American Girls (43 page)

The afternoon of the Fourth of July, Meredith, Ashley, and Mikayla went to a party at “the quarry.” The quarry was in Falling Rock Park, in La Grange, Kentucky, about thirty minutes from New Albany. It was a shale pit, the size of a small lake, filled with blue rainwater, surrounded by trees and rectangular rocks stacked at angles like giant pieces of French toast. There were sandy parking areas around the perimeter where kids were milling about next to their cars.

Mikayla was wearing a red-white-and-blue bikini with a spangling of stars. Ashley's bikini was black with gold beading, and Meredith had on a one-piece with an orange T-shirt over it. They wore their sunglasses.

They parked beside a cluster of cars where they saw some of their high school friends—boys and girls in bathing suits, all holding swim noodles and plastic rafts, cans of beer and red Solo cups.

The backs of the cars were open and filled with coolers. Kids were mixing drinks, pouring juice and liquor into soda bottles, chugging.

Music was playing, wafting across the air:
“Man, let's get medicated—”
The sun beat down. The New Albany girls got out of their car and called to their friends, who nodded and waved.

Mikayla's new boyfriend, Jim, was already there, a white boy in black-and-white trunks. He came shambling over and kissed her. They'd met at Little Five, the annual bicycle race at Indiana University at Bloomington, where Jim was a student.

“We had a beer pong contest to see if we would kiss,” Mikayla said. “And I won.”

“And they've been married ever since,” Ashley said, fluttering her eyes.

“I feel like I've known him forever,” Mikayla later tweeted. She was madly in love; and in the culture of social media, it was something she felt she constantly had to share. She tweeted and Instagrammed about their relationship almost daily, posting selfies of them together with comments like, “I'm so lucky to have this man in my life & to be able to call him my boyfriend.” She posted photos of them cuddling and kissing and cutting up. “I am one lucky girl and I am so proud to be your girlfriend,” she said in a comment. “I have no idea what I'd do had I not met you b,” or baby, friend.

The girls mixed drinks over the cooler in the back of the car—vodka, rum, orange juice, and Hawaiian Punch. “I can't get too drunk 'cause I don't wanna embarrass myself,” Ashley said, pouring vodka into a red Solo cup. “My mom always says you can do whatever you want, just don't be in a porno or act like a slut.”

Kids were drinking whiskey and vodka from the bottles, following it with swigs of Red Bull, Monster Energy, and Diet Coke. As the afternoon wore on, they got hotter and drunker, and they started dancing around. Boys danced with pelvic thrusts, undulating next to girls. Some of the girls looked annoyed but said nothing about it.

Boys in baseball hats danced with swim noodles flopping between their legs. A tall, rascally-looking white boy with dark hair named Ethan, in red-and-white-striped swim trunks, was the standout of the bunch. He was slapping girls' behinds, pinching them. They turned around without a word, barely registering what he'd done.

“I'm out here,” Ethan kept saying, in his white-boy-doing-a-homeboy voice. He was the one Meredith had called a “fuckboy.”

He was also the aspiring rapper among them, the wannabe Eminem. He used to post rap videos on YouTube. Now he was in college, studying business. Seemingly inspired by the freewheeling atmosphere, he started rapping for his friends. They stood in a circle, listening.

“You wanna know about me?” he rapped. “Y'all can go and check Google. She said she wanna ride me, and I ain't talking about this noodle. I said bang, look at my thang, look at my wang. Put it in her mouth, that's how we do in the South. All these thots, put it right in. The pussy I shatter…”

His friends were laughing, drinking.

“And my dick was so long when I raped you,” Ethan rapped, “you would claim that you were into it…Just ask like four chicks here, I'm packing the magnum. Fuck that man, I'm going in raw, they saying awww…”

The kids clapped when he was finished.

He was rapping about rape, but no one seemed to mind. Or if they did, they didn't say so. Rape is not an uncommon theme in popular music. Rapper Rick Ross rapped in the 2013 song “U.O.E.N.O.”:
“Put molly all in her Champagne / She ain't even know it”
—a scenario that describes a rape preceded by drugging. Other major rappers who have rhymed about rape include Eminem (
“you're the kind of girl that I'd assault and rape”
), Tyga (
“rape your lady”
), and Ja Rule (
“rape your stray ho”
).

