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Summary
Summary
Instagram. Whisper. Yik Yak. Vine. 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.
Author Notes
Nancy Jo Sales graduated summa cum laude from Yale University in 1986. She has written for several publications including Vanity Fair, New York, and Harper's Bazaar. She is known for her reporting on youth culture and crime and for her profiles of pop-culture icons. She won a 2011 Front Page Award for Best Magazine Feature and a 2010 Mirror Award for Best Profile, Digital Media. She is the author of The Bling Ring: How a Gang of Fame-Obsessed Teens Ripped off Hollywood and Shocked the World and American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers. The Sofia Coppola film The Bling Ring was based on Sales's 2010 Vanity Fair piece The Suspects Wore Louboutins.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
In swinging for a Reviving Ophelia-type blockbuster, pop-culture journalist Sales has certainly chosen a flashpoint topic: the all-consuming social media that, with every favorite and like, builds a warped mirror maze around our nation's girls. Sales weaves in everything from the history of cameras and the sagging of the 1990s girl-power movement to cyberbullying and body dysmorphia, but the book's calling card is its refrain: the real-life teens (and preteens) whose hanging-at-the-mall interactions Sales transcribes with heartbreaking fidelity. Theirs is a 24-hour marathon of posting carefully edited pictures to fish for approval, deliberating over the call for nudes from boys whose Axe Body Spray can be smelled through the phone, and desperately wanting to be a cool girl rather than a prude. It's all here: MILFs, dick pics, smizing, fuckboys, doxing, belfies, and twatching, much of which plays out on social networks parents have never heard of. Despite Sales' tendency to panic, the girls profiled emerge as oddly heroic: struggling, persevering, and thriving through what Sales calls a kind of unease, a sort of buzzing, rushing, anxious state. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Current enough to include October 2015 developments, this volume is being rushed to press with a 150,000 first printing.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THERE'S A MOMENT midway through Peggy Orenstein's latest book that seems to sum up what it's like to be a teenage girl right now. An economics major taking a gender studies class is getting dressed in her college dorm room for a night out, cheerfully discussing sexual stereotyping in advertising with Orenstein - while at the same time grabbing a miniskirt and a bottle of vodka, the better to achieve her evening goal: to "get really drunk and make out with someone." "You look hot," her By Anna North AMERICAN GIRLS Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers By Nancy Jo Sales 404 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95. IN THE 12 YEARS since the founding of Facebook, young people's use of social media has been the subject of fear - kids are rotting their brains and ruining their ability to form friendships! - and then a backlash: Don't worry, savvy parents, social media is just another way for kids to connect. The journalist Nancy Jo Sales isn't convinced by such reassurances. In "American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers," she offers a sort of third wave of social-media crit- friend tells her - and the student, apparently registering the oddness of the scene, turns to Orenstein. "In my gender class I'm all, 'That damned patriarchy,'" she says. "But... what's the point of a night if you aren't getting attention from guys?" Her ambition, she explains, "is to be just slutty enough, where you're not a prude but you're not a whore.... Finding that balance is every college girl's dream, you know what I mean?" Exactly how that got to be anyone's dream is the subject of "Girls and Sex," a thought-provoking if occasionally hand-wringing investigation by Orenstein, who in previous books has put classroom sexism, princess obsessions and other phenomena under her microscope. Be warned: Orenstein, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the mother of a preteen girl, begins her reporting worried by what she's heard about "hookup culture" - and ends it even more freaked out. It's not that girls are having so much sex (the percentage of high-schoolers who have had intercourse is actually dropping); even if they were, Orenstein's careful to say she wouldn't judge, really. But the acts the girls are engaging in, from oral sex to sexting, tend to be staged, she argues, more for boys' enjoyment than their own. For guys, she says, there is fun and pleasure; for girls (at least the straight ones), too little physical joy, too much regret and a general sense that the boys are in charge. Fully half the girls in Orenstein's book say they've been coerced into sex, and many had been raped - among them, by the way, that econ major, who was so confused that when her assailant dropped her off the next morning, she told him, "Thanks, I had fun." The sexual playing field Orenstein describes is so tilted no girl could win. I know, I know: Every generation thinks things have gotten more complicated since they were