Posting pictures of yourself—even lots and lots of pictures of yourself—while eating cereal or shopping for a prom dress or hanging with your besties is one thing. What really worries parents is the selfie’s evil cousin: the sext. Do not, we tell our daughters, absolutely do not send anyone sexually explicit messages or, God forbid, a nude or seminude photo. The Internet is forever, we say. Snapchat doesn’t prevent screenshots that can be redistributed in an instant and used as weapons (witness the rise of “revenge porn”: explicit images posted online without the victim’s consent, often following a breakup). In truth, it’s hard to know exactly how common “sexting” is among teens. In surveys, between 15 and 48 percent (depending on the age of the children asked and how “sexting” is defined) say they have sent or received an explicit text or photo. What is clear, though, is that the practice is not gender neutral. While equal numbers of boys and girls may sext voluntarily, girls are twice as likely to be among those who were pressured, coerced, blackmailed, or threatened into it—fully half of teen sexting in one large-scale survey fell into those categories. That’s particularly disturbing, since coercion into sexting appears to cause more long-term anxiety, depression, and trauma than coercion into real-life sex. Among the girls I met, the badgering to send nude photos could be incessant, beginning in middle school. One girl described how, in eighth grade, a male classmate threatened (in a text) to commit suicide if she didn’t send him a picture of her breasts. She told her parents, while a friend of hers he also targeted complied. Sometimes the pressure was mixed with girls’ own desire to please, to provoke, or to be affirmed as hot. They sexted photos to boyfriends to prove their trust, or to boys whose interest they hoped to attract. (Boys did this, too, but girls typically considered it aggressive and “gross.”) One girl told me that there had been an “epidemic” of classmates at her private Jewish middle school who flashed their breasts at boys while video chatting. The boys began taking screenshots and posting them online.
“Did the girls want that to happen?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “But it did.” By high school, the girls had “grown out of it,” but the boys had not. “I would video chat with boys, and they’d be like, ‘Come on! Flash me! Flash me!’ I wouldn’t do it, but they’d be very persistent. They’d say, ‘Just do it. I promise I won’t take a picture.’ And if you really like the guy, you think maybe he’ll like you back. . . . There were boys who had whole folders of pictures. Like trophies.”
Some girls considered sexting and sexy video chatting a way to experiment with sex safely (at least as they saw it). “I would do really graphic sexting over IM in middle and high school,” a freshman at a mid-Atlantic college told me, “or do stripteases on Skype. I wasn’t ready to lose my virginity, but I loved being the bad girl.” She didn’t worry that her recipients might share her performances; she believed she could use her body to intimidate as well as entice. “I’m six feet tall,” she said. “I’m not this dainty little thing. I was like, if you pass this around you will not have balls anymore. I will hurt you. So I felt in control.”
Are selfies empowering or oppressive? Is sexting harmful or harmless? Is that skirt an assertion of sexuality or an exploitation of it? Try this: looking up at the ceiling, raise your hand over your head and trace a clockwise circle with your index finger. Continue to trace the circle while slowly lowering your arm so that your finger is at eye level. Now, still tracing, lower your arm further until it’s at your waist. Look down at the circle. Which direction is it spinning? Although it would seem impossible, the circle moves clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. Management consultants use that “both/and” concept to break down rigid “either/or” thinking. Deborah Tolman has suggested that it’s equally useful when considering young women’s complicated relationships to their bodies, their sexuality, and sexualization. That’s the challenge to both parents and girls themselves: whether you’re discussing dress codes, social media, or the influence of pop culture, there is rarely a clear-cut truth.
Parts Is Parts
2014 was “all about that bass,” the lyrics to Meghan Trainor’s wildly popular confection themselves riddled with both/and contradiction. The song ostensibly celebrated the body positive, rejecting the “stick-figure silicone Barbie doll” ideal. Yet it contained a Trojan horse: not only did Trainor take a gratuitous swipe at “skinny bitches” (followed by a coy “No, I’m just playing”), but she also reassured young women that “boys, they like a little more booty to hold at night.” So, sure it’s fine to be curvier—as long as guys still think you’re hot.