In the 1970s, feminists called the normalization of rape in popular culture “rape culture,” referring to attitudes in advertising, movies, music, TV shows, and other media that dismiss or encourage sexual assault and rape. Examples could also be statements, such as Fox News pundit Liz Trotta saying, in response to a 2012 Pentagon report showing an increase in violent sexual assaults of women in the military, “Now, what did they expect? These people are in close contact.” Or Yale fraternity brothers chanting, “No means yes! Yes means anal!” during a 2010 pledge initiation. Some say rape culture doesn't exist. In 2014,
Time
ran an article saying, “It's Time to End ‘Rape Culture' Hysteria.” A week later, it ran a piece by Zerlina Maxwell, “Rape Culture Is Real.”

Ethan took a bow.

Unaccountably, the boys began chanting: “U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!”

“Happy birthday, America!” someone screamed.

“Hos, hos, hos, hos,” Ethan said, indicating some new girls in bikinis were walking by, several yards away. “Shot, shot, shot,
shot,
” he called at the girls, gesturing for them to come over, wiggling his fingers at them. He held up a whiskey bottle and said, “Shot, anybody want a shot?”

The girls trotted over.

“Yeeeah!” Ethan said with a smile.

“Yeah!” said the boys.

“Shots for thots,” said Ethan.

The girls opened their mouths and let the boys pour liquor down their throats. They wiped their mouths and smiled.

“Let my dick breathe,” Ethan joked, meaning there were so many girls surrounding him, he was suffocating.

“United States of fucking America!” said a boy.

“My question is, Who's coming home with me?” Ethan said. “I'm getting loose as shit out here. My signature dance is this,” he said, pumping his pelvis back and forth. “Hey, nice cheeks, Orange,” he called to a girl in an orange bikini who was walking by.

“Want a shot?” he asked. She came skipping over.

“Cheeks, cheeks, cheeks!” Ethan said. “I knew you would come when I called you.”

“She got a fat ass,” a boy muttered appreciatively.

“Shot, shot, shot!” said the boys.

“That's nice, tastes good,” said Orange, smiling, after downing a shot of their whiskey.

Ashley and Mikayla were watching, shaking their heads.

“Boys are disgusting,” said Ashley, frowning.

Then she said, “I'm so glad I have my friends.”

She put her arm around Mikayla and they hugged. “Aw,” Ashley said, “this is a sweet moment.” They smiled, heads together, rocking back and forth.

The friendship of the New Albany girls, in the way of girl group friendships today, was impassioned and entangled in social media. They were connected, they said, all day, every day, through their cell phones and social media. It was unusual for one of them not to have her phone on, not to be communicating constantly with the others, through group texting or reading and commenting on one another's social media posts.

“We love social media,” Ashley said. “Literally, that's our entire life. All day I'm checking Twitter. If I don't know where my friends are, I just go to Twitter, 'cause they post what they're doing.”

“We tweet each other,” said Meredith.

“That's what we talk about—like, Did you see this picture this person posted?” said Ashley.

“We'll screenshot it and then group text each other about it,” said Meredith.

“Like, if someone posts an ugly picture, then you're like, Did you see
this
?” Ashley said. “People will try and show me stuff and I'm like”— waving her hand dismissively—“No, I know, I already know. It's weird for me to not be on Twitter.”

Twitter was a place where they let one another know what they were doing, often with an attempt at a witty twist (“Trying to take a quick snooze in this chair in the library is the ultimate struggle,” Kelsey had tweeted), and how they were feeling (“I'm so stressed it's unreal,” tweeted Mikayla), and, in a way, who they were (“All that goes through my head all day is ‘what is some super bad shit I can do that no one else would,' ” tweeted Ashley). It was where they went to keep threading together their connection, and to make one another laugh. “Why limit happy hour to an hour??” tweeted Meredith. And sometimes it was a place to express, in a sidelong way, their pique with one another. “My friends are a lil fake but I love them,” tweeted Ashley, to no one in particular. And later: “I'm over everyone.”

One of Ashley's recent tweets said: “Honestly I have no clue what I did before Mikayla.”

They continued hugging each other, smiling, whispering in each other's ears.

Some of the boys were watching; and they began to chant: “Make-out! Make-out!”

Ashley and Mikayla broke away from each other's embrace and stared at the boys, perplexed.