young (it's one of those universally accepted parental truths, like the fact that kids don't go outside and play anymore). But the interesting question at the heart of "Girls and Sex" is not really whether things are better or worse for girls. It's why - at a time when women graduate from college at higher rates than men and are closing the wage gap - aren't young women more satisfied with their most intimate relationships? "When so much has changed for girls in the public realm," Orenstein writes, "why hasn't more... changed in the private one?" To answer this question, Orenstein interviews more than 70 young women between the ages of 15 and 20. Some of the culprits she locates are more familiar than others: There's pornography, which teaches boys to expect constantly willing, fully waxed partners, and girls to imitate all those arched backs and movie-perfect moans. (Sorry, male college students, but studies show that the percentage of your female peers who fake orgasm has been steadily rising.) There are the abstinence-only sex-ed programs of the last two decades, which she argues encourage shame and misinformation; and the unhelpful tendency of even liberal parents to go mute with their daughters on the subject of what they deserve in bed. ("Once parents stopped saying 'Don't,'" Orenstein observes, "many didn't know what to say.") There's alcohol, so much alcohol, a judgment-dulling menu of Jäger bombs and tequila shots. There's selfie culture, which Orenstein charges encourages girls to see themselves as objects to be "liked" (or not) - a simple-sounding phenomenon with surprisingly profound implications, since self-objectification has been linked with everything from depression to risky sexual behavior. There are the constant images of naked, writhing women, as well as the idea that taking your clothes off is a sign of power. ("I love Beyoncé," one girl tells Orenstein. "She's, like, a queen. But I wonder, if she wasn't so beautiful, if people didn't think she was so sexy, would she be able to make the feminist points she makes?") And despite all the time girls spend "impersonating sexiness," Orenstein finds that absent from their universe is a sense of actual female sexuality - figuring out what you want and doing it. Society is giving girls, she concludes, a "psychological clitoridectomy." Oh, but just one thing - plenty of the girls Orenstein interviews don't see it that way at all, and it's to her credit that she documents them pushing back against what they view as her old-school assumptions. (No, they tell her, Nicki Minaj isn't a sex object - she's a self-determining superstar.) These conversations are the most interesting, least expected part of "Girls and Sex," as when girls share that while an endless string of hookups can bum them out, many of them prefer it to "catching feelings" for a guy, which would make them more vulnerable. (The interviews also reveal an almost comical generation gap. When one recent high school graduate explains to Orenstein that performing oral sex is "like money or some kind of currency. ... It's how you make friends with the popular guys. ... It's more impersonal than sex," Orenstein writes, "I may be of a different generation, but, frankly, it's hard for me to consider a penis in my mouth as 'impersonal.'") It's a laugh-out-loud line, but Orenstein is of a different generation, and teenagers themselves may bristle at her judgment of them as victims. When she attends a Miley Cyrus concert and dismisses the half-naked star as "the opposite" of "unique," and a "lint trap of images and ideas," you know what she means - but that lint trap is also an actual young woman who is working out many of the same issues facing Orenstein's subjects (a fact that surely accounts for some of her popularity: "Slut-shamed" after her romp with Robin Thicke on the MTV Video Music Awards, Cyrus has held her own - a teen-girl revenge fantasy). What's more, the real-life teenage world isn't all Kardashians, anyway: Celebrities like Lorde have become popular without embracing the sex-doll style Orenstein frets over; thrift-shop dresses and Converse high-tops now mingle with minis and stilettos in teenage closets everywhere; even the Pirelli calendar dumped its nude models this year for shots of high-achieving women like the young blogger Tavi Gevinson, clothed. When Kim Kardashian tweeted a nude selfie recently, sure, some young women cheered her on - but plenty posted the Twitter version of an eye-roll. The truth is, female culture is more varied and rebellious than "Girls and Sex" lets on. And "Girls and Sex" isn't really about all girls: Though gay teenagers are included (and seem generally happier in their relationships than their straight peers), Orenstein's interviewees are mostly upper-middle-class, and she is mainly concerned with sex's impact on their emotional lives, not physical well-being - pregnancy and S.T.D.s come up rarely in her interviews, and current-day abortion access not at all. But given that lowincome young women are less able to pay, say, to travel across state lines to an open abortion clinic, you wonder how the picture of sex and its implications would have looked if girls of all incomes had been included. A bad night is one thing; a baby at 