[ed. See also: Teen Girls And Social Media: A Story Of 'Secret Lives' And Misogyny]
Garden City, Long Island: It was the day of the night of Lily’s first date, and she was worried about the eyeliner she ordered arriving from Amazon on time. It wasn’t exactly her firstdate, she said—she had been on dates, of sorts, since seventh grade, but this was the first one where she “really liked” the boy. He was “really smart, really funny, really athletic, really tall,” she said, eating chips at the long wooden table in the kitchen of her home, an eight-bedroom house on a leafy street in Garden City. “And he’s been my friend for a while”—since the previous summer, when they went to science camp together at an Ivy League university (“It sounds really nerdy I know, and it is, but honestly it’s fun”)—“and I really like him and he really likes me so I think it’s . . . yeah.” She nervously re-arranged her hair.
Lily said she wanted the date to be “perfect,” so she really wanted this certain Lancôme eyeliner to come before she had to start getting ready to go out. “It goes on the best and you can make wings like Audrey Hepburn’s. I saw it on a beauty tutorial. I watch tons of them ’cause they give you really good information.”
She had ordered the eyeliner on Amazon the night before for next-day delivery. “My mom’s credit card is on there,” she said, “so we can just like get whatever we want. She never notices.”
The doorbell rang and some packages came—the UPS man had two: some squishy neon-colored balls for Lily’s younger sister, Olivia, 10, and Lily’s eyeliner. “Oh, thank you!” Lily told the UPS man, signing for it.
“Don’t tell Mom,” she told Olivia, the package under her arm. “Where is Mom?”
“She took Henry to the Apple store,” Olivia said, tearing open her box of squishy balls. Henry was her brother, age 12.
“Why?” Lily asked.
“To buy him a new iPhone,” Olivia said. “He broke his. He threw it at the wall when he got mad at the game he was playing. He threw it twice.”
Lily was glad Henry wouldn’t be in the house while she was getting ready to go on her date; he was always saying things to try and make her doubt herself, always comparing himself to her, saying he was better at sports, and she was “dumb” for caring about things like clothes and makeup. “Little brothers, you know?” She shrugged. “He’s a pain. He’s just jealous because I’m older and he’s immature. He has A.D.H.D.; he never wants to do his homework. And sometimes he smells.” Lily had A.D.H.D., too, she said, but the prescription drugs she took controlled it and she could concentrate. “And I’m just, like, very driven,” she added. She said she also suffered from anxiety and took medication for that.
She was one of the top students in her grade at a competitive Manhattan private school. She was also an athlete, good at many sports. “My whole family’s good at sports,” she said breezily. “That’s one of the reasons we moved out here to Garden City, so my brother could play soccer.”
Garden City is a village of some 22,000 people, about an hour’s drive from Manhattan, an affluent community with many beautiful churches, a place centered on raising kids, raising them to be successes. An estimated 99 percent of Garden City High School graduates go on to colleges, many of them high-ranking. The school district is known for its strength in sports; in the afternoons, the playing fields are dotted with kids in team uniforms, running up and down. “Garden City kids are sick at sports,” said Matt, a 17-year-old boy at Roosevelt Field, a mall in East Garden City, the 10th largest mall in America; it used to be an airfield.
“You work hard, you excel at sports,” Matt said, “you get into an Ivy League school, or even like an N.Y.U. 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, 16, observed.
During the financial crisis of 2008, The New York Times ran a story about how the residents of Garden City were coping; one resident, a wealth manager, told the paper, “Someone from Des Moines might not feel bad about well-off people like this losing their money, but people get used to an income level.” The number of Garden City residents who work in finance and real estate has been estimated at 20 percent.
Lily’s father was a lawyer who worked in Manhattan and her mother was a stay-at-home mom. As the oldest of five, Lily said she never felt she had her parents’ full attention; the littler kids took up so much of her mother’s time and “my dad is, like, never home.” Her mother did pay her attention, she said, but she was “always, like, managing me and making sure I’m doing everything right.” So now it was nice—“so nice,” she said—to have someone in her life like Josh, her date, who would just talk to her and listen to her, and tell her she was pretty, “Oh my God, like all the time.”
