Girls & Sex

by Peggy Orenstein

  I’m going to say this once here, and then—because it is obvious—I will not repeat it in the course of this book: not all boys engage in such behavior, not by a long shot, and many young men are girls’ staunchest allies. However, every girl I spoke with, every single girl—regardless of her class, ethnicity, or sexual orientation; regardless of what she wore, regardless of her appearance—had been harassed in middle school, high school, college, or, often, all three. Who, then, is truly at risk of being “distracted” at school?

  At best, blaming girls’ clothing for the thoughts and actions of boys is counterproductive. At worst, it’s a short step from there to “she was asking for it.” Yet, I also can’t help but feel that girls such as Camila, who favors what she called “more so-called provocative” clothing, are missing something. Taking up the right to bare arms (and legs and cleavage and midriffs) as a feminist rallying cry strikes me as suspiciously Orwellian. I recall the simple litmus test for sexism proposed by British feminist Caitlin Moran, one that Camila unconsciously referenced: Are the guys doing it, too? “If they aren’t,” Moran wrote, “chances are you’re dealing with what we strident feminists refer to as ‘some total fucking bullshit.’”

  So while only girls get catcalled, it’s also true that only girls’ fashions urge body consciousness at the very youngest ages. Target offers bikinis for infants. The Gap hawks “skinny jeans” for toddlers. Preschoolers worship Disney princesses, characters whose eyes are larger than their waists. No one is trying to convince eleven-year-old boys to wear itty-bitty booty shorts or bare their bellies in the middle of winter. As concerned as I am about the policing of girls’ sexuality through clothing, I also worry about the incessant drumbeat of self-objectification: the pressure on young women to reduce their worth to their bodies and to see those bodies as a collection of parts that exist for others’ pleasure; to continuously monitor their appearance; to perform rather than to feel sensuality. I recall a conversation I had with Deborah Tolman, a professor at Hunter College and perhaps the foremost expert on teenage girls’ sexual desire. In her work, she said, girls had begun responding “to questions about how their bodies feel—questions about sexuality or arousal—by describing how they think they look. I have to remind them that looking good is not a feeling.” Self-objectification has been associated with depression, reduced cognitive function, lower GPA, distorted body image, body monitoring, eating disorders, risky sexual behavior, and reduced sexual pleasure. In one study of eighth-graders, self-objectification accounted for half the differential in girls’ reports of depression and more than two-thirds of the variance in their self-esteem. Another study linked girls’ focus on appearance to heightened shame and anxiety about their bodies. A study of twelfth-graders connected self-objectification to more negative attitudes about sexuality, discomfort in talking about sex, and higher rates of sexual regret. Self-objectification has also been correlated with lower political efficacy: the idea that you can have an impact in the public forum, that you can bring about change.

  Despite those risks, hypersexualization is ubiquitous, so visible as to be nearly invisible: it is the water in which girls swim, the air they breathe. Whatever else they might be—athletes, artists, scientists, musicians, newscasters, politicians—they learn that they must, as a female, first and foremost project sex appeal. Consider a report released by Princeton University in 2011 exploring the drop over the previous decade in public leadership positions held by female students. Among the reasons these über-elite young women gave for avoiding such roles was that being qualified was not enough. They needed to be “smart, driven, involved in many different activities (as are men), and, in addition, they are supposed to be pretty, sexy, thin, nice, and friendly.” Or, as one alumna put it, women had to “do everything, do it well, and look ‘hot’ while doing it.” A 2013 study at Boston College, meanwhile, found that female students were graduating with lower self-esteem than when they entered the school (boys’ self-esteem rose). They, too, in part blamed “the pressure to look or dress a certain way.” A sophomore in a survey at Duke that reached similar conclusions called the phenomenon “effortless perfection,” the “expectation that one would be smart, accomplished, fit, beautiful, and popular, and that all this would happen without visible effort.” No wonder they faltered.