17 is another. AT ANY RATE, the true audience for "Girls and Sex" isn't girls at all - but parents trying to understand them. So what should a mother or father hoping for a sexually well-adjusted daughter do? "Here's a solution," Orenstein offers, only somewhat in jest. "Move to the Netherlands." Dutch girls, she points out, are more likely to have sex in the context of loving relationships, and less because of boys' expectations, than here at home. There are useful lessons from the Dutch examples: Parents and teachers there, she explains, talk to kids about sex - not just the birds and bees and condoms, but also pleasure and consent and exactly how to say no, or yes; they even endorse in-home sleepovers versus sneaking around. Orenstein makes an excellent case that all this will help (though it may not be easy: My own 13-year-old bolted from the room every time I tried to talk about this book with her and is probably in Nebraska by now). But the sweeping issues her reporting illuminates clearly can't be solved by dinner-table or classroom conversations alone. To really fix things, you'll need bigger solutions, and it's tempting to wish Orenstein would put down her reporter's notebook to write a more focused sexual bill of rights that girls themselves, and not just their parents, can get behind. "Girls and Sex" is full of thoughtful concern and empathetic questions: What if girls learned that their sex drives mattered as much as boys'? What if hookups took place sober? What if? But Orenstein is uniquely positioned to do more than ask questions; you want her next book to tell us: Here's how. Let's go. CINDI LEIVE is the editor in chief of Glamour. icism. After talking to girls between the ages of 13 and 19 in 10 states, she believes we should be very worried indeed. Too often, discussions of teenagers exclude teenagers themselves, and it's clear that Sales has gone to great pains to listen to her subjects and to earn their trust. These girls have a lot to say not just about the apps on their phones but also about beauty, gender, race and class, and the book is at its most fascinating when they chat among themselves, sometimes as though Sales isn't even there. For most of them, social media is a necessary evil. It's an inextricable part of daily life - "Girls our age live on their phones," one 16-year-old says - but also a source of anxiety and jealousy and a tool for harassment and abuse. Thirteen-year-old Cassy (Sales changed her teenage subjects' names) says boys her age "blackmail" girls for nude pictures: "They say, Oh, I have embarrassing pictures of you, if you don't send nudes I'll send them all out on social media." If a girl relents, boys may share the nude picture with others, or post it to an Instagram account devoted to such images. Says Cassy, "Everyone winds up having it." Anecdotes like this make a persuasive case that social media has ratcheted up the pressure girls have long faced to appear both desirable and chaste. Less clear from "American Girls" is what anyone can do about it. Well versed in the contemporary literature on social media and adolescence, Sales disagrees with those who say adult worries about teenagers and social media stem from "moral panic" or fear of adolescent sexuality in general. "What this point of view fails to acknowledge," she writes, "are the ways in which the sexual behavior of teenagers actually is being changed and shaped by thoroughly new technology, smartphones and social media, not to mention the influence of online porn. What's being avoided are the hard questions about whether these behaviors are in fact healthy or abusive or even legal, from the perspective of the age of consent." These are indeed hard questions, but Sales provides few satisfying answers. She tells the story of Padma, whose Facebook pictures showing her in "casual clothes" and hanging out with friends garnered few likes. One day, Padma began posting pictures of herself in more revealing clothing - and getting lots of likes, as well as comments like "sexy" and "#pornstar." Sales draws a connection between Padma's new style and a period several years earlier when another girl bullied Padma on Facebook. "Was this part of how girls become hypersexualized, first by having their self-esteem destroyed?" Maybe - but it's just as likely that Padma began posting more sexually charged photos of herself as she grew older, and kept doing it because she got positive reinforcement. The question of whether she can make that choice freely in a society that vigorously polices her appearance and sexual expression is a valid one. But such questions have been asked many times before, and Sales doesn't bring much that is new to the debate. Nor does she have much to say about social media's more positive applications. While new platforms have opened up new avenues for harassment, they have also enabled new forms of activism, and young people have often been the first to adopt them. Kira, one of the only black girls in her graduating class at a Manhattan private high school, points out that social media has helped fuel the Black Lives Matter movement. "Some people are using social media to promote themselves," she says. "But other people are using it as a way to try and really change our society