Odd Girl Out (20 page)

There are few interactions that better illustrate how intertwined social reward and aggression are for girls. As Leah and Trisha degrade Julie behind her back, gossiping, which undoubtedly leads to in-person tension and conflict, they are deepening their own bond.

Some version of this same conversation might have occurred in a hallway or on a phone call. Yet isn't it easier to turn a girl against someone when you don't have to speak the damning words, or look a friend in the eye before you damage her relationship with your enemy? For instance, when I asked thirteen-year-old Jessica if it was easier to text when she was upset, she said, "Yeah. Because it's not, like, personal. It doesn't feel personal because you're just, they're just words ... When I'm texting her, I wouldn't say it to her face because I know she would flip out more and there would be more to regret."

There is also this: Leah could share the conversation with me because she had stored it. Why? Would Julie someday see it? Social media has surely not invented these conversations. But it has altered their impact, speed, and ease.

 

The parasites of the social media world are websites and applications that let users post anonymous messages about others. In 2010 Formspring.me led the pack. Untold thousands of teenagers have accounts on the site, which allows your audience—almost always your classmates—to write anything on your personal page without being identified.

Formspring's power lies in its offer of an answer to the question, "What do people think of me?" Most girls open accounts hoping to read positive comments about their looks, personality, or talents. What they get is usually much worse:

Okay so I just thought id help you out a little bit, okay, so ium going to try and say things in the nicest possible way ... your not hot s——t. Alright so stop acting like it. Okay no one f——king likes you, its fake. No guys would ever like you, your a b——ch to a lot of girls, and say some pretty shady s——t, so if I were you I would f——king stop. Your f——king annoying. And if you haven't notest you have the hugest nose ever ... i mean it what ever but yeah. & you made your self a formspring so don't except people to be nice on it. <3 bye b——ch.

Imagine walking the halls or sitting in class, never knowing if the person sitting next to you in math is the one pummeling you on Formspring. The site takes cybercruelty to a new low by making it appear consensual: When you register for your account, you literally invite others to bash you with their "honest" opinions. Because it appears consensual, it no longer seems like cybercruelty at all.

Girls are especially vulnerable to Formspring for several reasons. For girls obsessed with what peers are saying about them, the site seems too good to be true. Here, finally—girls believe—I will discover my true social worth. For girls who define success as being liked by everyone, Formspring lets hope spring eternal: You can open an account and maybe, just maybe, you won't get a mean comment. Or perhaps others will rally to your defense. You'll be that girl who everyone really loves!

Needless to say, it is a toxic, self-reinforcing cycle: If you are that desperate to know what your peers think, you probably lack the self-esteem to define your own value. The more you look outside of yourself for self-worth, by visiting the website, the more personal authority and confidence you give up.

Girls live in a social universe where truth is shielded and conflict is avoided. They flock to Formspring because it appears to bring those feelings to the surface. The site offers the illusion that users can do an end run around the girl underground. But Formspring invites people to be cruel without owning up, and users exaggerate, attack, and lie just because they can. They experiment with others' feelings as a game, just to see how they react. When there is no cost and no consequence to speech, people take leave of their ethics and good sense.

Yet too many girls buy into the fantasy that Formspring tells the truth. They do not pause to consider whether "truth" should be reconsidered if it is offered without responsibility or source. They are unable to tear themselves away. Shannon, thirteen, has been grounded several times for her refusal to get off Formspring. Each time her mother tracks down her page, she is punished. Desperate to know what her peers think, she fights every threat of grounding because she believes Formspring has something to offer that real life cannot: the truth about what others think about her and, so she thinks, a chance to repair her image and right wrongs.

Despite the breathtaking, casual cruelty that swarms the pages of Formspring, the girls who use it respond to their attackers with surprising indifference.

"
I'd f
***
you,
" posted one commenter.

"
thanks I mean very blunt but still flattering,
" responded the account holder.