“Tongue! Tongue!” the boys said, poking their fingers in the air in time with their chanting. They seemed to see Ashley and Mikayla's “sweet moment” as the prelude to a scene out of lesbian porn.

Ashley turned around and jabbed her finger back at them, mocking them. “Make-out! Make-out!
You
make out!” she shouted.

The boys' chanting died down. They looked confused.

Mikayla laughed. “I'll give you twenty dollars,” she told them. “If you make out, then we'll make out.”

“Not in the United States of fucking America!” said a boy. “Only girls!”

“U-S-A! U-S-A!” the boys started chanting again. “Girl-on-girl! Guys-not-on-guys! Girl-on-girl!”

“That's
sexist,
” Ashley said.

“Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!” the boys screamed.

“Make-out! Make-out!” Ashley and Mikayla screamed back at them.

“Simmer down,” somebody said.

Ashley and Mikayla finally gave up, backing down.

The boys cheered and gave each other the pound—the rough bro handshake—congratulating one another on their shouting victory.

At night the girls from Haines went out to the bars. They walked along Main Street, four sexy girls in sexy clothes. “The squad is out,” they said. “They know this squad.”

It was Lally, Sarah, Rebecca, and Ariel (they were the ones who had IDs). More girls kept passing by, girls in halter tops and bandeaux and bustiers. “Hi, babe!” “Hi!” There was hugging and air kisses between groups of girls.

Newark is a college town, with an area of less than nine square miles and a population of around 31,000. Main Street is the main drag, a long strip of bars and fast-food joints housed in neo-Colonial buildings. It smells like fast food and bacon.

It was early in the night, but there were already pools of vomit here and there, on the sidewalk and the street. The girls walked along, texting, checking out what was happening elsewhere on campus.

Groups of boys came strolling by, wearing polos and button-downs and madras shorts.

“Where you going?”

“I dunno. Maybe Kate's.”

Pecks on cheeks were exchanged with boys. They chatted about what bars they were going to, all very nonchalant, as if nobody really cared.

“You wanna see a bunch of drunken girls—wildly drunken girls?” said Rebecca.

Klondike Kate's was packed with girls and boys, all drinking and talking loudly.
“Wanna do a shot?”

Girls were drunk and reeling, some hitting on guys in an overt way. Rebecca looked disdainful. “Basic bitches, basic, basic bitches,” she said.

It was a bar scene you could see on a college campus almost anywhere in America, a loud and noisy party. What was striking was to see some of the girls “literally throwing themselves on guys,” as Rebecca said. For the girls it was perhaps an expression of sexual agency. But the self-satisfied look on the faces of some of the boys could make you think of David Buss's assertion that, in the age of the Internet, men are pursuing an increased array of options “and women are forced to go along with it.”

The girls from Haines stayed awhile, but the place was deemed too crowded and full of “drunk bitches” to be any fun, so they went home.

They poured more drinks in the kitchen and assembled in their basement, where they often hung out. There was a Chinese lantern hanging over a couple of tattered couches and a coffee table outfitted with several bongs. The walls were decorated with tie-dyed tapestries and white Christmas lights.

They sat cross-legged on the couches, texting and tapping at their phones. There were six girls, all drinking white wine and intermittently doing vodka shots. They were Rebecca, Eve, and Ariel, all from Manhattan; Sarah and Lally, from New Jersey; and Paige, a girl with auburn hair and glasses, from Connecticut.

“Did you
see
those girls literally throwing themselves at guys?” Rebecca asked with disgust.

“I was just like,
Why
?” said Lally. “Why can't you just be
friends
with guys? Friends first, then if you're interested, go for it, more power to you.”

“It's mostly the younger girls,” Ariel explained. “Especially incoming freshmen.”

What did guys think when girls “literally threw themselves” at them? I asked.

“They think, I'm gonna get fucked later, so I'm gonna let it happen,” said Eve, “but then they talk shit right after it happens—like, How annoying was she?”

“They just wanna get their dick wet,” said Sarah.

“I think it's important for girls to be assertive, though,” said Paige. “There's a certain boundary, of course, but if you want something, you gotta get it.”

“I went for it with James,” Lally said proudly. “I'm a girl with a boyfriend,” she told me. “Almost three years.”

There was a rustling among the group. Of the six girls, three had boyfriends—Ariel, Paige, and Lally. The girls who did not have boyfriends looked a tad uncomfortable all of a sudden.