for the better." She is one of the few girls in the book to make this point, and Sales could have delved deeper into the ways girls use social media to push back against the pressures they face, online and off. I wanted to hear more from the "feminist girls" one 17-year-old describes: "They express themselves, they stick up for themselves and they, like, put feminist things on social media." SALES WROTE a Vanity Fair story last year on the effect of Tinder and other dating apps on contemporary sexuality. In it, college women complained that men their age had no interest in courtship or even basic politeness - "Tinder has destroyed their game." And 20-something male Tinder aficionados made a variety of repellent comments suggesting women are disposable and interchangeable: "If you had a reservation somewhere and then a table at Per Se opened up, you'd want to go there," one of them said. In "American Girls," Sales argues that the same problem affects even young teenagers. She writes of "boys who never want to make a definite plan; who seem to be leaving all their options open; and who seem to assume that girls are waiting with bated breath for boys to appear at their door, or at least to text them." But social media didn't create boys like this - as Amanda Marcotte at Slate put it in response to the Vanity Fair story, "gross dudes were not invented by apps." Sales does point out real double standards for male and female sexual behavior, which have been far slower to change than technology. (While she talks to gay teenagers - one girl says friends of her ex-girlfriend harassed her on social media after the two broke up - most of her discussions of dating and sexuality focus on heterosexual kids.) But there's something exhausting about hearing, yet again, that boys and young men can't be bothered to be boyfriends; critics of hookup culture have been repeating that claim since some of Sales's subjects were in diapers. "American Girls" is also limited by its single-gender focus. While Sales talks to some older boys and young men, male voices are largely absent from the sections dealing with younger teenagers. The choice makes sense in a way - girls seem to suffer sexualized harassment and shaming on social media more frequently than boys do. But excluding boys' perspectives gives readers an incomplete view of the problem and its potential solutions. Do boys, too, feel pressure to present a certain image - maybe that of a player who's talking to lots of girls? What do they think when their friends demand nude pictures from girls or harass them online? Do they ever feel guilty about how they treat girls on social media? What, if anything, might get them to change? Sales's conversations with male college students hint at some answers to these questions. One of them, Ethan, is intriguingly conflicted about his social-media-enabled sex life. He boasts of "a scoring average higher than Kobe Bryant" and says he has no problem cheating on girls: "My friends are like, She's not gonna find out - you can have the main course and some appetizers, too." But, Sales writes, "he'd been cheated on; he still didn't seem over it." And Ethan says he wishes he lived "when you had to go knock on the door and ask the dad for permission." This time (which Ethan somewhat amusingly puts "in the '70s") wasn't necessarily a happy one for women - many jeremiads about today's sexual freedoms forget the oppressiveness that came before. But Sales doesn't probe Ethan's odd and possibly illuminating mixture of bravado and romanticism. And while she does mention the lack of female representation in Silicon Valley, she doesn't spend much time discussing what tech companies could do to fix some of the problems she identifies. The effect is to make apps like Facebook and Twitter seem static and unchangeable, when in fact they change all the time, and their corporate owners could modify them to protect younger users. It feels a bit strange to call for more talk of boys and big corporations in a book about girls. But when it comes to dating and sex, teenage girls are already subject to near-constant scrutiny, and they're too often considered in isolation, as though the dangers and injustices they face are entirely theirs to solve. By focusing almost exclusively on how girls suffer, Sales repeats the usual unhelpful and defeatist refrain: It's a terrible world out there, and girls have to navigate it all on their own. ANNA NORTH is a staff editor for The Times's opinion pages. Her latest novel, "The Life and Death of Sophie Stark," was published last year
Choice Review
American Girls will serve as a hot spark for classroom discussion. Journalist Sales collected hundreds of stories about life as experienced on social media from young women between the ages of 13 and 19, which she presents in chapters organized by age group. A journalist known for her writing on celebrity culture, the author structures her work in a series of journalistic vignettes rather than as an academic study of girl culture. As a roundup essay on a large scale, the book is redundant and shallow compared to anthropological or sociological research on girls. However, it has value for course discussion because of the clear writing and inclusion of quotations from two years of interviews. One critical point Sales makes is that the majority of girls across race, age, and economic background are sharing a social activity for the first time in history. She moves beyond moral panic rhetoric to document exactly how the sexualization of girls takes center stage in their social media lives. The author's claim that the use of smartphones, Snapchat, Facebook, sexting, and pornography is shaping adolescent sexuality deserves serious consideration. Summing Up: Essential. All public and undergraduate collections. --Laura Miller, University of Missouri-St. Louis
