American Girls (33 page)

“I guarantee you,” Teresa said, “any girl who doesn't get a lot of guys
wishes
she could.”

We were sitting in her car in the parking lot of the Starbucks where the kids in her school hung out in the afternoon. Livingston is an affluent town of around 30,000 people, about an hour and a half from Manhattan. The Starbucks parking lot was full of Mercedes and Range Rovers belonging to kids in Teresa's class. Her car was a BMW, which she said her father had bought for her as a congratulatory gift when she lost twenty-five pounds. “His whole attitude toward me changed,” Teresa said. “He didn't look at me like I was pathetic anymore.”

She was sipping her drink, a Venti iced skinny hazelnut macchiato with sugar-free syrup. She was smoking a Marlboro Gold and blowing the smoke out the window. She was wearing a pair of Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses. Her lip gloss shimmered.

“And I guarantee you,” she went on, “every girl wishes she could get three hundred likes on her pictures. Because that means you're the girl everybody wants to fuck. And everybody wants to be the girl everybody wants to fuck.

“Every girl who isn't that girl secretly hates herself,” Teresa said. “I know because I used to be that girl. On Facebook they called me horrible names. I had to delete my account for a while. But I have no sympathy for fatties,” she went on. “Just get your fat ass in the gym and work out. It's not that hard.”

I asked her if she thought it was sexist that so much emphasis was placed on girls and women being hot. “No,” she said. “That's what people who are jealous say. It's healthy to be thin. It's empowering to be hot. Being hot makes you feel fucking amazing. Anybody who isn't hot is just fucking jealous. Did you see ‘Dear Fat People'? That Nicole Arbour video? I fucking loved it. She said what everybody really thinks.”

In 2015, Arbour, a Canadian comedian and YouTuber, drew criticism for her “Dear Fat People” video in which she mocked overweight people, claiming fat-shaming is “not a thing.” “Fat people made that up,” said Arbour, a thin white blonde. “That's the race card with no race.” She spoke of encountering an “obese” family in an airport who “smelled like sausages” and had “Crisco [coming] out of their pores like a fucking Play-Doh Fun Factory.” The video has been viewed nearly 8.5 million times on YouTube.

In a video response, Whitney Way Thore, star of the TLC show
My Big Fat Fabulous Life,
retorted, “Fat-shaming
is
a thing; it's a really big thing, no pun intended. It is the really nasty spawn of a larger parent problem called body-shaming, which I'm fairly certain everyone on the planet, especially women, has experienced.” But Arbour refused to take her video down, saying of her critics, “What they are saying is a ridiculous outrage to a comedy video that has a bit too much truth in the jokes for their personal taste.”

“Being hot gets you everything,” Teresa went on. “You'd be amazed how many things I got when I turned into this.”

Like what things? I asked.

“Like people not looking at me like I was disgusting anymore,” she said. “Like people looking at me like I was giving them a boner.” She laughed. “Like every time me and my girls go out, we get free drinks. Guys just
buy
us stuff.”

She said that she had slept with five guys in the last year since her transformation. “And I don't regret a single one. Girls who judge me should just stop judging other girls for having fun and for doing what they want. Like, You're just fucked-up about sex. Get over it. Or better yet, Get laid and chill.

“When I'm ready for a relationship, I'll have one,” Teresa said. “Right now I'm just having fun. And there's nothing wrong with that. I'm a teenager. These are my ho years.”

I asked her if the guys she slept with treated her with respect. “You should ask me how I treat
them,
” she said. “I play them before they play me.”

She showed me her phone, tapping and scrolling through texts. She showed me some conversations in which she was sexting with boys. “I can fuck any one of 'em whenever I want,” she said, chuckling.

“Nothing would be wrong with hooking up if the students I spoke to seemed really empowered and excited about it,” says Donna Freitas, the author of
The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture Is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy.
For her book, Freitas conducted an online survey of 2,500 college students and interviewed over 100 more on seven college campuses. But the culture she describes is not so different from what many high school students are also experiencing. Or it may be what awaits them, in a few years, if nothing changes.

