American Girls (38 page)

The girls were twerking around the pool at the Holiday Inn Resort on spring break. The DJ was playing “Blurred Lines,” Robin Thicke's 2013 hit that tells a girl,
“I know you want it,”
and it seemed to be a favorite.

A line of girls was squatting, thrusting their hips back and forth, jiggling their butts. Boys jumped out of the pool and shoved their crotches into the twerking girls from behind. The twerkers laughed, grinding back into the boys.

“Spring break, yeah!” shouted a boy.

All over the patio, kids were taking pictures with their phones—pictures of each other, pictures of the twerking girls. They were posting them to social media.

There were little clusters of girls taking selfies, girls doing the duckface, throwing faux gang signs.

“You look hot,” they told each other. “
You
look hot.” “We're so hot.”

“Show your tits! Show your tits!” chanted boys and girls in the pool.

Out on the beach, there was a sprawling crowd of kids, all milling around, red plastic Solo cups in hand. A volleyball game was going on. A football sailed back and forth. Suddenly a cheer went up.

Everybody looked up at a small plane puttering across the sky; it was trailing a banner with a logo for Trojan, the condom company:
REAL. GOOD. SEX.

“We want sex!” chanted boys.

“Woo-hoo!” said girls.

“We want pussy!” said boys.

Girls said, “Yeah!”

Kids were filming the plane.

There was a group of four girls in bathing suits, attempting to take a group selfie, but one of them kept slinking down into the sand. She lay in the sand, laughing.

“Peyton,
stop.
”

Peyton was drunk. She'd been drinking since early that morning, said her friend Hayley, sighing. “Well, we've all been drinking since this morning,” Hayley said, “except for me—'cause I was the one driving. I'm the responsible one. I'm the mom.”

“You are the mom,” said her friend Brooke.

“Peyton is not the responsible one,” Hayley said, putting her hands on her hips, looking down at Peyton on the sand. Peyton was contorted with laughter. “Peyton is the one we all have to look after.”

“I love you,” said Peyton.

“Put your arm around me,” Hayley said, trying to pull Peyton up off the ground.

“Okay, Mom,” Peyton said, putting up her arms.

Hayley hoisted Peyton off the ground and posed her against her shoulder, like a drunk rag doll.

They'd driven straight through from Detroit, about fifteen hours from Panama City Beach. They were students at Wayne State University College of Nursing, all age eighteen. Their bodies were thin and toned—they said they'd been working out “like crazy,” getting ready to spend a week in their bikinis. “And you know there's going to be pictures.” They'd arrived at the hotel and checked in and come straight out to the beach. And now they wanted to send a Snapchat to their friends to announce their arrival. They wanted to Instagram the moment. They posed together, smiling their “we're having the time of our lives” smiles. Brooke held a cell phone camera up in front of them.

But Peyton slunk down on the sand again before they could get a good picture.

“Peyton is the one our moms are paranoid about us acting like,” Brooke said, looking down at Peyton.

“We're always scared she's gonna wander off without us,” said their friend Taylor.

“Do you wander off sometimes?” Hayley asked Peyton.

“A little bit,” said Peyton.

“She's the devious one,” said Brooke.

“When Peyton wanders off, we have to try and find her, 'cause she obviously will wander off and talk to anyone for a long period of time,” said Hayley.

“Just a loooong period of time,” said Peyton.

“And you can't trust everyone you meet, can you, Peyton?” Hayley said, leaning down again to pull her up.

“Bad things can happen,” Peyton said in a singsong.

Some boys had noticed Peyton's predicament and had come over to watch. They were shirtless, wearing multicolored trunks and funny hats—a cowboy hat, a sombrero. They looked as if they'd been getting in shape, too, pumping iron in preparation for spring break. One had a tattoo on his chest, block letters saying
STAY HUMBLE.

One of the boys took out his phone and started filming Peyton.

“Hey, stop,” said Hayley.

“Why? It's funny,” said the boy.

“No it's not,” Hayley said.

The boy kept filming.

“You guys, that is really not okay,” said Brooke.

The other boys laughed.

Then Peyton started to feel like she had to throw up. She flipped herself over and went on her knees in the sand. “Uh-oh,” she moaned. “I'm gonna be sick.”

