Cinderella Ate My Daughter

by Peggy Orenstein

  Each of these girls had more than 400 friends on the networking site—one, Felicia, had 622—which was so unremarkable that I almost didn’t note it. But really? Six hundred twenty-two friends? There were only about 250 students in her entire grade at school. One of my favorite books as a child was Joan Walsh Anglund’s A Friend Is Someone Who Likes You. These days, a better title might be A Friend Is Someone You Have Actually Met in Person. There is no way Felicia could know all those people offline, though she claimed to have at least met each of them. Even so, 622 people can witness everything she writes, every picture she posts. Six hundred twenty-two people can pass that information on to their 622 friends. Six hundred twenty-two people are watching her, judging her, at least in theory, every hour of every day. How does that influence a child’s development?

  Apparently, quite a bit. In short order—a matter of a few years—social networking and virtual worlds have transformed how young people, male as well as female, conceptualize both their selves and their relationships. According to Adriana Manago, a researcher at the Children’s Digital Media Center in Los Angeles who studies college students’ behavior on MySpace and Facebook, young people’s real-life identities are becoming ever more externally driven, sculpted in response to feedback from network “friends.” Obviously, teens have always tested out new selves among their peers, but back in the dark ages (say, in the year 2000), any negative response was fleeting and limited to a small group of people they actually knew. Now their thoughts, photos, tastes, and activities are laid out for immediate approval or rejection by hundreds of people, many of whom are relative strangers. The self, Manago said, becomes a brand, something to be marketed to others rather than developed from within. Instead of intimates with whom you interact for the sake of the exchange, friends become your consumers, an audience for whom you perform.

  The impact, back in the offline world, appears to be an uptick in narcissistic tendencies among young adults. In the largest study of its kind, a group of psychologists found that the scores of the 16,475 college students who took the Narcissistic Personality Inventory between 1982 and 2006 have risen by 30 percent. A full two-thirds of today’s young adults rank above average; excessive self-involvement is associated with difficulty in maintaining romantic relationships, dishonesty, and lack of empathy. And, it turns out, empathy, too, seems in measurably shorter supply: an analysis of seventy-two studies performed on almost 14,000 college students between 1979 and 2009 showed a drop in that trait, with the sharpest decline occurring since 2000. Social media may not have instigated that trend, but by encouraging self-promotion over self-awareness, they could easily accelerate it.

  I don’t mean to demonize new technology. I enjoy Facebook myself. Because of it, I am in touch with old friends and relatives who are scattered around the globe. It has also served as a handy vehicle to promote my work, to alert the readers among my “friends” that I have published something new. Yet I am also aware of the ways Facebook and the microblogging site Twitter subtly shifted my self-perception. Online, I carefully consider how any comments or photos I post will shape the persona I have cultivated; offline, I have caught myself processing my experience as it occurs, packaging life as I live it. As I loll in the front yard with Daisy or stand in line at the supermarket or read in bed, part of my consciousness splits off, viewing the scene from the outside and imagining how to distill it into a status update or a Tweet. Apparently, teenagers are not the only ones at risk of turning the self into a performance, though since their identities are less formed, one assumes the potential impact will be more profound.

  Girls, especially, are already so accustomed to disconnecting from their inner experience, observing themselves as others might. Unlike earlier generations, though, their imagined audience is all too real: online, every girl becomes a mini-Miley complete with her own adoring fan base that she is bound to maintain. In fact, if you try to choose the screen name “Miley” in a virtual world, you will be told no dice, though you can be Miley1819 or higher, if you would like. According to Manago, girls attract the most positive feedback when they post provocative photos or create hot avatars—as long as they don’t go too far. Just as with real celebs, then, girls online engage in perpetual, public negotiation between appearing “beautiful, sexy, yet innocent” (which they reportedly want) and coming off as “a slut” in front of hundreds of people (which they do not). Perhaps that high-wire act, as much as anything, reveals the lie of girls’ popular culture: if the sexualization and attention to appearance truly “empowered” girls, they would emerge from childhood with more freedom and control over their sexuality. Instead, they seem to have less: they have learned that sexiness confers power—unless you use it (or are perceived as using it). The fastest way to take a girl down remains, as ever, to attack her looks or sexual behavior: Ugly. Fat. Slut. Whore. Those are the teen girl equivalent of kryptonite.