“The more I talk to students,” Freitas says, “the more the culture of hooking up seems really problematic for them. Both young women and young men are seriously unhappy with the way things are; they're really ambivalent about the sex they're having. According to everything they see in pop culture, they're supposed to be having a great time; but it's rare that I find a young man or young woman who says hooking up is the best thing ever. In reality it seems to empty them out.

“There's this sort of soullessness fostered in hookup culture, there's a learned callousness. Sex is something you're not to care about. It's almost like their job to get it done. One word I keep hearing from students is ‘efficient.' They're so busy, so overscheduled, hooking up is an efficient way to get sex ‘done.' And you have to show that you're doing it. The reason for hooking up doesn't seem to be pleasure, fun, or intimacy; it's all about performance, gossip, and being able to update about it on social media.”

But posting about hookups on social media comes with its own perils, especially for girls, Freitas says. “One night can make or break your college experience. One wrong photo, one misstep, one tagline or comment, and you are done. I hear this over and over—it goes online and it's viral. Young women are terrified of getting a reputation, but they feel like they have to participate in hookup culture and advertising their hooking up on social media.

“Social media speeds us all up,” Freitas says. “We're constantly expected to be on it, to be updating. We're almost doing it without thinking. And that's really playing into how we act sexually. Students hook up with someone after friending them on Facebook or following them on Instagram. They wake up the next day in bed with someone they haven't had a conversation with. We need to give them the tools to have a conversation about what they want and what they expect from this encounter.

“I see students getting better and better at hookup culture,” Freitas says. “They're getting better at not caring. And I think that's really troubling. Everybody is becoming a sex object, a sex toy; it's an exchange, an agreement. The mainstreaming of porn is tremendously affecting what's expected of them. They're learning sex through porn. What it means to have sex, a lot of the time, is to mimic what they see in pornography. Alcohol is one of the criteria of the hookup,” Freitas goes on. “This is
Mad Men
sex, boring and ambivalent. They drink like they're Don Draper to drown out what is really going on with them. Alcohol has long been liquid courage. What I think has changed is why kids drink. This is about, How can I medicate myself so I don't feel? What I see is, I've got to drink so I can gear up to do this thing. I've got to get this over with and alcohol is a way to get through it.

“Conservatives sort of love all the stuff that I'm saying,” Freitas says, “but it's really hard to get liberal women to have this conversation because people are very afraid to critique hookup culture for fear of being called anti-sex. There's this sense that you give up your feminist cred if you critique what people perceive as a sexually liberated practice. Big-time feminists won't go near hooking up because they see it as sexually liberated. But I'm looking at it on the ground, and it doesn't hold up as sexual liberation. Hookup culture is an incredibly antifeminist culture. It's the antithesis of empowerment and choice.”

In 2015, in
The Independent Florida Alligator,
the school newspaper of the University of Florida, Ann Manov, an undergraduate, wrote a column headlined “Don't Twist the Meaning of Sexual Liberation.” “What's sexual liberation?” Manov asked. “Women's rights to Planned Parenthood, abortion and contraception are under threat”; but meanwhile, even “ ‘progressive' men's” sense of sexual entitlement is thriving,” she said.

“It's a poli-sci student lecturing me that it's illogical not to sleep with him,” Manov wrote. “It's him, after he cheats [on] me, saying, ‘I would never date you.'…It's playing the umpteenth side chick for a…Ph.D. student who says love is a lie and I'm being irrational…It's people I've barely met asking me my bra size. It's a friend's boyfriend messaging girls on OkCupid—‘But just for sex, so it's OK.' It's a girlfriend telling me she wants to be a born-again virgin. It's her Tinder non-boyfriend refusing to use a condom…

“This isn't sexual liberation,” Manov said. “It's asking us to f— like men and shut up…Women are raised to seek male approval. So even if we don't want to screw a guy, we still want him to want to screw us. The market is rigged: What does ‘want' even mean?…I don't want to cum with strangers. I don't want my feminism…to translate into that impersonal, inevitable ‘Well, I guess it's time to undress.' ”

Amanda tried to kill herself in eleventh grade. Her boyfriend had broken up with her so that he could play the field before graduating from high school, he said, and after some months of turmoil, Amanda took an overdose of one of her mother's prescription medications. She was hospitalized briefly and had gone into therapy.

