American Girls Quotes

“And yet, despite the high numbers of girls experiencing sexual harassment in schools, only 12 percent said they ever reported it to an adult. "Some researchers claim that sexual harassment is so common for girls that many fail to recognize it as sexual harassment when it happens," said the AAUW report. A 2014 study, published in Gender & Society, of students in a Midwestern city also found that girls failed to report incidents of sexual harassment in school because they regarded them as "normal." Their lack of reporting was found to stem from girls' fear of being labeled "bad girls" by teachers and administrators, who they felt would view them as provoking how they were treated. They also feared the condemnation of other girls, some of whom were shown to be unsupportive, accusing them of exaggerating or lying. Many girls saw everyday sexual harassment and abuse as "normal" male behavior male behavior and something they had to ignore, endure, or maneuver around.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“But whether or not teenagers are using dating apps, they're coming of age in a culture that has already been affected by the attitudes the apps have introduced. 'It’s like ordering Seamless,' says Dan, the investment banker, referring to the online food-delivery service. 'But you’re ordering a person.' The comparison to online shopping seems apt. dating apps are the free-market economy come to sex.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“Emily swiped right on every picture, indicating interest, and within minutes she was getting matches. Her picture, now centered in a little circle, came rolling toward a boy's picture in another circle, and collided with it, with a little ding. "See," she said, "it's like a game.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“We are in uncharted territory" when it comes to sex and the internet, says Justin Garcia, a research scientist at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. "There have been two major transitions" in heterosexual mating, Garcia says, "in the last four million years. The first was around ten to fifteen thousand years ago, in the agricultural revolution, when we became less migratory and more settled," leading to the establishment of marriage as a cultural contract.
"And the second major transition is with the rise of the Internet," Garcia says. Suddenly, instead of meeting through proximity, community connections, and family and friends, people could meet each other virtually and engage in amorous activity with the click of a button. Internet meeting is now surpassing every other form. “It’s changing so much about the way we act both romantically and sexually,” Garcia says. “It is unprecedented from an evolutionary standpoint.”
And yet this massive shift in our behavior has gone almost completely unexamined, especially given how the internet permeates modern life. While there have been studies about how men and women use social media differently- how they use language and present themselves differently, for example- there's not a lot of research about how they behave sexually online; and there is virtually nothing about how girls and boys do. While there has been concern about the online interaction of children and adults, it's striking that so little attention has been paid to the ways in which the Internet has changed the sexual behavior of girls and boys interacting together. This may be because the behavior has been largely hidden or unknown, or, again, due to the fear of not seeming "sex-positive," mistaking responsibility for judgement.
And there are questions to ask, from the standpoint of girls' and boys' physical and emotional health and the ethics of their treatment of each other. Sex on a screen is different from sex that develops in person, this much seems seems self-evident, just as talking on a screen is different from face-to-face communication. And so if talking on a screen reduces one's ability to be empathic, for example, then how does sex on a screen change sexual behavior? Are people more likely to act aggressively or unethically, as in other types of online communication? How do gender roles and sexism play into cybersex? And how does the influence of porn, which became available online at about the same time as social networking, factor in?”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“The girl was surprised when Freitas referred to the experience as sexual assault. "She had no idea that that's what it was, Freitas said. "I'm not sure some young women know what consent is anymore." It's ironic that there has been such outrage in the media about young women crying rape, when in actuality there seems to be a lack of understanding among some young women and girls about whether their encounters are rape or not.
"We've learned to be distant from our bodies, " Freitas said.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“The mainstreaming of porn is tremendously affecting what’s expected of them. They’re learning sex through porn. What it means to have sex, a lot of the time, is to mimic what they see in pornography.”
(Donna Freitas quote from book)”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“Misogyny now has become so normalized,” says Paul Roberts, the Impulse Society author. “We can’t even see the absurdity and the inequity of it, it’s so pervasive. When the male gaze was digitized, it was almost as if it was internalized. With smartphones and social media, girls had the means of producing the male gaze themselves, and it was as if they turned it on themselves willingly in order to compete in a marketplace in which sex was the main selling point.
