Teen troubles

American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers
Nancy Jo Sales
Knopf
2016, pp 404, $26.95

The murder last month of a 13-year-old Virginia girl — who had communicated with one of her suspected killers through Kik, the popular messaging app that offers its users anonymity — has reignited worries about teenagers’ use of social media. It is only the latest in a wave of stories that underscore the hazards facing young people in cyberspace.

In her discursive new book, American Girls, journalist Nancy Jo Sales examines the effects that growing up in the turbulent seas of social media are having on American girls. It looks not only at high-profile cases of predatory assault and cyberbullying, but also at how day-to-day life inside an online bubble can narrow one’s view of the world and warp relationships and self-esteem.

She writes about 13-year-old girls being asked for nude photos by male acquaintances, being slut-shamed by classmates, and using a special app to edit photos of their backsides. She writes about 16-year-old girls meeting strangers on Tinder and middle schoolers sexting in class.
This book does an unnerving job of depicting the highly-sexualised environment teenagers inhabit today on the Web and the social anxiety created by spending hours a day online. But American Girls is hardly groundbreaking in its revelations. Many of its findings were chronicled more succinctly in Anderson Cooper’s 2015 CNN special “#Being13: Inside the Secret World of Teens,” most notably the stress caused by the minute-by-minute monitoring of one’s status and popularity, the bullying and harassment that take place routinely online, and exposure of younger and younger children to overtly sexual content on the Web.
Sales explored many of these issues in a 2013 Vanity Fair article that was a kind of precursor to this book. Unfortunately, she has not amplified her findings much here, only padded them with additional examples. For that matter, Sales has failed to find an architecture that can successfully sustain a book-length narrative. American Girls too often devolves into generalised observations, illustrated with anecdotes drawn from the more than 200 interviews she conducted. These interviews with teenage girls can be insightful, disturbing and revealing, but they are also repetitious and in dire need of editing.
“One of the things that continually struck me over the course of my reporting,” Sales writes, “was the similarity of girls’ experiences on social media regardless of their race or background. The homogeneity of the technology and widespread use of the same apps seem to be creating, again, a certain culture. And a lot of what girls had to say about this culture involved an experience of what can only be described as sexism.”
Sales tries hard in these pages to situate girls’ current experiences with social media in context with changing attitudes toward feminism — from the “girl power” movement in the ‘90s to the emergence of “princess culture” in the 2000s to a growing awareness today that there is “inequality in the lives of women and girls that needed to be addressed.”
Not only is it alarming that children are increasingly exposed to pornography online, but Sales also notes that much of the sexual material they see “is characterised by what looks like violence against women” — violence “in which men dominate and control women, insult them, and sometimes hurt them physically.”
She argues that hit movies like American Pie (1999), in which teenage boys use a webcam to spy on an unsuspecting girl, “set a normalising tone” for how many Americans would view teenage cybersex in the years to come: “boys will be boys — even when doing something unethical and creepy — and girls just laugh along with it.” She also points to the fallout that the Kardashian sisters’ fame and relentless self-promotion on social media has had on girls — encouraging them to create airbrushed, sexualised online selves and to covet popularity measured in clicks and bling.
“The constant seeking of likes and attention on social media,” she observes, “seems for many girls to feel like being a contestant in a never-ending beauty pageant in which they’re forever performing to please the judges.” Sadly, many of Sales’ common-sense observations are undermined by her lapses into psychobabble: “What’s not often talked about in discussions about the hypersexualisation of girls,” she writes, “is how this trend has been concurrent with the hypermasculinisation of boys.” Also counterproductive is her alarmist tendency to exaggerate the social acceptance of odious behaviour. For instance, she asserts that graphic crotch pictures have become such “a fact of life for both adults and teens” that Rep Anthony D Weiner’s sending of an explicit photo of himself to a college student over Twitter — which led to his disgrace and resignation in June 2011 — might now “be viewed as no big thing.”

The New York Times