We talked one day at the home of Kim Goldman of the Santa Clarita Valley Youth Project. We sat on her porch overlooking the mountains, eating strawberries at a wooden table.

Amanda was a white girl, tall, with long dark hair and soft brown eyes. She was growing up in a wealthy area, but her family was not rich, which she said could be hard. “When my dad found out my mom was pregnant, my dad broke up with her,” she said. “For a long time my mom was a single mom. We didn't have anything.” Now her mother was married to Amanda's stepfather, a security guard, and things were better. “But you still always feel like you don't measure up,” she said.

Amanda met her ex-boyfriend, Tom, when she was fifteen and he was seventeen. “He and I were like best friends from the start,” she said. “He was the person I talked to about everything. When he broke up with me, the reason he gave was that there were three weeks left of senior year and he just wanted to ‘live it up.' He said he wanted to have sex with as many girls as he could. Like, he said there were girls he wanted to bang and he might never get another chance.

“It's still a struggle to me today to get past that,” Amanda said. “I already had trust issues because I was abandoned by my real dad. I'd never had sex before Tom; he was my first. Like it hurt me really bad when he broke up with me. My whole world fell apart. I loved him so much.”

She'd had a rough high school experience, beginning in ninth grade, when she was cyberbullied on Facebook by a girl at her school, along with the girl's mother. “She”—the mom—“was saying I was a slut and all I do is lay on my back, but I've only been with one person,” said Amanda.

“This girl and me, we just weren't friends anymore and she would talk crap about me, and I would talk crap about her, and it got onto Facebook. And then her mom got in the mix and her mom was talking crap about me—like her mom was saying that I was a slut and just opened my legs for everyone.”

Amanda's parents reported the cyberbullying to the police, she said, but they were told nothing could be done because no direct threats were made. Feeling isolated and depressed, Amanda got into drugs, ecstasy and weed, and started hanging out with the “scene” kids, kids who are into hard-core punk rock.

“All I talked about was sex, drugs, money, and partying,” she said. “I'd post pictures on Facebook of me smoking weed and partying. The druggies wouldn't judge me, so I felt safe with them. My mom found out I was doing all that stuff when I was in tenth grade. She caught me doing ecstasy. It caused a lot of problems between us.” Her home life became stressful.

When she started dating her boyfriend, Amanda said, she finally felt as if she had “something to live for.” “We were like the one couple in school that everybody knew, that everyone was like, You're so cute. You're gonna be together for a really long time.” And now that she had a steady boyfriend, she said, no one called her a slut. “People see you with a steady guy and they're like, Oh, she must be okay, 'cause he likes her—she got a guy.

“I've only had one sex partner,” Amanda said. “I know a lot of people that have slept with multiple guys 'cause they were drunk or high. To me that's gross. You don't sleep with random people. I hear so many guys in my school be like, Yeah, I had sex with this girl and that girl. They brag about it. I feel so bad for the girls. Guys talk about it like it's sports. There's this term for a girl—they call it a ‘homie hopper,' 'cause she goes from friend to friend. There's this one girl in our school that's slept with multiple guys and she was never dating any of them and they call her that.

“There's a girl I know, I talked to her once in English class in ninth grade and she was pregnant, and I was like, Who's the dad? And she said she didn't know. She was open about it. I was like, How many guys have you had sex with lately? and she was like, Ten, and I was like, Well, is one of them the dad? And she was like, Yeah, probably, I don't know. I was like, You don't care? She said, I don't care about the guys. And I was like, You don't care that you had sex and shared your body with ten other guys? And she was like, No, not really.”

Amanda attributed her boyfriend breaking up with her to the influence of his friends and the fact that it was “cool for a guy to have a lot of different girls.” “All his friends were like, Dude, you have a girlfriend. You can't do anything,” meaning have sex with other girls. Amanda said he confessed to her that after breaking up with her, he slept with the “homie hopper.”

“Boys have no respect for girls,” Amanda said. “They'll be like, Damn, that girl's hot, I'd fuck her. They'll be like, I'm gonna get some of that. They're very cocky. I wish it was the days when boys would have to get to know you before you have sex with them.”