American Girls (7 page)

The four thirteen-year-old girls had gone to spend the day at the Town Center mall. Wearing short shorts and tank tops, Converse and flip-flops, they glided along the air-conditioned halls past all the stores—Saks, Sephora, Victoria's Secret, Tiffany, Louis Vuitton. Their mothers had dropped them off for lunch; they had chicken and waffles at the Grand Lux Café, and now they were stuffed, so they sat down on some couches to check their phones.

As they visited their social media accounts, opening their Snapchats and liking and commenting on the Instagram posts of their friends, a procession of mothers and daughters drifted past, all dressed almost identically in Boca fashions. There was a lot of bronzed skin and bleached-blond hair. There were teenage girls in booty shorts and cleavage-baring tops, and mothers wearing almost exactly the same things, except with heels and bling. They carried shopping bags from Neiman Marcus, DKNY, and Pink.

“They call them ‘Boca brats,' ” said Julie, one of the girls on the couch, using an unflattering term for rich girls in the area. Boca Raton, a coastal city with a population of around 90,000, about fifty miles north of Miami, is wealthy. According to
Forbes,
it has several of the most exclusive gated communities in America. Andy Roddick has a home there, as does Jon Bon Jovi. Ariana Grande is Boca's homegrown pop superstar of the moment, a ponytailed diva known for her four-octave range, extreme microminis, and more than 50 million followers on Instagram.

I remarked to the girls how strange it seemed to see the mothers in the mall dressed so similarly to their daughters.

“They want to look hot,” said Cassy, not looking up from her phone.

“Everybody wants to look hot,” Julie said.

“Their daughters look hot and they want to look like their daughters,” said Maggie. “They think they're the Real Housewives.”

The reluctance of Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers to grow old is not lost on girls. The resistance to aging has been evident in the success the beauty industry has had with “anti-aging” products. The demand for plastic surgery and other cosmetic procedures skyrocketed in the 2000s, with a 98 percent increase in procedures overall between 2000 and 2012, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. The second most popular procedure for women ages forty to fifty-four in 2014 was breast augmentation. The hypersexualization which has enveloped the lives of American girls seems to have also ensnared their moms. The rise of the MILF (“Mother I'd Like to Fuck”) and cougar as sexual fantasies spilled over into mainstream pop culture in the 2010s, with TV shows like
Cougar Town
and
Hot in Cleveland
—the latter a sitcom about a group of women from L.A. who want so desperately to be considered hot that they move to a theoretically less competitive Midwestern town, looks-wise.

It was in porn that the MILF was widely fetishized. In describing the success of the porn production company Brazzers—it was the first endeavor of the founders of MindGeek—its CEO, Feras Antoon, attributed it to their mining of the MILF as sex object. “At first,” Antoon told
New York,
“they focused on busty women, ‘because the big-tits niche was so cheap' ”; but then “they realized that the MILF niche—the older-woman niche—is even bigger. And they became the masters of the big-tit-MILF niche.”

“MILF” was the third most popular search on Pornhub in 2014. The site's top porn star that year was Lisa Ann, born in 1972 and the so-called queen of MILF porn. (She prefers the term “cougar.”)

“All girls think about is trying to look hot,” Leah said.

“It's always a competition between girls, like, who has the biggest boobs,” said Cassy.

“A lot of people comment on social media, like, Oh my God, she's so flat, if she doesn't have boobs,” said Maggie.

As the girls began to talk about girls “trying to look hot,” their words came tumbling out, as if they couldn't say them quickly enough; they talked over one another, interrupting one another, their faces becoming urgent and intense.

“And a lot of boys are like, if you don't have boobs and a butt, they don't like you,” Maggie said.

“That's most of the boys right now,” said Cassy.

“A lot of boys in this generation—boys are not looking at the
personality,
” said Julie.

“They're just looking at the boobs and butt,” Cassy said. “And if you don't have them they won't date you.”