They hadn’t actually seen each other in person for about a year. After camp, they started gradually making contact through Facebook messaging, occasional texting, favoriting each other’s tweets and liking each other’s pictures on Instagram. “I just thought of him as a friend after camp until a month or two ago,” Lily said. And then something happened when they Skyped. “We just talked and talked for like four hours, and he really liked talking to me and I really liked talking to him so . . . yeah.” Again she nervously re-arranged her hair.
Ever since then, she said, she and Josh had been Skyping most nights for about an hour, and then for three- or four-hour stretches every weekend, only stopping “when we have to, like, go to the bathroom or take a shower.” Now they were texting all day, every day, even during school (“We just talk about whatever we’re doing, or we’ll say, like, Hey, what’s up, hi, bye”). He was the last person she talked to at night before she went to sleep and the first person she talked to in the morning, “when I open my eyes.” (...)
Now that she had the eyeliner, the next thing was to figure out what to wear. She searched in her closet and the heaps of clothes strewn everywhere in her room. Her room was messy, crammed with things: a bed, desk, a chair, clothes, books, shoes, discarded toys, and an elliptical exercise machine she used to “stay in shape.” “Sometimes when I’m stressed out I just go on it for like an hour and it takes the stress away.”
She began piecing together an outfit. “I have a pretty good fashion sense,” she said. “I modeled for like two years, but then I gave up because I fell down on the runway,” in a practice show, “and I didn’t like it anymore. I modeled from like 11 to 13—I was in a modeling agency. It was cool, it was fun, but it got to be too much, so I quit.” When I talked to Lily’s mother, later, she said that Lily “could be” a model, if she were only taller. “The lady at the agency would do our makeup and we would practice doing fake photo shoots and we would practice the catwalk in high heels,” said Lily. “It was fun to feel like everyone was watching you and it was cool to be able to say, like, I’m part of a modeling agency.”
I asked what had made her want to model. She thought a moment. “I guess I wanted to do it from seeing models on TV and in magazines—it was like, Oh, if I can be a model, girls will look up to me like I look up to these girls. Whenever I’d see models in magazines it was like, Wow, she’s really pretty and if I can be a model, girls will be like, Wow, she’s really pretty, too. I love America’s Next Top Model. It’s cool to watch what that life would be like. It’s such a glamorous life.” (...)
Lily said that she first started “dating” boys in seventh grade. “I had my first boyfriend then. I think I would have little crushes, like cute little crushes from fourth grade, but I wouldn’t go on dates. I don’t have serious relationships now because what’s the point, what’s the rush? You can be young and have your fun. But a lot of girls my age have serious boyfriends, serious dates. They’ll go to fancy restaurants together in the city, go to parties together. It’s crazy. They have, like, serious plans for the future, like what they’ll do when they go off to college or something, and I’m like, how can you even think of that at this moment?
“Girls in my school and girls on Long Island where I live,” she went on, “they do the same thing. There will be pictures on Facebook of girls my age out at these fancy places in fancy dresses, like they’re going to get married next week or something. They put pictures on social media—it’s a huge thing, boyfriends and social media. Girls that have boyfriends show them off on Facebook and Instagram. It’s not like they’re maliciously wanting people to think, Oh, look at my boyfriend, he’s so much hotter than your boyfriend, it’s just they want to show off what they’re doing, and the boys want to show off what they’re doing, too; so you’ll see all these photos on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, status updates 24/7—maybe to, like, even make people jealous.
“In seventh grade, that’s when it picks up,” she said. “They would have these little dances in seventh grade for private schools; I met my first boyfriend at one of those. It was cute, a little kiss on the cheek and stuff; sometimes we’d go out for ice cream. And seventh grade is when things really heat up on social media. That’s when boys start liking all your posts to get your attention. If a boy likes a lot of your posts, then he likes you. Especially if he likes your profile picture, ’cause that’s how you’re represented online—if he likes your profile picture that’s how you know.
“Social media is 95 percent of what happens in all relationships now,” she said. “How we talk is on social media. A lot of people don’t even meet; they just have boyfriends online. Girls meet their boyfriends online. That’s really scary to me; like I have a friend who just recently met a guy on social media—she never met him before in her life—and they were dating, and, like, that freaks me out because what if he were a serial killer or something? I mean, good for her for having a boyfriend at all, but I mean she never even really met this guy, she met him on iFunny—it’s this place where you share pictures and stuff, you make funny captions of pictures; they opened up a chat room and started to chat and Snapchat. It’s creepy to me to think, Well, what if he’s a rapist?”