Library Journal Review
Descend with Sales (The Bling Ring) into a world where sexism, pornography, and self-absorption spawn an atmosphere of one-upmanship, cyberbullying, slut shaming, and wretched hookups. These interviews with teens will arouse readers' tears, anger, and revulsion. Yet, the sample of youth Sales interviews, mostly in New Jersey, may not be representative of the United States in general. Nearly all Sales's subjects own iPhones, and there is no mention of the digital divide. Fears of phone confiscation during school hours aren't mentioned despite many schools' documented policies preventing the devices in the classroom. Moreover, Sales only interviews college students during alcohol-soaked vacations and doesn't back up her claim that sexism creates "social media Hell." The author's counterexamples show that sexism is too closely tied to individual perception for mass generalization. Readers also should consider Dana Boyd's It's Complicated, which offers a nuanced treatment of online conflict among teens, Jane Bailey and Valerie Stevens's Egirls, Ecitizens, a scholarly treatment of teenage Internet culture, and Leora -Tannenbaum's I Am Not a Slut. -VERDICT Although Sales sets forth a weak methodology and conclusion, her latest offering is still a compelling read for teens and those who work with them, giving voice to those who might not be heard otherwise.-Eileen H. Kramer, Georgia Perimeter Coll. Lib., Clarkston © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One 13 Montclair, New Jersey "SEND NOODZ." The boy sent the message in the middle of the day, when she was walking home from school. He sent it via direct message on Instagram, in the same shaky, childlike font as the new Drake album ("IF YOURE READING THIS ITS TOO LATE"). Sophia stared at her phone. "Wait what???" she responded. No answer. She continued along the empty streets. It was a warm spring day and the wide green lawns were full of blooming trees. Montclair was a pretty place, and it was safe, so a lot of kids walked home from school. She'd been with friends, but they had already peeled off and gone inside their houses, so she was all alone. She hoped to see someone she knew, hopefully a girl she could tell: "Oh my God, you know Zack, he asked me for nudes!" And: "What should I do?" But there was no one around. She thought about texting someone--most things, observations, gossip, jokes, were shared right away, but this seemed like something new. Something almost . . . private. Secret. That rare thing, something no one else could know. She had heard of boys asking girls for nudes before, but it had never happened to her. This was her first time. She didn't know how to respond, or if she should respond. Should she be outraged? Shocked? Her first reaction was: "I was like, Whoa, he finds me attractive? That's kind of strange. I never knew he found me attractive . . ." She thought about the boy. He was thirteen, the same age as she, a boy from her eighth-grade class. He was a boy like other boys--he talked loud and rough and wore baggy shorts and snapback hats and had a swaggering demeanor like Justin Bieber, whom he probably would have dissed. He was "cute," "but kind of gross." She wondered if he liked her. "He never likes anything of mine on Instagram, but why would he ask me that if he hadn't been thinking about me? If I wasn't in his mind? Boys aren't gonna come out and just say, 'I like you,' 'cause they don't do that. They have, like, their own language . . ." When she got to her house, a Victorian house with a wraparound porch, the place where boys had once come calling for girls, she went upstairs to her room. Plugged her phone into the charger. It was almost out of juice. She'd been up most of the night texting under the covers so if her mother walked in she wouldn't see--texting friends in her group chat who were still awake, sending words and emojis and giggling over inside jokes. And then during the day she had texted all through school. She woke up tired a lot of the time, but, she said, "I just drink a Red Bull." She went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Peered at herself. Pursed her lips. Stuck her tongue out to the side, Miley-style. Tossed her hair. She knew that she was "attractive," so she wasn't all that surprised that the boy had asked her for nudes. "I get, like, a hundred likes on all my pictures and people comment, like, 'Gorgeous . . . ' " But she wondered what it would be like if someone actually had a naked picture of her, and she wondered what that picture would be. "Not like I was gonna do it--oh my God, no--but if you did, like, what would you send so it looked