And the social media companies aren't going to do anything about it, as long as it's driving traffic.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“Young women's expectations of safety and entitlement to respect have perhaps risen faster than some young men's willingness to respect them," says Stephanie Coontz, who teaches history and family studies at Evergreen State College and has written about the history of dating. "Exploitative and disrespectful men have always existed. There are many evolved men, but there may be something going on in culture now that is making some more resistant to evolving.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“Communication is not just about words. It’s about body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, even pheromones, all of which can’t be conveyed through social media. Emoticons are very weak substitutes.” And when nonverbal cues are stripped away, it can limit the potential for understanding, arguably the foundation of empathy. When researchers at the University of Michigan reviewed data from seventy-two studies conducted between 1979 and 2009, all focused on monitoring levels of empathy among American college students, they found that students today were scoring about 40 percent lower than their earlier counterparts.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“It all goes together,” Montana said. “Society wants to sell them things, so it makes them grow up faster. Sexism serves capitalism.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“So, schools will say they have a ‘zero tolerance’ for bullying, but they really don’t want to deal with anything.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“The APA surveyed multiple studies which found links between the sexualization of girls and a wide range of mental health issues, including low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, cutting, even cognitive-dysfunction. Apparently, thinking about being hot makes it hard to think: "Chronic attention to physical appearance leaves fewer cognitive resources available for other mental and physical activities," said the APA report.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“A landmark 2007 report by the American Psychological Association (APA) found girls being sexualized--or treated as "objects of sexual desire... as things rather than as people with legitimate sexual feelings of their own"--in virtually every form of media, including movies, television, music videos and lyrics, video games and the Internet, advertising, cartoons, clothing, and toys. Even Dora the Explorer, once a cute, square-bodied child, got a makeover to make her look more svelte and "hot.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“The constant seeking of likes and attention on social media seems for many girls to feel like being a contestant in a never-ending beauty pageant in which they’re forever performing to please the judges—judges who have become more and more exacting. For it’s no longer enough for girls and women to be just pretty—even beautiful is not enough; now the goal is to be “perfect,” “flawless.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“I think, before the digital age,” says Michael Harris, the author of The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection, “girls had more opportunities to develop a rich interior life. At some point they were experiencing solitude. They had time to daydream or write in diaries or just think. Now, they’re online most of the time and a lot of what they’re doing there is comparing themselves or being compared. Online life is a toxic enabler of the desire to compare.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“You work hard, you excel at sports," Matt said, "you get into an Ivy League school, or even like an NYU or a Boston College, you make your parents look good, and they, like, pay you for your time. They see everything in terms of money so that's how they show their love - through money." "But a lot of kids who are fuck-ups get whatever they want, too," his friend Roxanne, sixteen, observed.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“For a generation of girls raised on the Disney corporation's multibillion-dollar line of so-called princess products, the five sisters of Keeping Up with the Kardashians were real-life princesses who lived in a Calabasas, California, castle, unabashedly focused on the pursuit of beauty treatments, expensive fun, and luxury brands - the latter a national fixation spawned in the "luxury revolution" of the last thirtysomething years, in which most of the wealth of the country had traveled into the hands of a few, with the rest of the population looking on longingly as the beneficiaries of a new Gilded Age flaunted their high-end stuff. And entertainment media, from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous to Keeping Up with the Kardashians, provided them with ample opportunities to do just that.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“A 2010 study by the Internet security firm AVG Technologies found that 92 percent of American children have an online presence before the age of two. Parents post nearly 1,000 images of their children online before their fifth birthday, according to a 2015 poll conducted by the U.K.-based Parent Zone, an online safety site.