  “Hot,” as journalist Ariel Levy wrote in her book, Female Chauvinist Pigs, is different from “beautiful” or “attractive.” It is a commercialized, one-dimensional, infinitely replicated, and, frankly, unimaginative vision of sexiness, one that, when applied to women, can be reduced to two words: “fuckable and saleable.” Levy says that “hotness” is specifically women’s work, and nowhere was that more evident than on the 2015 Vanity Fair cover featuring Caitlyn Jenner, née Bruce. To announce her physical transition from male to female, the sixty-five-year-old appeared in a corset (from a store called Trashy Lingerie), breasts overflowing, lips glossed like an ingénue’s. That image was often juxtaposed in the press with a picture of her as Bruce, hair lank with sweat, arms raised in triumph after winning Olympic gold. As a man, he used his body; as a woman, she displayed it. Certainly, it’s no revelation that girls are held to a punishingly narrow, often surgically or digitally enhanced ideal of “sexy,” and then labeled as “sluts” when they pursue it. What has changed is this: whereas earlier generations of media-literate, feminist-identified women saw their objectification as something to protest, today’s often see it as a personal choice, something that can be taken on intentionally as an expression rather than an imposition of sexuality. And why wouldn’t they, if “hot” has been portrayed as compulsory, a prerequisite to a woman’s relevance, strength, and independence?

  The girls I met talked about feeling both powerful and powerless while dressed in revealing clothing, using words like liberating, bold, boss bitch, and desirable, even as they expressed indignation over the constant public judgment of their bodies. They felt simultaneously that they actively chose a sexualized image—which was nobody’s damned business but their own—and that they had no choice. “You want to stand out,” one college sophomore told me. “You want to attract someone. So it’s not just about being hot, but who can be the hottest. One of my friends has gotten to the point where she’s practically naked at parties.” Girls shifted between subject and object day by day, moment by moment, sometimes without intending to, sometimes unsure themselves of which they were. Camila, for instance, had worn a brand-new bustier top to school the previous day. “When I got dressed I was like, ‘I feel super comfortable with myself,’” she said. “‘I feel really hot and this is going to be a good day.’ Then, as soon as I got to school, I felt like”—she snapped her fingers—“automatically I wasn’t in control. People are staring at you, looking you up and down, saying things. I started second-guessing myself, thinking, ‘I shouldn’t have worn this shirt. It’s too revealing, it’s too tight.’ It was dehumanizing.” Listening to Camila, I was struck by the assertion that how “hot” she felt would determine the quality of her day; also that, midway through her story, she switched to the second person—as if she, like those around her, suddenly saw herself as an object.

  I used to say, when speaking publicly on college campuses or to groups of parents, that one could disentangle sexualization from sexuality by remembering that the first is foisted on girls from the outside, the other cultivated from within. I’m no longer sure it’s so simple. It may seem clearly unhealthy when a three-year-old insists on wearing high heels to preschool every day or a five-year-old asks if she’s “sexy” or a seven-year-old begs for that padded bikini top from Abercrombie (an item that was pulled from the shelves after parental protest). But what about the sixteen-year-old who washes her boyfriend’s car clad in a bikini top and Daisy Dukes? What about that strip aerobics class the college freshman is taking? And what about, you know, that outfit? As Sydney, a Bay Area high school senior sporting oversize geek-chic glasses, asked me, “Isn’t there a difference between dressing slutty because yo
u don’t feel good about yourself, and you want validation, and dressing slutty because you do feel good about yourself and don’t need validation?”

  “Could be,” I replied. “Explain how you know which is which.”

  Sydney gazed down at the chipped black polish on her nails and began flipping one of her silver rings from finger to finger and back again. “I can’t,” she said after a moment. “My whole life is an attempt to figure out what, in the core of myself, I actually like versus what I want to hear from other people, or wanting to look a certain way to get attention. And part of me feels cheated out of my own well-being because of that.”

