American Girls Read Free Page B

strangers to look at a picture of a woman’s face and vote on how she measured up. The idea was also the basis of Facemash, the precursor to Facebook, a campus rating site created by Mark Zuckerberg in 2003, when he was still a Harvard sophomore. Two of the founders of YouTube, guy Silicon Valley software engineers who met at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, have said that Hot or Not was the inspiration for what they originally thought would be just a video version of the game, as well. Much of the culture of social media is, in a way, an ongoing expression of “hot or not,” liking or rejecting people and things, and the physical appeal of women and girls.
    So embedded in the culture of Silicon Valley is “hot or not” that it became the subject of satire with Titstare, a fictional mobile app that was presented at TechCrunch’s annual Disrupt Hackathon in San Francisco in 2013. Its creators, two young men in their twenties, described Titstare as “an app where you take photos of yourself staring at tits.” Titstare incited a brief uproar online for its outlandish theme, but some on Twitter called the joke “brilliant” and “pretty funny.” “Sexism is a major problem in the tech industry,” acknowledged TechCrunch, the tech industry news website owned by AOL, apologizing for the “misogynistic” presentation.
    “Beautiful,” “gorgeous,” “sexy,” “hot” are conventional responses to selfies in the culture of social media, responses which many girls seek as they spend minutes or hours of their day preparing themselves to be photographed and photographing themselves to the best advantage. There are typically more graphically sexual comments, too, which many girls feel they are expected to show appreciation for, or just ignore. And then there are different kinds of comments, critical or degrading assessments of how a girl appears on-screen, all based on an array of motivations, from personal animus to jealousy to slut-shaming.
    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.
    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.” 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.
    It isn’t that girls and women haven’t been exploited for their sexuality before; of course they have; but sexualization has become a prevailing mode, influencing how girls see themselves, as well as how they present themselves. The APA did not account for why this damaging sexualization of