The girls were friends from middle school; they were all in eighth grade. Maggie and Cassy were Latina, and Julie and Leah were white. All of them had long, straight, dark hair, except for Leah, who was blond, and all of them had braces. Cassy's and Maggie's fathers worked in technology; Leah's father was an industrial designer; Julie's mother was an executive in a communications company, and her father was a business owner. All of their parents were married.

“A lot of girls wear really tight shirts to make them look like they have bigger boobs,” Cassy said.

“They buy like a bra too big for them to make them look like they have bigger boobs,” said Maggie.

“A lot of girls post
this,
” said Julie.

She held up her phone, on which there was an Instagram shot of a girl they knew; her behind filled the frame. She was wearing only underwear. “Screenshot if you like my ass,” said the caption.

I asked them why they thought some girls posted nude or semi-nude pictures of themselves on social media.

“They're so insecure,” Cassy said. “They're looking for attention from boys—like, Damn, you're so hot—to make them feel better about themselves.”

“ 'Cause it's like if you're not hot—you're
not,
” said Julie.

“They have Instagram accounts at our school,” Maggie said, “like ‘[Name of School] Hotties,' where they post pictures of the hot girls. Like they tell you if you're hot or not.”

“And they get people's nudes and post them all over, like on ‘Broward County Exposed,' ” said Julie.

They said there were “a lot” of Instagram accounts where nude and semi-nude pictures of girls were posted. Known as “slut pages” to kids and “sexting rings” in the media, these types of amateur porn sites can be found in schools across the country. Their existence became a subject of national concern in 2012 with a Change.org petition to have a page titled “12 Year Old Slut Memes” removed from Facebook. Soraya Chemaly reported in
The Huffington Post
that “one of the offending page's profile photos is of a pink-lipped and pouty child (she looks a lot younger than twelve) wearing a tank top that reads ‘I love COCK.' ” The page, which had been created by two nineteen-year-old boys in Brisbane, Australia, was eventually taken off Facebook after an outpouring of protest. But slut pages have persisted in the United States and other countries.

“There's so many,” Julie said. “Like ‘Boca Barbies,' ‘Boca Bitches'—”

“ ‘Boca Hos,' ” said Cassy.

“ ‘BocaBiggestHos'—all one word,” said Julie.

“It's pictures of girls with their boobs and butts,” Maggie said. “The boys take pictures and make an Instagram account. After a while someone flags it and they take it down, but usually it's after everyone's already seen it.”

“It's girls that do it sometimes, too, if they wanna get back at someone,” Cassy said. “They'll post pictures and hate on people in the comments.”

“And sometimes girls do it so, like, they can post pictures of themselves,” Julie said. She pulled up one of the accounts they were talking about on her phone. There were about twenty shots of nude and semi-nude girls, all young teens. It was unsettling.

I asked them where the boys posting these pages were getting the pictures.

“If a girl sends nudes, everyone winds up having it,” Cassy said.

“Girls send it to a boy and that boy is sending it around,” said Julie.

What percentage of girls were sharing nudes? I asked.

“Twenty…thirty?” they guessed.

“The thing is, with boys,” Cassy said, “if you don't send them nudes, they say you're a prude.”

“Or scared,” said Maggie.

Had a boy ever asked them for nudes? I asked.

“Yes,”
they said.

“They blackmail you,” Cassy said. “They say, Oh, I have embarrassing pictures of you, if you don't send nudes I'll send them all out on social media.”

A 2009 survey by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy found that 51 percent of girls ages thirteen to nineteen said they believed that “pressure from a guy is a reason girls send sexy messages or images.” Sixty-six percent of girls who had sexted someone said they did so to be “fun or flirtatious,” and 52 percent as a “sexy present” for their boyfriends. So even some of the girls who willingly sent nudes were aware of pressure from boys to send them, in this study.

“Like embarrassing pictures of you when you wake up or something like that,” Maggie explained.

“Or they say, like, I know a secret of yours,” Leah said. “Or they make up a rumor.”

Did any of the parents know about the slut pages? I asked.

“Yes, some do,” Julie said. “And I'm sure the school knows from the parents, but the school says it can't do anything 'cause it's happening on social media.”