  Girls do push back against the constraints of “hot,” the contradictory message that it is mandatory yet also the justification for their harassment or assault. A spontaneous movement of “Slutwalks” exploded in 2011, after a Toronto policeman suggested that college women who wanted to avoid sexual assault shouldn’t dress so provocatively. Infuriated, young women across the globe, many in fishnets and garters, hit the streets bearing signs reading such things as “My Dress Is Not a Yes!” and “My Ass Is Not an Excuse for Assault!” At the other end of the spectrum, Generation Y made news both by growing out their armpit hair and rejecting the torture device commonly known as thong underwear (some in favor of “granny pants” with “Feminist” stamped across the rump), proving they could be sexy without pandering to “hot.” On a more personal level, one of the young women I met, an art student, told me that, tired of the “costume” that girls were expected to don at college parties, she was opting for a different one, showing up dressed as a sparkly unicorn. “I feel liberated,” she told me. “It’s still kind of body-conscious, and there is a lot of makeup involved, but I’m also fully covered. And I’m one-of-a-kind.”

  Hot or Not: Social Media and the New “Body Product”

  Girls did not always organize their thinking about themselves around the physical. Before World War I, self-improvement meant being less self-involved, less vain: helping others, focusing on schoolwork, becoming better read, and cultivating empathy. Author Joan Jacobs Brumberg highlighted this change in her book The Body Project by comparing the New Year’s resolutions of girls at the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:

  “Resolved,” wrote a girl in 1892, “to think before speaking. To work seriously. To be self-restrained in conversations and actions. Not to let my thoughts wander. To be dignified. Interest myself more in others.”

  And one hundred years later:

  “I will try to make myself better in any way I possibly can. . . . I will lose weight, get new lenses, already got new haircut, good makeup, new clothes and accessories.”

  Brumberg’s book was published in the late 1990s, a good decade before social media took off. With the advent of MySpace, then Facebook, then Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, Tinder, YikYak, and—mark my words—some social media–linked microchip that they’ll soon implant in all our heads, the body has become even more entrenched as the ultimate expression of the female self, evolving from “project” to consciously marketed “product.” There are myriad ways social media can be fun, creative, connective, political. They can be a lifeline for kids who feel different from their peers, particularly LGBTQ teens, providing them with crucial support and community. They have also reinforced the relentless externalization of girls’ sense of self. There is evidence that the more concerned a girl is about her appearance, weight, and body image, the more likely she is to consult the magic mirror of her social media profile, and vice versa: the more she checks her profile, the more concerned she becomes about appearance, weight, and body image. Comments on girls’ pages, too, tend to focus disproportionately on looks, and even more than in the real world, that becomes a measure of friendship, self-image, and self-worth.

  In a windowless basement office on a private midwestern college campus, Sarah, a first-semester sophomore, stood in front of me with the toes of one foot pointed forward, one knee slightly bent, to demonstrate the “leg bevel”—a pose pioneered by showgirls but which is now standard in girls’ social media photos. “It slims your body more than if you stand normally,” she explained. Sarah grew up in Atlanta, where she attended a small Christian high school. She had dyed blond hair that hung to her shoulders, blue eyes, and carefully applied makeup—foundation, eye shadow, lipstick. “People will”—she stopped and laughed self-consciously—“this is so stupid, but people will learn the ways to pose in pictures so they’ll look good on Facebook or Instagram. I mean, I do it. A hand on your hip—that makes you look thinner, too. Or, whichever side you part your hair on, the other side would be your ‘better’ side, so I try to face this way in photos.” She turned her right cheek toward me and continued. “I edit little blemishes out and fix the lighting. And if you watch things like America’s Next Top Model, you learn to ‘find your light.’ Things like that.”

