American Girls
Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers
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- £4.49
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- £4.49
Publisher Description
A New York Times Bestseller
Instagram. Whisper. YouTube. Kik. Ask.fm. Tinder. The dominant force in the lives of girls coming of age in America today is social media. What it is doing to an entire generation of young women is the subject of award-winning Vanity Fair writer Nancy Jo Sales’s riveting and explosive American Girls.
With extraordinary intimacy and precision, Sales captures what it feels like to be a girl in America today. From Montclair to Manhattan and Los Angeles, from Florida and Arizona to Texas and Kentucky, Sales crisscrossed the country, speaking to more than two hundred girls, ages thirteen to nineteen, and documenting a massive change in the way girls are growing up, a phenomenon that transcends race, geography, and household income. American Girls provides a disturbing portrait of the end of childhood as we know it and of the inexorable and ubiquitous experience of a new kind of adolescence—one dominated by new social and sexual norms, where a girl’s first crushes and experiences of longing and romance occur in an accelerated electronic environment; where issues of identity and self-esteem are magnified and transformed by social platforms that provide instantaneous judgment. What does it mean to be a girl in America in 2016? It means coming of age online in a hypersexualized culture that has normalized extreme behavior, from pornography to the casual exchange of nude photographs; a culture rife with a virulent new strain of sexism and a sometimes self-undermining notion of feminist empowerment; a culture in which teenagers are spending so much time on technology and social media that they are not developing basic communication skills. From beauty gurus to slut-shaming to a disconcerting trend of exhibitionism, Nancy Jo Sales provides a shocking window into the troubling world of today’s teenage girls.
Provocative and urgent, American Girls is destined to ignite a much-needed conversation about how we can help our daughters and sons negotiate unprecedented new challenges.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This intelligent, history-grounded investigation by journalist Sales (The Bling Ring) finds dismaying evidence that social media has fostered a culture "very hostile" to girls in which sexism, harassment, and cyberbullying have become the "new normal," along with the "constant chore" of tailoring one's image for public consumption and approval. With self-awareness and candor, her interview subjects, ages 13 to 19, clearly articulate the ways in which "social media is a nightmare," a strange "half-reality" that produces self-consciousness, narcissism, image obsession, anxiety, depression, loneliness, drama, and "the overwhelming pressure to be perfect" or at least "to be considered hot.' " Teens value social media as a revolutionary tool for collective action, but Sales finds that across race, class, and region, social media reinforces a sexual double standard; its use reduces communication skills, and its users exhibit continual disrespect for women hand-in-hand with "an almost total erosion of privacy." She deftly analyzes the causes of this phenomenon of self-objectification among them the "pornification of American life," the hypersexualization of teens, and broader trends towards impulse gratification as well as its consequences, including rising rates of STDs, self-harm, exploitation, and a deterioration in girls' ability to cultivate relationships, intimacy, and a rich interior life. Solutions will be difficult, but Sales's research demonstrates that parental involvement is key to inoculating girls against the "insidious" effects of online life. Parents, educators, administrators, and the purveyors of social media platforms should all take note of this thoughtful, probing, and urgent work.