Garden City, Long Island: It was the day of the night of Lily’s first date, and she was worried about the eyeliner she ordered arriving from Amazon on time. It wasn’t exactly her firstdate, she said—she had been on dates, of sorts, since seventh grade, but this was the first one where she “really liked” the boy. He was “really smart, really funny, really athletic, really tall,” she said, eating chips at the long wooden table in the kitchen of her home, an eight-bedroom house on a leafy street in Garden City. “And he’s been my friend for a while”—since the previous summer, when they went to science camp together at an Ivy League university (“It sounds really nerdy I know, and it is, but honestly it’s fun”)—“and I really like him and he really likes me so I think it’s . . . yeah.” She nervously re-arranged her hair.
Lily said she wanted the date to be “perfect,” so she really wanted this certain Lancôme eyeliner to come before she had to start getting ready to go out. “It goes on the best and you can make wings like Audrey Hepburn’s. I saw it on a beauty tutorial. I watch tons of them ’cause they give you really good information.”She had ordered the eyeliner on Amazon the night before for next-day delivery. “My mom’s credit card is on there,” she said, “so we can just like get whatever we want. She never notices.”
The doorbell rang and some packages came—the UPS man had two: some squishy neon-colored balls for Lily’s younger sister, Olivia, 10, and Lily’s eyeliner. “Oh, thank you!” Lily told the UPS man, signing for it.
“Don’t tell Mom,” she told Olivia, the package under her arm. “Where is Mom?”
“She took Henry to the Apple store,” Olivia said, tearing open her box of squishy balls. Henry was her brother, age 12.
“Why?” Lily asked.
“To buy him a new iPhone,” Olivia said. “He broke his. He threw it at the wall when he got mad at the game he was playing. He threw it twice.”
Lily was glad Henry wouldn’t be in the house while she was getting ready to go on her date; he was always saying things to try and make her doubt herself, always comparing himself to her, saying he was better at sports, and she was “dumb” for caring about things like clothes and makeup. “Little brothers, you know?” She shrugged. “He’s a pain. He’s just jealous because I’m older and he’s immature. He has A.D.H.D.; he never wants to do his homework. And sometimes he smells.” Lily had A.D.H.D., too, she said, but the prescription drugs she took controlled it and she could concentrate. “And I’m just, like, very driven,” she added. She said she also suffered from anxiety and took medication for that.
She was one of the top students in her grade at a competitive Manhattan private school. She was also an athlete, good at many sports. “My whole family’s good at sports,” she said breezily. “That’s one of the reasons we moved out here to Garden City, so my brother could play soccer.”
Garden City is a village of some 22,000 people, about an hour’s drive from Manhattan, an affluent community with many beautiful churches, a place centered on raising kids, raising them to be successes. An estimated 99 percent of Garden City High School graduates go on to colleges, many of them high-ranking. The school district is known for its strength in sports; in the afternoons, the playing fields are dotted with kids in team uniforms, running up and down. “Garden City kids are sick at sports,” said Matt, a 17-year-old boy at Roosevelt Field, a mall in East Garden City, the 10th largest mall in America; it used to be an airfield.
“You work hard, you excel at sports,” Matt said, “you get into an Ivy League school, or even like an N.Y.U. 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, 16, observed.
During the financial crisis of 2008, The New York Times ran a story about how the residents of Garden City were coping; one resident, a wealth manager, told the paper, “Someone from Des Moines might not feel bad about well-off people like this losing their money, but people get used to an income level.” The number of Garden City residents who work in finance and real estate has been estimated at 20 percent.
Lily’s father was a lawyer who worked in Manhattan and her mother was a stay-at-home mom. As the oldest of five, Lily said she never felt she had her parents’ full attention; the littler kids took up so much of her mother’s time and “my dad is, like, never home.” Her mother did pay her attention, she said, but she was “always, like, managing me and making sure I’m doing everything right.” So now it was nice—“so nice,” she said—to have someone in her life like Josh, her date, who would just talk to her and listen to her, and tell her she was pretty, “Oh my God, like all the time.”
They hadn’t actually seen each other in person for about a year. After camp, they started gradually making contact through Facebook messaging, occasional texting, favoriting each other’s tweets and liking each other’s pictures on Instagram. “I just thought of him as a friend after camp until a month or two ago,” Lily said. And then something happened when they Skyped. “We just talked and talked for like four hours, and he really liked talking to me and I really liked talking to him so . . . yeah.” Again she nervously re-arranged her hair.