  Erin and her friends have their own ideas about how to strike the right balance. Jessica, fourteen, explained, “I never put up a picture just of me. That’s slutty.”

  I asked how merely posting a solo shot of herself could qualify as “slutty.” “Well,” she responded, “it’s self-centered, though, which is kind of the same thing.”

  She pulled up the profile of one of her classmates to show me what she meant. The other girls crowded around the screen. How strange, I thought; I don’t know this girl and never will, but here I was rifling through her photos, reading what other people thought of them. One snapshot showed her leaning forward in a bikini top; in another, she posed with one shoulder thrust coyly toward the viewer. “Look at her,” said Felicia, disgusted. “She’s dyed her hair blond. Badly. And look at that.” She pointed to a close-up shot of the girl mugging for the camera with a boy. “He is in her bed! Her bed!”

  Felicia did not stint on comments about other girls, even though she herself had been branded a slut in eighth grade by classmates who were jealous of the boy she was dating. Also, she has large breasts, which had developed early, and, really, isn’t that enough? Her tormentors targeted her both in person and electronically, even creating a Facebook page called “Felicia’s a Whore.” “I tried to act like it didn’t bother me,” she said, tersely. “But it was not a lovely situation.” Nor an uncommon one. The girls showed me another friend’s Formspring page: a free application that allows your Facebook “friends” to ask questions or post comments about you—anonymously. That means that while the person who says “Can I see ur tits live?” or “U r a bitch!” is someone you know (or at least someone you have friended), you can never know exactly who. Think of it as the online equivalent of a bathroom stall with all the raunchiness and lord-of-the-flies viciousness that implies. The mind reels at the idea of such technology in the hands of teenage girls, who are already masters of—and suckers for—stealth aggression.

  In the early days of the Web, people feared their daughters would be stalked by strangers online, but the far bigger threat has turned out to come from neighbors, friends, peers. In the first high-profile case of cyberbullying, a Missouri girl, Megan Meier, hung herself in her bedroom after a romance with a boy she had met on MySpace—but had never spoken to or seen in person—went sour. “You’re the kind of boy a girl would kill herself over,” Meier wrote in her final post, twenty minutes before her suicide. She was just three weeks shy of her fourteenth birthday. The boy, it was later discovered, did not exist: he had been fabricated by Meier’s neighbor, forty-seven-year-old Lori Drew, to punish the girl for spreading rumors about Drew’s own daughter. Four years later, in 2010, fifteen-year-old Phoebe Prince put cyberbullying back in the headlines: she hung herself after enduring months of sexual slurs in her South Hadley, Massachusetts, high school hallways, as well as via text message and on Facebook. A few months later, Alexis Pilkington, a popular seventeen-year-old soccer player from Long Island, also took her life after a series of cybertaunts, which persisted on a memorial page created after her death.

  Most cases of online
harassment do not go that far, but the upsurge of abuse is disturbing. A 2009 poll conducted by the Associated Press and MTV found that half of young people aged fourteen to twenty-four reported experiencing digital abuse, with girls significantly more likely to be victimized than boys. Two-thirds of those who were the target of rumors and hearsay were “very upset” or “extremely upset” by the experience, and they were more than twice as likely as their peers to have considered suicide.

  Gossip and nasty notes may be painful staples of middle school and high school girls’ lives, but YouTube, Facebook, instant messaging, texting, and voice mail can raise cruelty to exponential heights. Rumors can spread faster and further and, as the case of Phoebe Prince illustrates, there is nowhere to escape their reach—not your bedroom, not the dinner table, not while going out with your friends. The anonymity of the screen may also embolden bullies: the natural inhibitions one might feel face-to-face, along with any sense of accountability, fall away. It is easy, especially among young people, for behavior to spin out of control. Further, this risks exposing them to consequences they did not—or could not—anticipate.