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“In an interview om WNYC in 2015, Willliam Arkin, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, national security expert, and the author of Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Prefect Warfare, compared the military's compulsive data-collecting with unmanned drones to our collective addiction to our smartphones. "You can't just stop yourself from checking your e-mail or texting," Arkin said. "And that's the world of drones in a nutshell." Are we using our phones like drones? Compulsively checking on one another? And when we don't like what someone has to say, or perhaps how they look, dropping destructive speech bombs whose after-effects we never have to see in person?”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“A 2013 review of studies on cyber-bullying in the Universal Journal of Educational Research reported that "perceived anonymity online and the safety and security of being behind a computer screen aid in freeing individuals from traditionally constraining pressures of society, conscience, morality, and ethics to behave in a normative manner." In other words, digital communication seems to relieve people of their conscience, enabling them to feel more comfortable behaving unethically.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“But another important question is, what is making some boys think sexual harassment is normal?”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“The more I talk to students," Freitas says, "the more the culture of hooking up seems really problematic for them. Both young women and young men are seriously unhappy with the way things are; they're really ambivalent about the sex they're having. According to everything they see in pop culture, they're supposed to be having a great time; but it's rare that I find a young man or a young woman who says hooking up is the best thing ever. In reality it seems to empty them out.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“It's people running around looking for anything to generate volume: Oh, teenage girls are taking their clothes off? And that's getting a lot of hits? Then let's turn a blind eye to the consequences. Oh, your daughter's on Tinder? Well, she's just meeting friends. It's all about high-volume usage. I don't think it's necessarily a cynical, let's destroy women thing - it's how can I get my next quarter's bonus?
And I think to the extent that the digital social media society normalizes impulses- think it, post it," Roberts says, "we've also created a context for more and more provocative propositions, whatever they are: Look at my boobs. Do you want to hook up? It's moved the bar for what's normal and normalized extreme behavior; everything outrageous becomes normalized so rapidly. You realize how insane things are today when you think about the relative rate of change. When I was in high school, if I had gone around saying, Here's a picture of me, like me, I would have gotten punched. If a girl went around passing out naked pictures of herself, people would have thought she needed therapy. Now that's just Selfie Sunday."

(--- Paul Roberts quoted from the book)”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“The real world we inhabit together is the one that matters; we need to find a way of navigating ourselves and our children back there, to the world of true and lasting connection.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“Girls need to put down their phones sometimes and pick up books.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“In 2009, the Urban Dictionary defined a “guys’ girl” as “a mix between tomboy and girly girl…The guys talk openly in front of her and she wouldn’t be out of place going to a strip club with them. A guy’s girl enjoys the freedom guys have in farting, eating disgusting food, and in how they discuss sex, but still likes to look and feel like a woman.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“They were slim and slinky and wearing eyeliner wings and sheer sleeveless tops, short shorts, and ankle boots. It was a sort of hipster, fashionista version of provocative.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“She posted a picture of herself in a T-shirt which said “FLAWLESS.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“Kids started having their own cameras, en masse, in the 1960s. Kodak Instamatics, which came out in 1963, were inexpensive ($16) and easy to use, durable and small, the perfect size to fit in a child’s pocket or the upper tray of a footlocker on its way to summer camp. The Instagram logo, in a conscious nod, echoes the look of the early Instamatics—a dark stripe on top, metallic on the bottom, with a round flat lens and viewfinder in the middle. The”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“For many girls, the pressure to be considered "hot" is felt on a nearly continual basis online. The sites with which they most commonly interact encourage them to post images of themselves, and employ the "liking" feature, with which users can judge their appearance and, in effect, rate them. When girls post their pictures on Instagram or Snapchat or Facebook, they know they will be judged for their "hotness," and in a quantifiable way, with numbers of likes. Social media, which gave us selfies, seems to encourage an undue focus on appearance for everyone, but for girls, this focus is combined with a pervasive sexualization of girls in the wider culture, an overarching trend which is already having serious consequences.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers