As a parentlike figure in the lives of two tweenage girls I found this to be one of the most seriously terrifying books I have ever read.

The tasks of adolescence are difficult enough without the overt "sexification" introduced to, and expected of, barely pubescent children. Girls hold themselves to unreasonable standards of physical beauty in order to impress boys as well as other girls; tastemakers and online "influencers" have fundamentally altered the landscape of childhood. Children feel an accelerating need to keep up with the perceived lives of their peers and "FOMO" lends a frantic sense to adolescent and young adult lives.

I chose to read this book because I do not use online tools like Instagram, Tik-Tok, etc. and I can't imagine giving any sh*ts about what strangers on the Internet think of me. I was about to say these tools are not a part of my world (but of course they are, unfortunately -- just because I don't use them doesn't mean they don't affect people I love), and that I don't care about these sites (but of course I do, because as a responsible parentlike person I must be aware of their pernicious influence).

All I can really say is this: If you have children, or if you love children, read the book. Be aware of the struggles your children face, even if you feel those struggles aren't real -- they are horrifyingly real to them. As a smack-in-the-middle Gen-Xer, I found myself incredulous that anyone - child or adult - could mistake the illusory online world for the real one, but I was wrong.

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Abandoned halfway. I think the book was well-reported and the writing is solid, but the organization is lacking. The book covers many important themes and does so well, illustrating with examples from pop culture and anecdotes from personal interviews. However, because so many of the issues affecting girls via social media are closely correlated, there is a lot of redundancy in themes, quotes appear multiple times, and it's unclear whether the same anecdotes (or at least the same interview occurrences) are recycled.

It almost feels like the author dumped all of her notes from various articles into this book, but without sorting through them or wrapping around a narrative thread to give it flow and cohesion, or any thoughts as to what the reader should 'do' with the information.

This is a good update and modernization of Reviving Ophelia, which was published in the early 1990s. There is a lot of good thinking and important reporting in here, but it isn't presented very effectively. I felt like I had gleaned most of the thinking after reading half the book and couldn't stand the thought of retreading the same ground in the next half. With some disciplined editing and structure, this could have been much more powerful. ( )

This book had me completely freaked out. The stories these girls tell, and the facts that Sales provide are shocking and depressing. Thirteen-year-old boys routinely texting girls they know for nude pictures of themselves, and the girls unable to say something reason, like "are you fucking insane?" Instead they feel they have to laugh it off (except when they say ok). And the bullying these girls take online from friends and strangers, causing them all sort of drama that only exists online. Real world friends and family, like their parents, have no clue what is going on. The the reversal of feminism, the objectification of women as sex objects, comparing themselves to Kardashians, girls who are replaceable by an endless pool of other girls online, who routinely deal with boys who want rougher sex like all that they find in online porn. Sales begins with the porn and seems to pin everything there.

Some (abbreviated) quotes just to highlight where this book was taking my sense of parental worry:

"Social media is destroying our lives," one of the {teenage} girls said...

"So why don't you go off it?" I asked.

"Because then we would have no life,"

...

In a regular case...a boy who asked for nudes could be handled with humor, they said. It must be humor, never anger..."If you get mad they'll think you have no chill. They'll be like, OMG, like chill, I was just asking. But if you say no and laugh, they'll think you have chill. 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."

...

A 2015 study...found a possible link between anxiety in girls ages eleven to thirteen and seeing images of women being sexually objectified on social media. Girls this age were significantly more likely to feel nervous or show a lack of confidence than they were just 5 years ago, according to the study...

It seems relevant that it is in about the last 5 years that the majority of girls have gotten smartphones

...

She posited that at the onset of adolescence, girls' confidence levels drop as they begin to become aware of their own objectification and sexualization in the wider world. "They lose their resiliency and optimism and become less curious and inclined to take risks,"..."They lose their assertive, energetic and 'tomboyish' personalities and become more deferential, self-critical and depressed. "

- "she" is author Mary Pipher. The quotes come from Reviving Ophelia, from 1994.