good, and not ratchet?" She wondered if the boy had thought about kissing her. If he was going to be her first kiss. She'd been wondering what it would be like to kiss a boy, to have one want you so bad he would take you into the park or even his room and press his lips against yours, wrapping his arms around you, holding you close. She heard her phone ding from inside the bathroom. A text alert. She ran to see. It was the boy, responding to her message: "I really need this 'cause I have to win a bet I wont show anyone," he wrote. "What serious who else did you ask," she texted, her heart beating fast. "nobody lol I need it from you please" "Why" "so theres this high school kid I think hes a senior who hooks me up with lq"--booze--"he said hell get us as much as we need cause hes rich if me and jack show that we can get nudes no disrespect im just asking you cause youre the prettiest girl and the best person to ask" She stared at the phone, thought about it a moment, and wrote: "lol" New York, New York At the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan in May 2015, Kim Kardashian was launching her latest book, Selfish, a collection of selfies and nudes. It was more than 400 pages of Kim staring into the camera, pursing her lips, looking sultry and suggestive. It was Kim naked in a bathroom mirror, naked in a bedroom mirror, clutching her naked breasts, leaning naked over a bathroom sink, sticking her famous behind up in the air; Kim leaning naked over a bed in the grainy dark, Kim in lingerie and bathing suits, lounging beside electric-blue swimming pools, doing "leg shots." "Oh my God oh my God oh my God oh my God," said a thirteen-year-old girl waiting in the line snaking through the store. There were pictures of Kim from 2006, when she was still an L.A. party girl and friend of Paris Hilton's, to 2014, after she had become one of the most famous women in the world. In those eight years, which had seen the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, and the global spread of social media through mobile technology, Kim had become social media's biggest star. In 2006, she had just 856 friends on Myspace--where she announced in her profile, "I'm a PRINCESS and you're not so there!"--and now she had 31 million followers on Instagram, second only to Beyoncé, whom she would eclipse in a few months, climbing to number one. She had 34 million followers on Twitter, where she posted more selfies daily, most of which got thousands of favorites and retweets. "I love her," said another girl in the store. What was the meaning of Kim Kardashian? Why was she here, and why wouldn't she go? Why did anyone care about her, and how had she become so ubiquitous? Throughout the years of her ascendance, people had been trying to figure this out. Some seemed furious at her success, which in 2015 included TV shows, endorsement deals, makeup, fragrances, clothing lines, one of the most popular of all mobile apps--in which a Kim avatar showed you how to become as famous as she--and a net worth of $85 million. Still, she was called "vain," "shallow," "frivolous," "egotistical," "materialistic," and many other more vulgar insults in endless media pieces and online rants. "I have never heard more anger and dismay than when we announced that the people you are about to see were on our list," Barbara Walters told viewers before airing a segment on the Kardashian family in her 10 Most Fascinating People show of 2011. "You are all often described as famous for being famous," Walters leveled at sisters Kim, Khloé, Kourtney, and their mother, Kris, who sat before her in sleek couture. "You don't really act, you don't sing, you don't dance, you don't have any--forgive me--any talent." The Kardashians tried, in their mild way, but they couldn't quite seem to explain to Walters, who had come of age at a different time, that this was actually the point--talent didn't matter much in becoming famous anymore. Or perhaps what served as talent had transformed. It was now enough to know how to become famous purely for the sake of fame. "She's amazing," said another girl in Barnes & Noble. The Kardashians, a family of American girls, had come on the scene, swept forward by the gown of Princess Kim, in a kind of perfect cultural storm: there was the fascination with fame that had always danced at the edges of American identity, and now, with the explosion of a celebrity news industry fueled by Internet blogs and TMZ, had taken over the aspirational longings of the young. A 2007 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 51 percent of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds said their most or second most important life goal was to become famous. Sixty-four percent said their number one goal was to become rich. A girl waiting in line for Kim said, "I want her life." There was reality television, which stoked a thirst for more and more intimate details of the lives of celebrities and newly minted reality show stars. And there was princess culture. 