Trainor was kind of late to the party, though: the “bass” was already in ascendance, metamorphosing from a Sir Mix-A-Lot novelty song to a JLo trademark, to a national obsession. On the cover of her single “Anaconda,” Nicki Minaj squatted, back to the camera, her knees splayed, revealing a prodigious (and, rumor has it, surgically enhanced) posterior. The art for Lady Gaga’s single “Do What You Want” featured a be-thonged upthrust rear. (The chorus of the song itself, a duet with alleged child rapist R. Kelly, is “Do what you want, what you want with my body.”) During her On the Run tour, Beyoncé appeared in a Givenchy-designed bodysuit with cutouts that showed off her naked buns. The cover of the 2014 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue portrayed yet another rear view: three topless supermodels gazing playfully over their shoulders as they offer their near-bare bum cheeks for readers’ inspection. Later that year, Lopez rereleased her trend-launching hit “Booty” with a new, far more explicit video, featuring “Pu$$y” rapper Iggy Azalea. And Kim Kardashian notoriously tried to “break the Internet” with a Paper magazine cover shot of her bounteous (and, again, possibly augmented) derrière, slick with baby oil.
And there’s more! Jen Selter, a fitness model dubbed the Belfie Queen—that’s “butt selfie”—has over 7 million Instagram oglers and earns as much as sixty thousand dollars for sponsored posts. For the more ordinary mortals, an eighty-dollar gizmo called a “belfie stick,” designed to help capture that perfect rear angle, sold out immediately online and, at this writing, had a months-long waiting list. Between 2012 and 2013 the number of “Brazilian butt lifts” performed in the United States, in which fat is transferred from another part of the body to the rear, jumped 16 percent. For those short the ten thousand dollars required for that procedure, sales of twenty-two-dollar Booty Pop panties—think padded bra for the bum—were up in November 2014 nearly 50 percent from the same period a year earlier; the company subsequently introduced a new, larger product, with 25 percent more foam.
Maybe it was just the butt’s turn: After all, how many more hours could women while away obsessing over their stomachs, breasts, hips, upper arms, necks, and faces? How many more cosmetic procedures could they undergo? Something had to fill the breach. Truly, you’d think that after buying into the horror of the “thigh gap,” women would resist being defined by yet another body part, particularly this one. As Amy Schumer rapped in “Milk, Milk, Lemonade,” her brilliant send-up of the booty craze, we’re “talkin’ ’bout my fudge machine.” The girls I met, though, didn’t see it that way. Matilda Oh suggested I was hypocritical for dismissing Nicki Minaj as self-objectifying in “Anaconda” but hailing Lena Dunham as subversive for playing Ping-Pong topless on Girls. But Dunham wasn’t trying to be hot. Quite the opposite: she is dough-bellied and soft-chinned, with natural, lopsided breasts. Her “bass” is perhaps a little profundo. In other words, she looks like an average American woman. She uses her body to shatter taboos against showing the imperfectly ordinary, to challenge our pneumatic, implant-propelled expectations. “Nicki Minaj is challenging, too,” Matilda countered. Minaj cast off shame, rejected the male-generated shackles of “respectable” female sexual behavior, refused to see the behind—especially when it’s large, especially when it’s attached to a woman of color—as “dirty.” “People always gripe about Nicki Minaj’s butt,” Matilda said, “but I think it’s kind of ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t.’ If y
ou emphasize it, you could potentially normalize black bodies in the mainstream, but you’ll also be accused of ‘objectifying’ yourself. If you don’t do it, though, you are arguably participating in a culture of body shame. So how is a woman of color supposed to ‘take control of her sexuality’ or be ‘body-positive’ without it being construed as internalized fetishization?”
Is Minaj’s butt transgressive? What about Gaga’s? What about those Sports Illustrated swimsuit models’? How can one tell which of these images is defiant and which is complicit; which liberates and which limits; which undermines standards of beauty and which creates new ones? Can they do both simultaneously? “I love Beyoncé,” a freshman at a West Coast college told me. “She’s one of my idols. She’s, like, a queen. But I wonder, if she wasn’t beautiful, if people didn’t think she was so sexy, would she be able to make the feminist points she makes?”