“Oh, no, not here,” Brooke murmured worriedly.

“Come on, get up, I'll take you to the bathroom,” Hayley pleaded in Peyton's ear.

“Let her hurl!” said one of the boys.

“Are you filming this?” said his friend, grinning.

“Yeah,” said the boy with the camera, “this is hilarious.”

Peyton spewed all over the sand with a roaring belch.

“Ewwwwww!”
said the boys. “Oh my God!” “Nice one!”

“Oh, I'm putting this on the spring break Snapchat Story,” the boy with the camera said.

“No, you guys, don't,” said Taylor.

“Seriously,” said Hayley. “That is seriously fucked.”

“She's the one who's wasted,” said the boy.

There's been a precipitous rise in drinking among high school and college-age girls, according to studies. In 2013, the CDC identified binge drinking as “a serious, under-recognized problem among women and girls.” About 20 percent of high school girls binge drink, the CDC reported, as do around 24 percent of college-age women. “Between 1999 and 2008, there was a 52 percent increase in the number of young women showing up in emergency rooms for being dangerously intoxicated, while the rate for males in the same period rose only nine percent,” reported
The Wall Street Journal
in 2013. “Between 1998 and 2007, there was a 30 percent increase in the number of women arrested for drunk driving, while there was a seven percent drop in drunk driving arrests for males.” Girls are reportedly having their first drink at a younger age, at around fourteen. No study has really accounted for why.

Is it because of the way images of women drinking have been glamorized in pop culture? (
“It's all a blur last night,”
Katy Perry sings in “Waking Up in Vegas.”) Scenes of women clinking glasses as an act of camaraderie and triumph have been mainstreamed since
Sex and the City.
Or is it because, since the '90s, beer and wine and liquor companies have stepped up their marketing to young women?

Is it due to the many pressures on girls—pressure to achieve in school, in sports, and simultaneously be beautiful and sexy at all times? In a survey by Girls Inc., school-age girls reported feeling an overwhelming pressure to be “perfect”—not only to succeed in school and engage in multiple extracurricular activities, but also to be “kind and caring,” “please everyone and dress right,” and “be very thin.”

Or is there more drinking by teenage girls and young women because, in hookup culture, alcohol diminishes the need for emotional intimacy during sex? Or is it a display of female power, to “drink like a man”—even as female bodies process alcohol at a slower rate, leading to intoxication after fewer drinks?

Peyton wiped her mouth. She stood up shakily, holding on to Hayley. “You okay?” Hayley said.

“Yeah, I'm good,” said Peyton.

“Let's go get you some water,” Hayley said.

The other girls followed as Hayley hustled Peyton, staggering, into the hotel.

“Thanks for the show!” said the boy with the phone.

Hayley put her middle finger up in the air, not turning around to look at him.

Rachel lived in Beverlywood, in the Westside of L.A. Leilah told me I should talk to her, as she was an unusual girl these days, “really anti–social media.” I went to her house one afternoon; we sat on the back patio by the pool. Her shaggy sheepdog padded around. Rachel was eighteen, with long curly brown hair and merry brown eyes. She was barefoot, wearing a sundress; she brought to mind a hippie girl from the 1970s.

“I think the most relevant thing for me was deleting my Instagram,” Rachel said. “I didn't like the way that my life was becoming something staged for pictures. I prefer to enjoy what I'm doing for the sake of doing it, not for getting other people to approve of me. And that felt like what it was becoming. There's this expression, ‘Do it for the Vine,' and I really don't like that saying because it means we're not doing it to do it, we're doing it to record it and have people press ‘like.'

“I started a rule among my friends: phones in the middle of the table on silent whenever we get together for lunch or dinner. Whoever picks up their phone first has to pay the bill. It helps a lot because people now have to actually be forced to pay attention to each other. I went camping a couple weeks ago and everyone was looking for a [Wi-Fi] bar so they could post a picture and finally they gave up—we were out of range. So I put everyone's phones in the car and I said, It doesn't matter if we get service. And for a couple of hours, it was so much fun. We went hiking. And everyone was talking to each other, which is so rare these days.

“And then we came back to the car and everyone just grabbed their phones. The service had reached us, and the rest of the night was spent on phones. We were sitting around the campfire and people were reading things out loud from their phones, and I said, Why don't you guys want to be here in this moment? And they didn't understand. They said, We're present, we're reading current events, it doesn't get more present than that.” She smiled at the irony of it.