"YOU KNOW HOW YOUR ALLERGIC TO EVERYTHING.!! YOU SHOULD EAT A BUNCH OF PEANUTS AND HAVE AN ALLERGY ATTACK AND DIE..." said one poster. The account holder replied, "HAHA, you should eat some penis and choke on it and die! Take a HIKE KYKE."

"ur fat and hot and ur boobs r large," read one post.

"K," the page owner replied breezily.

How can girls be so blasé? It is not entirely clear. It is possible that aggression simply breeds more aggression: interpersonal norms on-line are radically different, with the bar for nastiness constantly being set, raised, and reset. For many girls, having a Formspring page seems to be a point of pride, a sign that you can handle the haters. You are tough enough to face the truth of what others think. But the reality is that most girls are hoping for something else. With every flip response, account holders authorize others to continue berating them.

Formspring has had predecessors like Juicy Campus and the Honesty Box feature on Facebook. It will likely have descendents and already has many cousins. Facebook is flooded with applications that tempt girls to find out what their friends have said about them. On my own Facebook page, I get a note every few days that a former student has answered questions about me. To further entice, the application reveals a long list of anonymously answered questions for me to preview. "Do you think that Rachel Simmons is a wannabe?" reads one. "Yes," someone has apparently written. "Do you think Rachel Simmons is cute?" (yes) "Do you think Rachel Simmons smells?" (no). And on and on. To find out who is taking the time to size me up, I have to "earn coins" by downloading other applications. Today, in my thirties, I roll my eyes. As a middle schooler? I would have fought bears to get those coins.

Perhaps that is the point. These website developers seem to know they are sinking their teeth into a juicy developmental moment: the insatiable hunger for acceptance. It is a longing some girls will do anything to satisfy, no matter the cost. I am reminded here of the children's book
Tuck Everlasting,
in which a young girl meets a family that has tasted the fountain of youth and now struggles with the challenge of eternal life. On Formspring, girls believe they have discovered a similar cure-all—for insecurity—but what they get is the curse of knowing too much. "You don't have to live forever," the narrator says in the film version of the book. "You just have to live." Similarly, girls don't need to be liked by everyone. Rather, they should just strive to be liked.

 

sexting

Sexting, or the sending of sexual images or text through electronic channels, broke the surface of American consciousness in 2009. Alarming surveys announced that as many as 19 percent of teens had sent a sexually suggestive photo or text, while 31 percent had received one from someone else.
⁴²
Although this practice is not directly related to the hidden culture of aggression, girls use sexual images to humiliate each other. Sexting is also an important part of girls' relationship with social media, so I have chosen to explore it in this chapter.

The national conversation on sexting has cast girls as casualties of preying boys and an oversexualized culture. This is true, but only part of the story. In fact, sexting is a natural and predictable outgrowth of the relationship girls have created with social media. To suggest otherwise—that sexting is an exceptional phenomenon, or the sad story of a girl with low self-esteem—is to condescend to girls and ignore their context.

As I have shown throughout this chapter, girls are hardly passive vessels being manipulated by technology; to the contrary, girls leverage social media to serve their drive to feel good about themselves, be liked, and achieve status. As girls approach adolescence, they engage with an entertainment culture that values women for their celebrity, bodies, and sexuality. At the same time, girls learn that attention from a high-status boy will vault them into the highest echelons of popularity. Enter sexting.

Erin Lambert is sixteen. With a pixie cut and sarcastic, quick tongue, she is a real-life Juno, the wisecracking, headstrong teenager from the eponymous film. She is both fierce and fragile, rolling her eyes brashly at her own regrettable sexts, but confiding that she longs to be told she is beautiful.

Erin tells me about two chat sites, Omeggle and Chatroulette, that connect her instantly with random strangers via webcam or text chat. No one knows who she is unless she tells them, and she can click to the next stranger should she grow uncomfortable or bored. Both of these sites crawl with men who touch themselves on camera and send explicit sexual messages. Erin doesn't care. She knows what she is looking for.