Feminist scholar bell hooks, who kicked the Beyhive in 2014 when she called Beyoncé a “terrorist, especially in terms of her impact on young girls,” has suggested that the fascination with the butt is nothing more than the latest way to reduce a woman to a body part: the latest PG-13 stand-in for “the pussy.” The obsession is no different, no more subversive, and no more “empowering” to women than the fetishization of the breast or the wet, open mouth. As with those pop culture memes, she said, it raises the basic question: “Who possesses and who has rights to the female body?”
Young fans such as Matilda argue that the stars themselves do. Female artists, they insist, are taking control (or at least are being marketed as taking control) of a hypersexualized industry that too often exploits women. Yes, these women may be products, but they are also producers. The decision to twerk onstage, or twirl on a poll, or dance in one’s drawers around a fully clothed man, or to pose nude on the cover of a magazine is now a woman’s alone: rather than capitulating, they are actually reclaiming their sexuality. Yet those performers still work within a system that, for the most part, demands women look and present their bodies in a particular way in order to be heard, in order to be seen, in order to work. Successfully manipulating that system to their advantage by, say, nominally reimagining the same old strip club clichés may get them rich, it may get them famous, but it shouldn’t be confused with creating actual change. Artists such as Gaga or Rihanna or Beyoncé or Miley or Nicki or Iggy or Kesha or Katy or Selena may not be puppets, but they aren’t necessarily sheroes, either. They’re shrewd strategists, spinning commodified sexuality as a choice, one that may be profitable but is no less constraining, ultimately, either to female artists or to regular girls. So the question is not whether pop divas are expressing or exploiting their sexuality so much as why the choices for women remain so narrow, why the fastest route to the top as a woman in a sexist entertainment world (just as for ordinary girls on social media) is to package your sexuality, preferably in the most extreme, attention-getting way possible.
The Twerk Seen ’Round the World
Miley Cyrus’s face floated against the back wall of Oakland’s Oracle Arena, a cross between a humongous selfie and the disembodied head from The Wizard of Oz. An eye winked, the lips pursed and stretched. A pink tongue unfurled, and suddenly the real Miley, dressed in a red, spangly two-piece leotard with bird feather shoulders, stepped out, arms aloft, and slid onto the stage. As she launched into the opening lines of her song “SMS (Bangerz),” tens of thousands of girls (and a few boys) screamed and held up flashing iPhones, the latter-day version of waving cigarette lighters. It was February 2014, about six months since Miley buried her Disney image forever with what has been called “the twerk seen ’round the world.”
For those who may have recently migrated from Pluto, Miley sparked international outrage with her performance at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards, first mimicking anilingus on a black female backup dancer (who inexplicably had a giant stuffed teddy bear strapped to her back) and then stripping down to plastic, skin-colored skivvies and vibrating her butt, or “twerking,” against Robin Thicke’s crotch as the two performed his controversial hit, “Blurred Lines.” She also employed a foam finger, the kind fans typically brandish at sporting events, in ways that, once witnessed, could never be unseen. Throughout, there was that freakish wagging tongue, which now rivals KISS’s Gene Simmons’s in notoriety. The performance sparked predictable hand-wringing by both conservative pundits and feminists. (No less than Sinead O’Connor, who once shredded a picture of the Pope on live TV while singing the word evil, urged Miley “not to let the music industry make a prostitute of you.”) Then came a backlash, led largely by young women, accusing both groups of “slut-shaming” Miley for “expressing her sexuality.” Miley was also attacked as racist for appropriating aspects of black “ratchet” culture to boost her bad-girl cred and using her voluptuous backup dancers’ bodies as props. None of it mattered. By the next morning Miley’s singles had secured the top two spots on iTunes. The Bangerz album, released about six weeks later, debuted at number one on the Billboard charts.