I asked her if she ever felt like she missed out on anything, not being on social media.

“Yes, but in a good way,” she said. “I'll be in conversations with people where they'll be talking about whatever so-and-so tweeted or posted and I don't know what they're talking about, but I also don't care. Sometimes there will be a ten-minute-long conversation where I can't participate because I didn't see that post or I didn't watch that video, but I'd rather not anyway. If I want to get to know someone, I don't want to know the version of themselves that they artificially created and posted online.

“High school is about being cool,” Rachel said, “and being cool is being in-the-know. So if you don't have that one app that's popular or you haven't seen that thing online that everybody's talking about, you can be made to feel like you're out of it, and no one wants to be that one that doesn't
know.
But how important is it really to know what Mary posted yesterday on Instagram? If I want to know Mary, I'll call her up and ask her to hang out.”

She said she'd also noticed how the pressure to create a “perfect” social media self was influencing girls to focus more on their appearance. “It just seems like the norm now, to be ‘into beauty,' and there's no, like, embarrassment about it. Everyone is trying to look like the girls in magazines or the famous girls online and there's so much access to so many different products to make yourself look ‘better.' I think it's sort of normal now to
not
look like what you really look like. ‘Get this makeup, get this body, wear this bra, and you'll look this much better.' It's a kind of Photoshopping of your actual self.

“I have friends who are very into makeup, and they watch YouTube videos about it to learn how to put it on. They're like, I have to have this blush and this eyeliner. I know a girl who posted before and after pictures of herself as she was giving herself a makeover. She posted about it, saying, like, I don't need that snack, and she showed the workouts that she did at the gym. And she was totally comfortable sharing very provocative pictures of herself, semi-nudes, after she had lost weight, saying, Look how much better I look now. It was actually disturbing. I kept thinking, Why does she need us to see this?

“My brother has a Tinder and is active on it,” she said, “and we were looking at the girls on his feed. So I downloaded Tinder onto my phone so we could see the difference between the girls' and the guys' profiles, and the girls were a lot more primped and edited, posing in very seductive ways. The girls were more sexualized, pushing up their boobs and making pouty faces. Some of the guys were in the gym, not wearing shirts, but mostly they were just drinking or holding girls on their arms. I think it's pretty obvious that social media is having a bigger effect on girls than on boys.

“Obviously there's a beneficial quality to social media, having everybody tuned in to more or less the same wavelength,” Rachel said. “It's so much easier to share information and exchange opinions. But like any tool, social media can also be misused, and I think right now it's being misused socially. I feel like there are so many ways this technological boom could have gone that would be so much more beneficial.

“I just don't see a place for it in my life. I think my feelings about this come from my family. We're a family that is really close and likes to be really present with each other all the time, and that's not possible if you're focused on what you're gonna put on your timeline. We don't allow any electronics at the table, and when we go on family trips, we leave our phones in our rooms. I'm so grateful for that. I have a close relative who is really attached to her phone, and she'll spend the entire time at family dinners taking pictures of everybody, and then she goes in a corner, creating an Instagram, and then she's checking for likes and she's not part of the conversation. I see that in a lot of people now and I don't want to be that way.”

Rachel's family was Jewish, and they kept Shabbat, the tradition of having family meals and refraining from working or using electronics from sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday. “Doing the family dinner thing on Friday nights brings us together,” she said. “We talk about our week and sit and share, and I think that is rare for a lot of families these days. We've prioritized real intimate family interactions, and I think that has made a huge difference…When you don't have the skills and the practice of being comfortable with just being, then the phone becomes a sort of crutch. People say, When I'm standing by myself, I'll pretend I'm on the phone or pretend I'm texting—they don't want to be alone. But then your existence, it's not real. Or you're creating a different version of it, and missing out on so much by just staring at your phone.

“I don't have any solutions,” Rachel said, “but I think it's time to start addressing the fact that things have gone awry. Social media has created an even bigger disparity between the way you are and the way people
think
you are; and it seems like it doesn't lead to a fulfilling life.

“People are not pursuing happiness with this. They're pursuing an attractive picture.”