  Teens have always been acutely aware of how they are seen by their peers. Social media amps up that self-consciousness: rather than experimenting among a small group of people they actually know, they now lay out their thoughts, photos, tastes, and activities (as well as their lapses in judgment) for immediate approval or censure by their 947 BFFs, many of whom are relative strangers. The result, according to Adriana Manago, a researcher at the Children’s Digital Media Center in Los Angeles who studies college students’ behavior on social media, is that young people have begun talking about the self as a brand rather than something to be developed from within. Their “friends” become an audience to be sought after and maintained. Ninety-two percent of teens go online daily, including 24 percent who are online “almost constantly.” Nearly three-quarters use two or more social networking sites. Also, especially on photo-sharing sites such as Instagram, girls are more active than boys, who are more likely to be gamers. “You use your experience to create an image,” Matilda Oh, a high school senior in San Francisco told me, “with the ultimate goal being to show that you’re desirable and attractive and wanted and liked.” Every young woman, she said, knows that she will “get ten times as many ‘likes’ by posting a picture of yourself in a bikini than you would if you were wearing a snow jacket.” Yet, just as in the real world, girls must be careful to come off as “hot” yet not “slutty,” sexually confident but not “thirsty.” In one study of 1,500 Facebook profiles, college-age women judged other girls’ profiles far more harshly than they did boys’, criticizing those who had “too many” friends, shared “too much” information, showed “too much” skin in photos, name checked their boyfriends “too often,” posted “too many” status updates. This despite the fact that 1,499 of the profiles aspired to the same “ideal”: a girl who, through status updates, glamour shots, and skin-bearing selfies, depicted herself as “fun” and “carefree”; who had lots of attractive friends, went to lots of parties, and was interested mostly in romance, pop culture, and shopping. You could easily get trashed, then, for the very thing you needed to do to court approval.

  It doesn’t take much to become a target. “You can totally get stigmatized,” agreed Sarah. “I knew a girl who only Instagrammed selfies. Every single picture was a selfie. And people talked about it. It made her seem like she either had no friends or was too into herself. There are so many ways to be judged. And of course you’re afraid that the judgments you pass against others will be passed against you. It’s not something you ever talk about, though. You just try to listen to what people say and kind of learn those unwritten rules. Like, don’t change your profile picture too much. Don’t post statuses about everything you’re doing. Don’t have too many pictures of yourself.”

  In 2013 selfie was named the “international word of the year” by Oxford Dictionaries. Anyone with a Facebook or Instagram account probably has posted a few, but no one matches the self-chronicling output of adolescent girls (interestingly, after age forty, men become the more dominant selfie posters—perhaps in midlife, women unconsciously render themselves invisible). The portraits can be
a giddy assertion of pride for young women, a claim staked for the right to take up public space. “If you write off the endless stream of posts as image-conscious narcissism,” Rachel Simmons, author of Odd Girl Out, has written, “you’ll miss the chance to watch girls practice promoting themselves—a skill that boys are otherwise given more permission to develop, and which serves them later on when they negotiate for raises and promotions.”

  Personally, I love flipping through posts by the girls I know (my nieces, my friends’ kids, the girls I interview), seeing them in front of national monuments or on graduation day or clowning around with friends. That doesn’t, however, allay my concern that selfies can impose another tyranny on girls, another imperative to dish up their bodies for inspection by others and themselves, another way in which their value is reduced to the superficial, flattened, measured by visibility. As one girl said to me, “It’s like cell phones, Facebook—all of it comes back to the issue of: Am I pretty? How many friends do I have? How do my profile pictures look? Let me stalk myself.”

  The girls I met, again, were not passive; they were not victims of social media. They were acutely literate, often avidly feminist. They actively engaged in contemporary culture even as they struggled with the meaning and impact of that engagement. Nearly two-thirds of teen girls in one large-scale survey did feel that selfies boosted their confidence. So there’s that. But about half also said that photos posted of them by others (presumably less mindful of their best angles) have the potential to make them feel bad. Body dissatisfaction seems less driven by the actual time young women spent on social media than by how much of that time they spend sharing and viewing photos; the more they look at others’ pictures, whether close friends or distant peers, the more unhappy they become about their own appearance. Little wonder, then, that there has been a proliferation of “selfie surgery apps,” which allow a user to shrink her nose, whiten her teeth, broaden her smile. Actual plastic surgery among those under thirty is on the rise, too. In 2011 there was a 71 percent increase in the number of high school girls obtaining chin implants specifically because they wanted to look better in prom selfies. One of every three members surveyed by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery in 2013 said that their patients sought their services to look better in selfies.