Publisher's Synopsis
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. How it is influencing their experience of adolescence and sexuality, and wrecking their self-esteem, is the subject of 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 Oklahoma to West Virginia, from Flagstaff to Salt Lake City, from Miami and Montclair to Manhattan and L.A., American Girls provides a provocative, disturbing portrait of a national crisis: What does it mean to be a girl in America in 2015? It means coming of age online, in a hypersexualised culture--a culture in which girls as young as twelve and thirteen are routinely asked by boys to send scantily clad or even nude photographs; a culture in which pornography is ubiquitous, inescapable; a culture rife with a virulent strain of sexism that often masquerades as a bold, new feminism. From beauty gurus to slut-shaming to the disconcerting wave of girl-on-girl aggression fueled and driven by social media, Nancy Jo Sales provides a shocking window onto the troubled and troubling world of America's girls.