The book follows girls by age, each chapter focusing on one teenage age, from 13 to 19. Each chapter mainly reports various interviews Sales did of many girls in different situations and lifestyles. Much of the chapters are taken up by direct quotes. The reader can feel the Sales's usually unstated sense of shock. These stories are wild and tell things I never would have expected.

As the girls get older, the effects of social media become hard to separate from other cultural factors and the book, unable to separate them, loses focus. Her 18 year-olds will provide sharp and perceptive criticisms of social media. Some of them have given it up. Her 19 year-olds tend to be in a university setting, in the midst of all the sexual activity going on there. Shocking as these stories, they aren't new. Many of us witnessed all this stuff ourselves in this setting. And social media is reduced to just another stress on relationships. It was interesting that these kids don't go on dates.

The book evolves in these kinds of horrors of info:

on hookup culture:

"Conservatives sort of love all the stuff I’m saying", Donna Frietas says, “but it’s really hard to get liberal woman to have this conversation ... Big-time feminists won’t go near hooking up because they see it as sexually liberated. But I’m looking at it on the ground, and it doesn’t hold up as sexual liberation. Hookup culture is incredibly antifeminist culture. It’s the antithesis of empowerment and choice.”

on the routine normal-ness of sexual harassment in school:

A national survey in 2011 by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) of students grades 7 to 12 found that 'sexual harassment is part of everyday life in middle and high schools.' Nearly half (48%) of students surveyed experienced some form of sexual harassment in the 2010-11 school year, and the majority of those students (87%) said it had a negative effect on them.

And, a maybe apt summary:

"And he would post pictures of other girls and I would tweet about my experience with guys. I acted like I didn't care. Nowadays, if you care, you're dumb."

I finished the book really disturbed by the trends. I hate to see my girl heading into this world.

But ... this stuff is really anecdotal in sum. Sales is a journalist, not a sociologist and her reporting is of the girls she met. If she found a more extreme story, one where social media led to suicide, or documented some terrible event, she was sure to report it here. Also, a lot of this stuff has been going on for a long time, and was happening well before social media entered our culture. Horny boys have been assholes for a long time, and girls have always been by trying to make boys happy, either by giving in or playing them off some other ways. This is part of the nature of adolescence. The atmosphere is always moving, and it might be getting worse. It is uncomfortable that so much is happening online, outside the awareness of parents and teachers, and it's painful to see publice school choose, as policy, to not look into it. This might be leading to more abuse and might be pushing culture to one of less respect for woman, a reversal of feminism.

I feel a little tied up in how to respond to this book overall. But, Sales brings a great deal of information that needs to be discussed - on topics really pertinent to girls, boys and their parents. I think it's a valuable book for any of us here that deal with kids, girls or boys.

2016
https://www.librarything.com/topic/226898#5665036 ( )

I picked up American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales because I have a teenage daughter. The book looks at how teenage girls use and are used by social media. Most of the book is comprised of conversations that Sales had with teenage girls, or conversations between teenage girls that she listened in on. Based on an article that Sales wrote for Vanity Fair, there's quite a bit of padding and wheel-spinning before Sales begins to draw conclusions from her research. Much of the information Sales presents should be familiar to anyone paying attention to the news cycle or who is raising a daughter, however, a few of her conclusions are worth considering; the most thought-provoking is her asking whether girls are able to have full agency over their own behaviors in the society they are raised in.

Here are her comments on agency:

There's so much emphasis on acknowledging the need for this, and in honoring girls' and women's capacity for this, that there's never much questioning of whether they actually have it. Agency isn't something that's always necessarily present in someone's decision-making. In fact, ti's the nature of a sexist society to rob a woman of her agency long before she becomes a woman, when she's still a girl. Women's identities crystalize in cultures that are in many ways dead set against their interests. Girls are exposed to expected norms of behavior long before they're able to decide whether these norms are what they choose to inhabit.

While American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers is twice as long as it needs to be, it does raise issues that we should be discussing as a society, from how to raise independent girls acting in their own best interests, to what responsibility social media sites like Yik Yak and Snapchat should have towards their young users. ( )

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