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. "I get letters from little girls begging me to adopt them," Kim once told a reporter. The Kardashian lifestyle was the fulfillment of a new American dream that had been embraced by many girls and young women, unsurprisingly enough, at a time when everything around them supported it as an ideal: it was to be beautiful, famous, and rich, and to have amazing clothes, bags, and shoes and tens of millions of followers on social media. It was to get tens or even hundreds of thousands of likes on all your selfies. "I want to take a selfie with her," a girl in Barnes & Noble said excitedly. Behind the Kardashians' lifestyle, there was a mother, but it wasn't Kim; it was Kris Jenner, Kim's own mother and tireless manager, who took 10 percent of all her daughters' incomes. "My job is to take my family's fifteen minutes of fame and turn it into thirty," Kris once declared. That her family's fifteen minutes had begun with a leaked sex tape of her daughter and the singer Ray J didn't seem to give her pause; in fact, it was just after the release of the tape that Kris started shopping her family's reality show, a move she likened to "[making] some lemonade out of these lemons." The scandal which Paris Hilton had already endured wasn't much of a scandal anymore. Porn stars were writing best-selling books and appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show. For the biggest, darkest cloud in the perfect storm that brought Kim Kardashian rising out of the ocean of wannabe celebrities like Venus on a flip phone was the widespread consumption and normalization of online porn. In 2014, Pornhub reported in its "Year in Review" that Kim was number eight in the top ten most popular "porn stars" in the world. "Kim, you're doing amazing, sweetie," Kris said in an iconic moment on Keeping Up with the Kardashians, in which Kim, naked except for jewelry and heels, is on her knees, arching her back, and posing as a photographer snaps pictures--as does Kris, with a little personal camera. The moment is striking in its depiction of another element of the cultural tempest that delivered us Kim: the hypersexualization of American girls and women. "She's hot," said a boy waiting in line to see her. "Is Kim Kardashian a feminist role model?" asked Jezebel in 2013. The website answered "no" and "noooooooooooooooo." But already the worm of popular opinion was starting to turn. Kim was being touted as a "businesswoman." She was being called "powerful"--and didn't achieving power, any kind of power, by any means, make a woman a feminist? So blogs and think pieces argued. Was it Kim's marriage to a powerful music industry player and self-described "creative genius," Kanye West, or their joint appearance on the cover of Vogue in 2014--a nod from establishment media moving Kim onto the A-list--that began to mute her haters? Or was it that Kim's true talent, her skill at using social media--the real secret of her success, all along--was finally being recognized for the power it commanded? "Something about Kim is very appealing to digital natives," Re/code founder Kara Swisher told Rolling Stone in 2015. Yes, and that something was becoming very clear: Kim successfully used the technological tools now available to almost everyone to get what everyone wanted. What she'd been doing relentlessly since the introduction of smartphones and before, now everybody was doing--using social media to self-promote, to craft an idealized online self; and girls coming of age in the second decade of the twenty-first century were using it to present a sexualized self. "My little cousin, she's thirteen, and she posts such inappropriate pictures on Instagram and boys post sexual comments, and she's like, Thank you. It's child porn, and everyone's looking at it on their iPhones in the cafeteria," said a seventeen-year-old girl in New York. Presiding over the pornification of American life was Princess Kim, who'd been crowned the "Selfie Queen." Posting selfies, once thought to be embarrassingly narcissistic, was now as common as brushing one's teeth--or putting on makeup, the subject of many of the selfies in Kim's new book. For the last and loudest thunderclap in this perfect storm, the precipitous rise of narcissism in the American psyche--charted in studies since the 1970s, and accelerated by social media, according to psychologists--was personified and glamorized in the image of a dewy, contoured Kim staring into her iPhone screen. Slate called Selfish "riveting." The Atlantic, in a review titled "You Win, Kim Kardashian," gushed, "In declaring herself, against all common sense, as art, she mocks and dares and provokes. She rejects what came before. And with her candor about who she is and what it takes to make her that way, she might also, against all odds, move us forward." Whatever that might mean. At the Barnes & Noble in Manhattan, Kim, then thirty-four, was wearing a tight, high-necked white lace dress and glistening with products. She sat behind a table, signing books for her hundreds of awaiting fans. "You've inspired me to be hot and famous," a teenage girl told her, blushing. "Aw," said Kim. "I love you." Though there had been a ban on selfies at the signing, Kim stood up and took a selfie with the girl. They posed together, staring into the girl's smartphone, pursing their lips. "You are a role model for my daughters," said someone's mother. Excerpted from American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.