  Portraying girls as victims, particularly of other girls, is distressing, but it is also comfortable, familiar territory. What happens when girls, under the pretext of sexual self-determination, seem to victimize themselves? A 2008 survey by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy found that 39 percent of teens had sent or posted sexually suggestive messages (or “sexts”), and 22 percent of teenage girls had electronically sent or posted nude or seminude photos of themselves. At first I was skeptical of those figures: the teen sexting “epidemic” had the earmarks of media-generated hype, the kind of moral panic that breaks out whenever girls have the audacity to act sexually. Young ladies flashing skin and propositioning boys? Heavens to Betsy, hie them to a nunnery!

  Then, mere days after that report was released, a friend of mine found a photo on her fourteen-year-old son’s computer of one of his female classmates—a ninth-grader—naked from the waist up. She was not even a girl he knew well. “We’re trying to teach our son that women are not playthings,” my friend said. “How are we supposed to do that if a girl sends him something like this?”

  Good question. How is one to explain such behavior? Part of me, I had to admit, was taken by the girl’s bravado: that at age fourteen, she felt confident enough in her body to send a nudie shot to a boy she barely knew. Was it possible that this was a form of progress, a sign that at least some of today’s girls were taking charge of their sexuality, transcending the double standard? I wanted to believe it, but the conclusion didn’t sit right.

  I checked in with Deborah Tolman, a professor of human sexuality studies at Hunter College who for years has been my go-to gal on all matters of girls and desire. As it happened, she had been wrestling with these very questions and had come up with a theory: girls like the one I have described are not connecting more deeply to their own feelings, needs, or desires. Instead, sexual entitlement itself has become objectified; like identity, like femininity, it, too, has become a performance, something to “do” rather than to “experience.” Teasing and turning boys on might give girls a certain thrill, even a fleeting sense of power, but it will not help them understand their own pleasure, recognize their own arousal, allow them to assert themselves in intimate (let alone casual) relationships.

  Previously, I mentioned that early sexualization can derail girls’ healthy development, estrange them from their own erotic feelings. Ninth-graders texting naked photos may be one result. Another might be the annual “slut list” the senior girls at an affluent high school in Millburn, New Jersey, compile of incoming freshmen (which made national news after they posted it on Facebook in 2009); being chosen is at once an honor and a humiliation, marking a girl as “popular” even as it accuses her of lusting after her brother or wanting someone to “bend me over and knock me up.” That detached sexuality may also contribute to an emerging phenomenon that Tolman is studying, which she called, bluntly, Anal Is the New Oral. “All girls are now expected to have oral sex in their repertoire,” she explained. “Anal sex is becoming the new ‘Will she do it or not?’ behavior, the new ‘Prove you love me.’ And still, girls’ sexual pleasure is not part of the equation.” That is such a fundamental misunderstanding of romantic relationships and sexuality—as a mother, it plunges me into despair. I find myself improbably nostalgic for the late 1970s, when I came of age. Fewer of us competed on the sports field, raised our hands during math class, or graduated from college. No one spoke the word “vagina,” whether in a monologue or not. And there was that Farrah flip to contend with. Yet in that oh-so-brief window between the advent of the pill and the fear of AIDS, when abortion was both legal and accessible to teenagers, there was—at least for some of us—a kind of Our Bodies, Ourselves optimism about sex. Young women felt an almost solemn, political duty to understand their desire and responses, to explore their own pleasure, to recognize sexuality as something rising from within. And young men—at least some of them—seemed eager to take the journey with us, to rewrite the rules of masculinity so they would prize mutuality over conquest. That notion now seems as quaint as a one-piece swimsuit on a five-year-old. “By the time they are teenagers,” Tolman said, “the girls I talk to respond to questions about how their bodies feel—questions about sexuality or desire—by talking about how their bodies look. They will say something like ‘I felt like I looked good.’ ” My fear for my daughter, then, is not that she will someday act in a sexual way; it is that she will learn to act sexually against her own self-interest.