This was not my first Miley concert. Five years earlier I’d attended her Wonder World tour, also at the Oracle Arena, where she shocked a crowd of tweenie-bopper Hannah Montana fans by grinding on the boys in the band while clad in leather short shorts and a cleavage-baring vest. This time around it seemed those little girls (or their mothers) had gotten the memo: they were nowhere in sight. Or maybe they were here; they were simply older now, as was Miley. Before the show, the halls of the arena were jammed with young women in their late teens and early twenties sporting Miley’s pigtail bun hairstyle from the VMAs. Some wore crop tops emblazoned with the word twerk in six-inch-high capital letters. A number of them carried foam fingers. A few had found knock-offs of the furry teddy-bear-faced lingerie teddy that Miley had worn before stripping at the awards, with its winking eye and chops-licking tongue. (“Miley Cyrus costume” had been the second most popular search on Google that Halloween, with those teddies selling for around ninety dollars a pop.) One girl waltzed by clad in a flesh-toned bra and panties, and while that might not in itself have raised eyebrows, the two middle-aged adults trailing her with cameras, paparazzi-style (presumably her parents), turned more than a few heads. There was lots of midriff on parade, a lot of leg, a lot of stilettos. The smell of weed permeated the air.
I planted myself near a concession stand, where no fewer than thirty girls over the course of about fifteen minutes asked me to snap their picture beside a life-size poster of Cyrus displaying her famous tongue. A few made “duck lips” or “faux surprise” face—I’m fun! I’m ironic!—but most imitated their idol. I asked one girl, a nineteen-year-old named Emilia, to explain the appeal of the pose. “I guess it’s to say, ‘I don’t care,’” she said.
“You don’t care about what?”
She shrugged. “I just don’t care!”
A twenty-one-year-old women’s studies major from San Francisco State University stood nearby dressed in a black-and-white striped romper, her hair wound into pigtail buns, a slash of red lipstick on her mouth. “I like Miley because she is just herself,” she explained. “I loved Hannah Montana. I’ve seen every episode. But I’m grown up now, and so is Miley. She needed to break free and show that she wasn’t the Disney star anymore.” The girl looked around the hallway. “And she did.”
“She is the epitome of perfection,” enthused her friend. “And she’s not going to fit into any cultural ideal. Everyone tells you who you’re supposed to be as a girl, but Miley? She is just who she is.”
The show itself was a kaleidoscope of quasi-psychedelic images. A caricatured animated Miley (conceived by Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi), bug-eyed and buck-toothed, with huge, flopping butt cheeks, cavorted on-screen as the real-life version performed with those plush stuffed dancing bears, pinching and palpating more backup dancers. A giant bed disgorged dancers of both sexes, who joined Miley in a mock orgy. She simulated intercourse with a “little person,” pantomimed fellatio on a dancer dressed as Abraham
Lincoln (“party in the USA!”). She urged her audience to make out with each other, drawling, “The more tongue, the better. The dirtier, the better.” The “nastiest” couples, she said, would be projected onto Jumbotrons flanking the stage. (“Girl on girl is always appreciated,” she said with a smirk.)
The show was unquestionably graphic but not especially erotic. The images and actions were too random, too devoid of larger meaning or purpose. They were just so much flotsam and jetsam seemingly thrown out to stimulate reaction—any reaction. Look, a thirty-foot cat! Miley in a cannabis body suit! Miley getting off on the hood of a car! Miley astride a giant, airborne hot dog! Cyrus, her pixie-cut hair dyed platinum, was thinner than she’d been five years before, with no curve to her hips or breasts. She looked surprisingly androgynous, an R-rated Cathy Rigby, a tripped-out Peter Pan. Watching her, I recalled Ariel Levy’s observation that Paris Hilton was the perfect celebrity for a time when interest in the appearance of sexiness had surpassed interest in the existence of sexual pleasure. In Hilton’s famed sex tapes, she looks excited only when posing for the camera; during the actual sex, she seems bored, even taking a phone call in the midst of intercourse. Today’s “raunch culture,” Levy wrote, is not liberating or progressive, not about “opening our minds to the possibilities and mysteries of sexuality.” There’s a disconnect between its representation of “hotness” and sex itself. Even Hilton, Levy pointed out, has said, “My boyfriends always tell me I’m not sexual. Sexy, but not sexual.”
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