American Girls (35 page)

Dinner at Rise went from sushi to mochi and fried green tea ice cream. The girls talked and laughed.

“It's amazing how much we're just talking tonight,” Madison said. “Like, nobody is on their phones.”

“I like it so much better,” Billie said. “Phones just destroy conversation.”

“Especially with boys,” Sally said. “They never talk to us.”

“They don't have to,” Billie said. “They don't have to engage in a conversation. They can just text.”

“They can text four girls at once,” Sally said. “I'm not just faulting boys—girls do it, too. But think about it. You can have a live chat going on FaceTime and be texting and Snapchatting someone else.”

And how did this affect how girls and boys viewed each other? I asked.

Billie said, “It reduces respect. 'Cause it's not a respectful way of communicating with someone. No one is special or has your full attention. It's like you're dealing with four or five options and seeing which one will pan out.”

“Social media just rushes everything,” Sally said. “I feel like no one's waiting till they're ready to have sex.”

I asked them if people at their school were having actual sex, not just cybersex. They laughed.

“Are you kidding me?” said Michelle. “People are having sex
in school.
There's condoms all over the place.”

“I walked in on two girls in the bathroom once,” Billie said.

“I walked in on a girl and a boy,” said Madison. “It was oddly quiet, and I see this girl's feet and boy's feet standing in the corner of the big stall. I just left.”

“Can't you wait till you get home?” Billie joked.

“Sometimes they put a sign on the door that says
OUT OF ORDER
,” Madison said. The other girls laughed. “But you can tell someone wrote it and it wasn't a printed thing,” she added.

“I hooked up with a guy at school junior year,” Michelle confessed. “He was this hot football player—gorgeous blue eyes. We were taking the same drama class. We made out in the theater. I just wanted to make out with him. Guys at our school are not datable.”

“Nobody dates. It's just hooking up,” said Madison.

“After parties, it's like, Who got with who? What's the scoop?” said Sally. “Monday morning you get the gossip.”

“ ‘Oh, I was drunk, I don't remember it,' ” Billie said, repeating an oft-heard phrase.

“There's parties every weekend,” Madison said. “People get drunk, hook up. Seniors are like, Let's live it up. We're all going off to different colleges, I'm never going to see you again, so let's just, you know, do it.”

I asked if they thought porn had anything to do with all this.

They all said,
“Yes.”

“Boys look at porn all day,” said Billie.

“They watch it during class,” said Madison.

“Whenever you text a guy and ask, What are you doing?, they say they're watching porn,” said Sally. “Some guys in my class were actually watching it while someone was doing a presentation. This girl Jennifer was giving a presentation and these guys put their phones like that”—she held her phone up to show the screen. “They were like, Oh, Jennifer, I have a question, and they raised their phones and it was a porn video. She couldn't even concentrate. It was so sad. I felt so bad for her.”

Didn't the teacher see? I asked.

“The teacher didn't even know,” Sally said. “She was at the back. The boys were sitting in the front of the class.”

“Disgusting,” said Michelle.

I asked why no one told the teacher.

The girls all looked around at one another. “If you tell on them, they'll never let you forget it,” said Billie.

It was a classic case of sexual harassment. I asked if this had occurred to them.

“Actually, yes,” said Madison. “But boys do stuff like that all the time—like in my history class this kid watches porny videos that his girlfriend sends him and he shows them around. Guys watch it right there in class. They just think it's funny. I don't know if they realize it's
harassment.
”

They said their school was a competitive one, “a pressure-cooker school.” “Everybody competes for grades.” Kids competed with one another to get into Ivy League schools. “Like you only matter if you get into a really good school,” said Billie. The girls all said they wanted to be doctors, surgeons, pediatricians; they said they'd been inspired to go into the sciences from watching
Grey's Anatomy
—a show with several strong female leads who are doctors in a hospital. So these were empowered, privileged girls, girls who saw themselves as future doctors. And yet they didn't feel they could speak up when they were being sexually harassed in a high school classroom.

More than forty years after the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission began enforcing Title IX, issuing regulations against sexual harassment in publicly funded schools, the sexual harassment of both girls and boys in schools has quietly gone mainstream. A national survey in 2011 by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) of students in grades seven to twelve found that “sexual harassment is part of everyday life in middle and high schools. Nearly half (48 percent) of the students surveyed experienced some form of sexual harassment in the 2010–11 school year, and the majority of those students (87 percent) said it had a negative effect on them. Verbal harassment (unwelcome sexual comments, jokes, or gestures) made up the bulk of the incidents, but physical harassment was far too common. Sexual harassment by text, e-mail, Facebook, or other electronic means affected nearly one-third (30 percent) of students…

“Girls were more likely than boys to be sexually harassed, by a significant margin (56 percent versus 40 percent),” the AAUW report went on. “Girls were more likely than boys to be sexually harassed both in person…and via text, e-mail, Facebook, or other electronic means…Girls' experiences tend to be more physical and intrusive than boys' experiences. Girls were more likely than boys to say that they had been negatively affected by sexual harassment…Not only were girls more likely than boys to say sexual harassment caused them to have trouble sleeping…not want to go to school…or change the way they went to or home from school…girls were more likely in every case to say they felt that way for ‘quite a while' compared with boys.

“Too often, these negative emotional effects take a toll on students' and especially girls' education, resulting in decreased productivity and increased absenteeism from school,” said the AAUW report. “Thus, although both girls and boys can encounter sexual harassment at school, it is still a highly ‘gendered phenomenon' that is directly and negatively associated with outcomes for girls…

“Girls were much more likely to experience unwanted sexual jokes, comments, or gestures…more likely to say that they were shown sexy or sexual pictures that they did not want to see…and that they had been touched in an unwelcome sexual way…Girls were also more likely to say that they had been physically intimidated in a sexual way…and were forced to do something sexual.” The AAUW found that the prevalence of sexual harassment was statistically similar among students of different racial and ethnic groups. It found that very few students would admit to harassing others.