Ever since then, she said, she and Josh had been Skyping most nights for about an hour, and then for three- or four-hour stretches every weekend, only stopping “when we have to, like, go to the bathroom or take a shower.” Now they were texting all day, every day, even during school (“We just talk about whatever we’re doing, or we’ll say, like, Hey, what’s up, hi, bye”). He was the last person she talked to at night before she went to sleep and the first person she talked to in the morning, “when I open my eyes.” (...)
Now that she had the eyeliner, the next thing was to figure out what to wear. She searched in her closet and the heaps of clothes strewn everywhere in her room. Her room was messy, crammed with things: a bed, desk, a chair, clothes, books, shoes, discarded toys, and an elliptical exercise machine she used to “stay in shape.” “Sometimes when I’m stressed out I just go on it for like an hour and it takes the stress away.”
She began piecing together an outfit. “I have a pretty good fashion sense,” she said. “I modeled for like two years, but then I gave up because I fell down on the runway,” in a practice show, “and I didn’t like it anymore. I modeled from like 11 to 13—I was in a modeling agency. It was cool, it was fun, but it got to be too much, so I quit.” When I talked to Lily’s mother, later, she said that Lily “could be” a model, if she were only taller. “The lady at the agency would do our makeup and we would practice doing fake photo shoots and we would practice the catwalk in high heels,” said Lily. “It was fun to feel like everyone was watching you and it was cool to be able to say, like, I’m part of a modeling agency.”
I asked what had made her want to model. She thought a moment. “I guess I wanted to do it from seeing models on TV and in magazines—it was like, Oh, if I can be a model, girls will look up to me like I look up to these girls. Whenever I’d see models in magazines it was like, Wow, she’s really pretty and if I can be a model, girls will be like, Wow, she’s really pretty, too. I love America’s Next Top Model. It’s cool to watch what that life would be like. It’s such a glamorous life.” (...)
Lily said that she first started “dating” boys in seventh grade. “I had my first boyfriend then. I think I would have little crushes, like cute little crushes from fourth grade, but I wouldn’t go on dates. I don’t have serious relationships now because what’s the point, what’s the rush? You can be young and have your fun. But a lot of girls my age have serious boyfriends, serious dates. They’ll go to fancy restaurants together in the city, go to parties together. It’s crazy. They have, like, serious plans for the future, like what they’ll do when they go off to college or something, and I’m like, how can you even think of that at this moment?
“Girls in my school and girls on Long Island where I live,” she went on, “they do the same thing. There will be pictures on Facebook of girls my age out at these fancy places in fancy dresses, like they’re going to get married next week or something. They put pictures on social media—it’s a huge thing, boyfriends and social media. Girls that have boyfriends show them off on Facebook and Instagram. It’s not like they’re maliciously wanting people to think, Oh, look at my boyfriend, he’s so much hotter than your boyfriend, it’s just they want to show off what they’re doing, and the boys want to show off what they’re doing, too; so you’ll see all these photos on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, status updates 24/7—maybe to, like, even make people jealous.
“In seventh grade, that’s when it picks up,” she said. “They would have these little dances in seventh grade for private schools; I met my first boyfriend at one of those. It was cute, a little kiss on the cheek and stuff; sometimes we’d go out for ice cream. And seventh grade is when things really heat up on social media. That’s when boys start liking all your posts to get your attention. If a boy likes a lot of your posts, then he likes you. Especially if he likes your profile picture, ’cause that’s how you’re represented online—if he likes your profile picture that’s how you know.
“Social media is 95 percent of what happens in all relationships now,” she said. “How we talk is on social media. A lot of people don’t even meet; they just have boyfriends online. Girls meet their boyfriends online. That’s really scary to me; like I have a friend who just recently met a guy on social media—she never met him before in her life—and they were dating, and, like, that freaks me out because what if he were a serial killer or something? I mean, good for her for having a boyfriend at all, but I mean she never even really met this guy, she met him on iFunny—it’s this place where you share pictures and stuff, you make funny captions of pictures; they opened up a chat room and started to chat and Snapchat. It’s creepy to me to think, Well, what if he’s a rapist?”
by Nancy Jo Sales, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Image: NPR