Girls have learned to use social media to feel closer to their friends. Now, they have figured out how to use it to feel beautiful and sexy. "I could go on Omeggle right now," she says, "and click to a couple of windows and be told, 'You're so gorgeous.'" Like many girls, Erin struggles to accept her face and body. She wonders if her body is attractive, even normal. She has had a few boyfriends, nothing serious. She agonizes in the mirror over her breasts, skin, and legs.

When Erin was fourteen, she showed her breasts over video chat to a friend of a friend. Recently dumped by a boyfriend, Erin met Steve at a party. The two Skyped for the next few nights. Steve pleaded with her for three hours. When I ask her if flashing him was fun, she says, "Kind of? To know that he really wanted to see me in a sexual way and knowing that he was trying really hard to do so. That was a little bit satisfying, I guess, to know I could make someone want that."

Yet she later felt "kind of, like, ashamed." It was, she said, "the first time a guy has seen you without your shirt on and I just wasted it." Still, she got something in return. Steve told her he liked her breasts, and it meant a lot to Erin. "At least I can be confident about them now because I know they're not Quasimodo boobs, like deformed and ugly and should be kept in a bell tower," she said wryly.

So you felt affirmed? I asked her. "Yeah," she replied. "It was nice to just kind of hear, like, you're okay. You're not horrid and disgusting. I think I just wanted someone to confirm that I wasn't worthless. And that I, like, could be attractive." The comfort of Steve's words lingered for two weeks, after which, she lolled mockingly, she was back to "all that low self-esteem stuff."

Was Erin's quick surge of affirmation from Steve so different from the charge a girl seeks when she sends out a text to a friend and waits anxiously for a reply? Both girls are using social media to summon reassurance: For Erin, it is about her body and sexuality; for another girl, it is about her likability or social worth. "I just wanted to know so badly that who I was physically was normal. And that it was like, something that could be loved and enjoyed and wanted." It is worth noting that before social media, Erin would have had to take real physical risks to earn this kind of feedback. On some level, sexting may be "safer" than the real-life alternative.

Yet the stakes for sexters are dangerous in a different way. Erin travels on thin ice in this world. When she met a boy from another country on Chatroulette, they talked every night for two weeks. Then he convinced her to take off her shirt. It was easier, she says, the second time, even though she still felt guilty. He asked if she wanted to see his penis; she didn't. "They're, like, weird-looking, man," she cracked. "It kind of looked like a hot dog." That Erin was not only uninterested but slightly repulsed suggests she was using the interaction for a purpose beyond sexual titillation or desire. When she explained why she did it, she says, "He was cute and funny and we flirted, so he would, like, tell me I was pretty and stuff."

Eventually, Erin completely disrobed on camera for Matt. "What if he's recording this?" she wondered. It turned out that he was. Through a mutual online friend, Erin discovered there was a digital file of her in the shower. Mortified, she sent a photograph of Matt's penis—which she had taken, she mentioned casually, "just in case"—to the mutual friend as revenge. (Not surprisingly, the effect was entirely different: "He was pretty well endowed so his friends just respected him more, it turns out.") She made him swear to delete it, though she will never know for sure if he did. Today, they are still friends.

Just as girls become desensitized to graphic language online, a similar indifference can develop around sexual exchanges. "After I did it the second time, it wasn't as awkward," Erin remembered. "I was, like, well, someone has seen [my breasts] before. I know they're not horrible. It was just a matter of, like, what if my parents walk in? What if he's a jerk about it?" She compared revealing her breasts to showing off a new haircut. "It's not like this huge big thing or, like, okay, I got a haircut. I show one person, and you're the first person to see my haircut. Then everyone else sees it. It's not a big deal anymore."

Even as she flirts with the danger of exposure, Erin is keenly aware of her power to "delete" the relationship. Unlike someone at school, who she might have to see every day, "you can delete [these guys] from your buddy list and then they're gone forever. You don't have to think about them if you don't want to." When she tells me this, Erin may be forgetting that an explicit video of her may be out there somewhere, immune to any delete button. Yet I am reminded of Leah's food chain of relationships: If she wanted to, she could easily "delete" her more trivial relationships with the peers she texts but never speaks to. Is this Erin's "food chain"?