I heard from girls all over that, when difficult situations involving social media occurred in their schools, their principals and school administrators would tell their parents that there was nothing they could do. However, Justin Patchin, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire and the codirector of the Cyberbullying Research Center, told me, “That's completely false. Schools can do something about it; there are federal standards based on Supreme Court cases giving schools the authority to discipline students for anything that happens online. I used to get that comment a lot, ‘Not at school, not my problem,' but it's completely wrong. We're going to need more higher-level court cases where schools
don't
intervene when they're supposed to in order to get them to take responsibility.”

“And boys send dick pics, too,” Cassy said.

“Yeah,”
said the other girls.

It has become common for girls to receive dick pics from boys—meaning pictures of boys' erect penises—usually unsolicited. It was regarded as shocking in 2011 when the aptly named Anthony Weiner, a New York congressman, was exposed for sending a picture of his penis bulging under a pair of shorts to a young woman who followed him on Twitter. But just a few years later, the congressman's dick pic might be viewed as no big thing. Like nudes, dick pics have become a fact of life for both adults and teens. “We are in the age of the dick pic,” said MensHealth.com in 2014. “How to Take a Dick Pic,” advised Esquire.com that same year. On Critique My Dick Pic, a well-known Tumblr blog accessible to anyone online, dick pic submissions are posted, assessed, and graded.

There have been blog posts and Reddit threads where women exchange advice about “what to do if you get a dick pic”; but rarely does anyone ever bring up the question of sexual harassment, although the majority of women in surveys say they don't like receiving such images, especially unasked. “Do they think that we want that? 'Cause we don't,” said Sally, a seventeen-year-old girl in Boca Raton. “It makes you feel disrespected,” said her friend Michelle, seventeen. “I got dick pics in sixth grade. But nobody wants to see it; it doesn't turn me on. It shocked me.”

In 2015, the actress Juliette Lewis posted a video on Facebook registering her disgust at receiving an unsolicited dick pic. “So I looked at my direct messages,” Lewis said, referring to a message she had received on social media. “So people just send naked pictures to each other and be like, Hey, here's my dick? It's so sad…You're sick.”

And yet, many of the same feminists who condemn street harassment and online harassment can't be heard calling the sending of dick pics “harassment,” if they talk about it at all, although sending an unsolicited dick pic could reasonably be compared to the crime of flashing. On social media, dick pics are treated in a jocular way; a YouTube video, “Women React to Dick Pics!” has gotten millions of views. “Please stop sending me pictures of your dick,” one of the young women in the video pleads in a comical tone. In 2013, Cosmopolitan.com ran “In Defense of the Dick Pic,” saying, “It's kind of romantic, actually. Like a Hallmark card made of skin.”

When I asked the boys in James City County if they sent dick pics, they said they had, usually as a way to try to get nudes in return. “Sometimes it works, like thirty percent of the time,” one boy said. “I send them my dick, so they'll show me something of theirs.”

“Yes, I have gotten one,” Julie said, “and I didn't ask for it. I thought he was my friend, but he changed. It got me upset.”

“Some of them don't even show their face,” Cassy said. “They just send it to you like, Hey, look at
this.
”

“But, honestly, there are girls who do the same kinds of things,” Julie said. She told of how, the day before, a friend had come over to her house after school and wanted to video chat with some boys on FaceTime—naked. “She came out of my closet naked, ready to answer the call, and I was like, What are you doing? She wanted to be naked in front of the boys. And I said, This is really not okay, you're thirteen years old and you're acting like a twenty-year-old girl.”

“What would have happened if the boys had screenshotted her?” I asked.

“That's what they do!” exclaimed the girls.

“They think it's cool to try and trick you,” said Cassy.

In porn, the tricking of women into doing something sexual is a common theme. On Pornhub, XVideos, and other sites, you can find videos with titles such as “Tricked Into Sex.” “Naive Teen Tricked” is a link on a site called PussySpace, “Dumb Teen Gets Tricked Into 3Some” on Pornhub, and “Hypnotized girl tricked into sex” on XVideos.