“A boy tried to unzip my pants.” “I was called a whore because I have many friends that are boys.” “Someone had lewd photos on their phone—they asked if I wanted to see them and even though I said no, they showed them to me anyway.” These were some of the incidents the AAUW reported. The study found that whether a girl becomes a victim of sexual harassment has much to do with her physical appearance. Girls “whose bodies are really developed,” “who are very pretty,” “who are not pretty or not very feminine,” or who are overweight were the most likely to suffer sexual harassment.

And yet, despite the high numbers of girls experiencing sexual harassment in schools, only 12 percent said they ever reported it to an adult. “Some researchers claim that sexual harassment is so common for girls that many fail to recognize it as sexual harassment when it happens,” said the AAUW report. A 2014 study, published in
Gender & Society,
of students between the ages of twelve and seventeen in a Midwestern city also found that girls failed to report incidents of sexual harassment in school because they regarded them as “normal.” Their lack of reporting was found to stem from girls' fear of being labeled “bad girls” by teachers and administrators, who they felt would view them as provoking how they were treated. They also feared the condemnation of other girls, some of whom were shown to be unsupportive, accusing them of exaggerating or lying. Many girls saw everyday sexual harassment and abuse as “normal” male behavior and something they had to ignore, endure, or maneuver around. “They grab you, touch your butt and try to, like, touch you in the front, and run away, but it's okay, I mean…I never think it's a big thing because they do it to everyone,” said a thirteen-year-old girl in the study.

But another important question is, What is making some boys think sexual harassment is normal? In the AAUW study, when the small percentage of students who admitted to sexually harassing others were asked why they did it, 44 percent said, “It's just part of school life,” and 39 percent said, “I thought it was funny.” “People misunderstood that sexual harassment is about sex—it's really about control, and power, and abusing it,” said Anita Hill in the documentary
Anita.

“It's just become so common,” Billie groaned, referring to boys looking at porn in school. “And, like, what are you supposed to say? It's bad enough when they compare us to porn stars and look at their porn-star accounts on Instagram at lunch. But when they're, like, looking at a girl they know—that
we
may know—a girl our age”—now she was referring to boys looking at nudes—“how can we, like, object? Either we're slut-shaming or we're jealous or a prude.”

“They look at their pictures and talk about who they want to, you know,” Madison said. “Like whose butt is bigger, whose chest.”

“We're used to it,” said Michelle. “This all started in sixth grade. They started asking for nudes. I don't know if they had any idea that it's
harassment
—I don't know if they do now. They're just doing it 'cause they're horny and they want to see naked girls.”

“Girls get accused of doing all the messed-up stuff on social media, but guys do it, too,” said Billie.

I asked them what they thought of the argument that girls taking and sending nudes was empowering for them.

“I don't buy it,” Sally said. “If you felt good about your body, you would conserve yourself for somebody you think really deserves that. There's other ways of showing off your body than showing everything. Like, some things are better left unshown.”

Michelle made a face. “But I think a guy should respect a girl no matter how much skin she's showing,” she said. “They're still human beings—they still have a brain, a personality. You don't know anything about them. You can't just, like, say disrespectful things about them. They're still a person.”

“I agree,” said Billie. “But boys
don't
respect girls who show off their bodies—they think it's hot, but they don't respect them. It's the
boys
that find it empowering because they think it's being done for them.”

They talked about a girl in their school who wore provocative clothes—booty shorts and tops showing “side boob,” they said—and flirted with male teachers in order to get better grades, or so they believed. “She calls this seventy-year-old teacher ‘babe,' ” said Michelle. The other girls laughed.

And does it work? I asked. “No, she gets bad grades,” said Michelle.

“See, no guy respects that,” Billie said. “Maybe if they've been raised by like the biggest, most feminist mom, but how many of those moms exist?”

“Most moms have no clue what boys are like,” Madison said.

“No, and we don't want to tell them, 'cause they'd be too worried about us,” said Michelle. “And, seriously, like some moms don't want to hear it. They blame everything on girls. They're just like, Oh, look at what she did to my precious son, she sent him nudes. They don't know that, like, their son is hooking up with their daughter and sending pictures of his dick to other girls.” Now she was talking about Kyle again.

“Like that weekend Billie sent me the picture of him and his girlfriend,” she went on, “he had stayed over at my house the night before. So he was hooking up with me and then posting ‘couples' pictures with
her.
And he was telling her mom over wine, I'm in love with your daughter. He was making plans with her mom about how he could still be with her when they went to college. He leaves her house at four o'clock—I'm at Hollister shopping—and he calls me right after he left. Like right after!” It was something she and Morgan had ascertained when they compared notes. “He said all this stuff to her mom and then he left her house and was trying to get with me.”

She held up his text from that day: “I'm hard and horny lol and I just want you.”

The other girls shook their heads.

“High school boys suck, they really do,” said Madison.

Sally looked down. “Well, not all,” she said.

“Oh, that's right!” said Michelle. “Sally knows a good guy.”

Sally said, “He is a good guy.” She smiled.

She had liked him since freshman year, she said. In the spring, she added him on Snapchat—“I was scared, but I did it. But then,” she said, “he didn't add me back,” so she was scared that he wasn't interested. Two whole days went by. “So I took back my request.” She was in agony. “He's a very smart, respectable boy. I thought I had no chance.”