A new book compiled from 2.5 years of research has uncovered a dark and troubling underbelly to the highly-addictive social media world in which too many of our young girls are being lured.
In an interview with the New York Post, Nancy Jo Sales, author or American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers, says that even though the over-sexualization of girls in society has been “percolating for years”, she was shocked at the level of sexual harassment being borne every day by the average teenage girl with a smartphone.
“It’s something that happens online on a daily basis — sometimes an hourly basis. And it’s so common, it’s become a regular part of teen culture. You’ll read an article about ‘sexting rings’ but what these articles miss is that it’s not at just one school. It’s happening at every school I researched. It’s become so common.”
And it all takes place in cyberspace now, in a world with a language all its own – Slut pages. Sink shots. Yik Yak. Finstas. Kik. Snapchat. Revenge porn. Tinder food stamps.
For example, slut pages are where nude photos of a girl, usually sent to a boyfriend, are distributed to others sometimes known as a “sexting ring” and then posted on Instagram accounts with names such as “[School Name] Hotties” or “[School Name] Hos.” Viewers then post their comments about the girl and her body. These slut pages were found at every school she visited.
“This is typically followed by a kind of schoolwide shaming (of the girl — never the boy) that calls to mind the tarring and feathering of Puritan New England,” Sales writes.
Needless to say, this kind of “slut shaming” has led to serious emotional problems for girls, including anxiety, depression, and even suicide.
So why do girls participate in behavior that so openly demeans them? From what Sales describes, it’s the new peer pressure.
There’s a big demand for nude photos at school where girls are invited either by a boyfriend or even just a random guy in the halls.
“They have conversations with boys who [ask for nudes] and they think, ‘Maybe this is how I have a relationship,’ ” Sales says. “And one of the girls told me that if you respond by saying, ‘How dare you?’ or get angry, they say you have no chill.”
As 13-year-old Sophia explains to Sales in the book: “‘They judge you if you don’t send nudes like you’re a prude. But if you just laugh, then they’ll be aggravated, but they won’t do anything bad to you . . . [such as] start rumors. Pretend like you sent them a naked picture they got off the Internet and it’s not even you.’ ”
Some girls go along with it just to get attention. “It’s to get the likes,” said one 14 year-old in Garden City, N.Y. “Everything’s about the likes.”
Sales describes this social-media pressure to have a presence as akin to building a brand. “ . . . [I]t makes a twisted kind of sense that girls—exposed from the earliest age to sexualized images, and encouraged by their parents’ own obsession with self-promotion—are promoting their online selves with sex. In so doing, they’re also following the example of the most successful social-media celebrities.”
Another problem is that for most American girls these days, social media is where they live, says Sales, who spoke to over 200 girls ages 13-19 from Manhattan, Florida, Arizona, Texas and Kentucky. No matter where she went, the teen girls she encountered were addicted to their phones and couldn’t stop looking at them.
“We’re on it 24/7,” a 13-year-old girl in Montclair, NJ, told her. “It’s all we do.”
And so they sink into this demeaning world of “sink shots” – which is a girl who takes a selfie in her underwear with her butt propped up on a sink to make it look more like Kim Kardashian’s famous “belfie” photos.
Then there’s Yik Yak and Kik, two anonymous messaging apps that allow users to communicate with one another. Participating on sites such as these is what led to the murder of 13 year-old Nicole Madison Lovell in Blacksbrug, Virginia who was communicating with her 18 year-old murderer on Kik before meeting up with him.
They can also get involved in Tinder food stamps, which is a dating app that allows people to exchange sex for free meals or other items. Sales refers to it as a kind of “soft prostitution” that has become surprisingly normalized on social media.
Some teens even set up a finsta, a fake Instagram account, so their parents won’t know what they’re up to online.
And when they need advice, many don’t turn to their parents or other trusted adult, they go to Askfm.com which is a popular question-and-answer site for teens to go to ask questions without anyone knowing who they are.
“Unfortunately, it’s also become the perfect forum for cyber-bullying and harassment. The app has been linked with at least seven teen suicides, according to an anti-bullying organization called No Bullying, including a 14-year-old named Hannah Smith from Leicestershire, England, who was routinely taunted by anonymous commenters who said things like ‘every[one] will be happy if u died,’ ‘drink bleach’ and ‘go die’,” Sales wrote.
In spite of all this, Sales says she can’t refer to teen girls as “victims” of this crass and demeaning culture that affords them so little value because many of them are “thriving and surviving” in this toxic environment in spite of how hostile it is to women.
“So how does this affect girls? Well, whenever you have a situation in which people are dehumanized, women and girls suffer more. We are already more objectified. It becomes easier [for boys] to see someone as a thing, rather than a person.”
What does a parent do about it? Talk to your teens – both male and female – about what is happening on social media and how much time they spend on it. And not just once. This has to be an ongoing conversation.
“It’s a challenging landscape, much of it unprecedented in our experience. And I feel we all have a responsibility to guide our daughters and sons through it.”
Admittedly, young women have a tougher time on social media because of how they are objectified, and some have even stepped out of it altogether, but the vast majority of girls just can’t bring themselves to stop.
“I spoke to girls who said, ‘social media is destroying our lives,’ ” Sales says. “ ‘But we can’t go off it, because then we’d have no life.’ There’s this whole perception that [teenage girls] love social media, but in many ways they hate it. But they don’t stop, because that’s where teen culture is happening.”
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