  Most young women, thankfully, are not out there making personalized Playboy centerfolds. The ones who are may well be the ones engaging in other risky behaviors offline; the statistics on sexting, for instance, are similar, demographically, to those on binge drinking. Megan Meier, the girl who committed suicide in 2006, had a history of depression, as did Alexis Pilkington. Phoebe Prince seems to have been a self-cutter. Does that make them anomalies, or canaries in a coal mine? What about the thirteen-year-old girl “in love” who sends a hot shot to her boyfriend without considering what he will do with it after she dumps him? Or the girl who one time—just one time—does a stupid, thoughtless thing. Which of us hasn’t been that girl? In the old days that One Stupid Thing might have sparked ugly rumors, but it could also fade away. The bad judgment you showed when you got drunk at a party and danced topless on a table was ephemeral. But my friend’s son, were he so inclined, could forward his classmate’s photo to one of his friends, who could forward it to two of his friends and, as in that 1970s shampoo commercial, so on and so on, until all three thousand–plus kids at their high school had a copy—and maybe all the kids in the next town as well. And that, as much as the act itself, is the problem: the indelibility of it, the never-ending potential for replication, the loss of control over your image and identity right when, as a teenager, you need it most.

  Electronic media have created a series of funhouse mirrors. They both forge greater intimacy and undermine it—sometimes simultaneously. Determining what, exactly, is going on at any given time is confusing enough for an adult, let alone a child. The ten-year-old daughter of another friend of mine recently invited a pal for a sleepover. Rather than playing in person, the girls wanted to spend the evening using the family’s computers—a desktop downstairs, a laptop upstairs—to send each other messages on the virtual world Webkinz.com. Was that just a latter-day version of one of my favorite childhood activities—putting a message in a basket and lowering it down the laundry chute on a string from the second story of my house to the basement, where my best friend awaited? Or was it something else, the beginnings of alienation from living, breathing friends, from the messiness and reciprocity of authentic relationships? Watching the unparalleled social experiment being conducted on our children, it’s worth considering—for boys as well as girls—how Internet use enhances their real lives, their real friendships, their contribution
s to the real world. And if we can’t answer all of that in a satisfying way, maybe it is time to give their second lives some second thought.

  So how to prepare our kids for a safe, productive life online? Late one winter afternoon I drove to Black Hawk, a gated community of multimillion-dollar houses in Danville, California. At the top of a long, twisting driveway, a building that could have been a small hotel emerged before me. It was the home of Hilary DeCesare, a former account manager at Oracle and recently divorced mom of three: twelve-year-old twins—a girl and a boy—as well as an eight-year-old girl. DeCesare’s home doubled as headquarters of the soon-to-be-launched social networking site she was developing for kids aged eight to thirteen that she hopes will be as revolutionary as Facebook was. To date, there was nothing like it: a COPPA-compliant site that will allow kids to customize their profile pages, create interest groups, play games, write on one another’s walls, e-mail, even video chat. A sophisticated software program will scan the site 24/7 for explicit language and the percentage of skin showing on photos and videos. Users will find regular tips posted on their walls to educate them about online safety and etiquette. Anyone caught bullying will be suspended or banished. Parents can monitor their children as closely or loosely as they see fit: approving each friend request and group membership in real time; receiving a weekly or monthly e-mail rundown of their child’s activity; or, if they choose, trusting their kids to find their own way. They can restrict their children to preset “canned chat” phrases or allow them to IM one another freely. DeCesare likes to call it “the Internet with training wheels.”

  DeCesare, a fit blond woman dressed in a powder blue sweater and jeans, met me at the door with a plate of homemade fudge and a surprise. When we had first spoken, some months earlier, her site had been called Girl Ambition (a name that would seem more appealing to mothers than kids) and had been adamantly single-sex. She had focused on girls, she had told me, because they were adopting the social technologies more rapidly than boys. Also because she was a mom as well as an entrepreneur: one who did not like the values promoted by the commercial sites for girls her own daughters frequented. She had hoped to lure them away with a fun alternative that, P.S., would also slip in lessons on goal setting, self-esteem, and healthy body image as well as offer advice on dealing with cyberbullies. In the interim, however, she had realized it didn’t make business sense to exclude half the world’s kids because of their sex. So she had scaled back the educational component and renamed the company the more neutral (and potentially profitable) Everloop.