that in my reporting. I've changed their names and some identifying details as a way of protecting their privacy. Their ages here are their ages when we spoke. Most of the time, when I spoke with girls ages sixteen and under, their parents knew about our interviews and sometimes sat in on them. I met girls in public places, through parents, teachers, school counselors and administrators, and friends. I met them at high schools and middle schools, at malls and movie theaters and Starbucks. I met them on college campuses, at a Houston beauty pageant, and on spring break.

One of the things that continually struck me over the course of my reporting was the similarity of girls' experiences on social media regardless of their race or background. The homogeneity of the technology and widespread use of the same apps seem to be creating, again, a certain culture. And a lot of what girls had to say about this culture involved an experience of what can only be described as sexism—a word of which many girls, especially in the beginning of my process, were unaware. “What's sexism?” asked a girl in Williamsburg, Virginia. “Is that when somebody likes sex?” When I asked her and her friends if they'd ever heard of feminism, another girl said, “Is that when a boy acts like a girl?”

But those same girls are not unfamiliar with these words now, as I learned in a later conversation. In 2014, a surge of feminism rose up online like Hokusai's
Great Wave off Kanagawa.
It all began in January, in the days after Elliot Rodger, age twenty-two, a rich kid from Calabasas, California, killed six people and injured fourteen others before committing suicide in Isla Vista, near the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara. He had gone there seeking women to punish for their failure to appreciate him and have sex with him, he said. His 141-page manifesto, “My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger,” which he posted online, was a misogynistic screed. Rodger saw women as “flawed,” “like a plague,” “incapable of reason or thinking rationally,” undeserving of “any rights.” He envisioned a world in which he would starve women to death in concentration camps.

The response to this event on social media was like an explosion. Suddenly women and girls all over the world were raising their voices, sharing their experiences of sexual violence, harassment, and discrimination. And they were doing it on social media, with the hashtag #yesallwomen. It was a powerful example of how social media could be used as an activist tool, to protest sexism, as much as it was a place where sexism was being felt. Rebecca Solnit, writing on MotherJones.com, described this as a moment in which “you could see change happen.” I could see the change myself.

Girls I interviewed in 2013 were much more resigned to the sexism in their lives than girls I spoke to in 2014. As the year went on and women and girls continued to speak out, online, girls seemed to wake up. They were talking about the same things—“savages” and “fuckboys,” slut-shaming and a punishing double standard—but they were expressing themselves with a new and critical perspective which many said they'd learned from posts and articles they'd read on social media.

It's not that anything material in their lives had necessarily changed, but their thinking was changing, and they seemed to feel emboldened to talk about things in a way they might not have, even as recently as a year before, when such talk might have gotten them labeled “feminists”—and nobody wanted to be a feminist, whatever a feminist might be. Many of their favorite celebrities—Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Kelly Clarkson, Shailene Woodley, and others—shrank away from being labeled feminists back then. “I'm not a feminist,” Lady Gaga said in 2009.

But in 2014, something changed, and girls' role models were starting to embrace the word, and, more significantly, the idea that there was inequality in the lives of women and girls that needed to be addressed. Emma Watson delivered a widely publicized speech at the United Nations, saying, “Fighting for women's rights has too often become synonymous with man-hating. If there is one thing I know for certain, it is that this has to stop.” Watson urged men and boys to join women and girls in becoming “advocates for gender equality.” Taylor Swift switched teams, throwing in with the feminists. And then Beyoncé performed at the MTV Video Music Awards in front of a twelve-foot sign reading
FEMINIST
. “That was a big, big thing,” said a fourteen-year-old girl in New York. “It was like, Beyoncé, wow.”

And yet it was in late 2015 that you saw something like Syracusesnap. The culture of social media churns away, seeming to pay very little attention, so far, to the protestations of feminists or anyone who objects to its troubling aspects. And girls suffer. On a daily, sometimes hourly, basis, on their phones, they encounter things which are offensive and potentially damaging to their well-being and sense of self-esteem. I sat next to a fourteen-year-old girl on a New York City bus one day and asked her to show me what she was looking at on her phone. As we traveled down Second Avenue, the posts on her Twitter timeline included a meme that was circulating of a picture of Albert Einstein emblazoned with the words “WHAT WAS THE SMARTEST THING TO HAVE EVER COME OUT OF A WOMAN'S MOUTH? MY DICK.” “I guess it's supposed to be funny,” the girl said uncertainly.