“We were off and on and the reason we were off is I don't think
I
was everything to him that I was supposed to be,” Lally said. “And now we're on and I can tell he wants intimacy—he
wants
that relationship…He kind of got over his college time to fuck around with girls and do whatever he was doing.”

She told the story of their relationship in a bubbly rush: it had started with a hookup; and then one day, Lally said, she told the boy, “If I'm just your toy and we're just hanging out, then let me know, because I am building feelings…And he was like, No, we're good. And ever since then we've been together,” she said, beaming.

The other girls were silent.

I asked if this was a common thing, for a hookup to lead to a relationship.

The other girls said, “Noooooo.”

“If you're up-front with them about what you're thinking…it magically is a lot easier,” Eve said. “They're not such dicks. Because if you just, like, say, Let's be honest”—she took on a very frank voice—“We're just gonna sleep together and I don't wanna have to do the
texting
thing and I'm gonna be gone before you wake up—if you just
say
it”—here she waved her hand—“magically they have more respect for you and are much nicer. It's, Oh, she knows what's going on, I don't have to pretend.”

“And if you say, I have feelings for you,” Ariel said, “and they say, I don't
want
that, then you save yourself a whole fucking—”

“Shit-show,” murmured Paige.

“Girls complicate everything,” Eve said, “but the great thing about guys is how they don't give a shit—they get to the point. That's how they always are, and so if you just say what you're thinking, whether or not it's going to go the way you want, if you say it clearly”—she snapped her fingers—“they'll give an answer back. They're not trying to overanalyze and dissect and think into things.”

Now Rebecca was looking uncomfortable, as if there were something about all of this that wasn't squaring with her own experience. “But it seems like the girl always has to be the one to say what she's thinking
first,
” she said. “Like, By the way, it's totally
fine
if I don't sleep over—you don't
have
to text me. I think that now in college everybody has that FOMO; this is my time to be young, to sleep around, to party. And I think that guys…maybe wouldn't treat a girl the nicest because of what the girl might think of him. ‘
Ooooh,
he double-texted me!' ‘He drove me home in the morning.' That's a big deal!

“ ‘He kissed me good-bye!' ” Rebecca went on. “Boys are afraid to make it seem like it's more than it is, thinking
we'll
see it as more than it is. But they get it wrong.”

It was the same quandary girls everywhere seemed to be dealing with: how to bring boys up to speed with the fact that women might just want to have sex as they do, without the expectation of a committed relationship. Or could it sometimes be having to convince oneself of not wanting to have a relationship at a time when these were becoming more and more rare?

Then Sarah talked about “this kid I'm hooking up with.” There were guys the girls said they hooked up with, and guys they were “talking to”—a step down in intensity, it could be going on at the same time as hooking up with another person. “Like, I'm terrified about the idea of being exclusive with him, let alone
dating
him,” said Sarah, “but he's someone that I absolutely love hanging out with. I just don't want to make a real choice because that's really scary. But when we hook up he's always like, No, I
want
to see you”—which was a surprise to her, different from the usual thing of guys acting aloof.

“He's very open about wanting it,” Sarah said, “which is why I actually ended up liking him, 'cause when I texted him it wasn't like, wait forty minutes. He texted me right back. That's why we're supposed to
have
our phones, because we actually
want
to speak with each other. It's just so refreshing. I don't have to, like, bullshit around with him and it doesn't matter if I want to see him or fuck him or whatever, I can just text him and it doesn't matter. That's why I ended up liking him, because it was never a game.”

“I
do
play games,” Eve said after a moment. “But I think that's just because I'm bored. I'm
terrible.
If there's no games and I'm not, like, being entertained, you lost my interest, good-bye, on to the next one.”

Her delivery was theatrically dismissive; she was their femme fatale, their Samantha from
Sex and the City.

“Eve is the one who wants what you can't have,” Rebecca said, grinning. “She's the no-strings-attached, we-can-fuck-just-to-fuck type of person.”

“It's sad,” Eve said with a sigh, “because it means I'll never be with anyone—and eventually you have to get
someone.
”

“You like to hunt,” said Sarah.

“I've been in two relationships,” Eve said, “but it's all just entertainment for me. If I'm gonna be married for the rest of my life, I'll have to be with the same person forever. So”—she snapped her fingers in the air—“keep me interested now!”