The shift from calling to dating happened quickly, in the way that such shifts often do. The rich copied the poor; the middle class copied the rich. In 1914, Ladies’ Home Journal reported that it was now “considered ‘smart’ to go to the low order of dance halls, and not only be a looker-on, but also to dance among all sorts and conditions of men and women.” The sense of social liberation was hardly shared by all. Weigel notes the Harlem Renaissance writer Wallace Thurman’s observation, in the mid-nineteen-twenties, that his neighborhood’s night clubs had become de-facto segregated “shrines” to which self-styled white sophisticates made pilgrimage on their nights out. The upper crust flocked, too, to drag shows and gay burlesques, part of a long tradition of straight daters cribbing from gay life. (Just as, in more recent history, Tinder launched on the heels of Grindr, so were the straight singles bars of the sixties inspired by gay nightspots. One of the most popular of these franchises still thrives, albeit in much altered form, under its original name: T.G.I. Friday’s.)
Soon enough, dating became an activity by which women tried to transcend class. By the nineteen-tens and twenties, as it became commonplace for women to work in public as shopgirls, laundresses, and waitresses, the hope of “dating up” by snagging middle-class customers to go out with, and, eventually, marry, became a trope—one that largely excluded working-class black women, the majority of whom were restricted to jobs as maids.
To sell themselves as romantic prospects along with whatever else they were selling, girls cultivated a certain look—makeup, recently the province of actresses and prostitutes, went mainstream—and a certain style: solicitous, flirtatious, credulous, coy. Fast-forward a few decades and you get Helen Gurley Brown, self-appointed patron saint to single girls, impressing upon female office workers the importance of not leaving “any facet of you unpolished,” lest an eligible colleague who glances your way fails to keep glancing.
Dating, born in cities, grew up on the college campus. In the twenties and thirties, privileged College Men and Coeds pursued one another with a libidinous vigor to rival latter-day “hook-up culture.” Students got physical both at official mixers and at gatherings of their own—“Mothers Complain That Modern Girls ‘Vamp’ Their Sons at Petting Parties,” reads a 1922 Times headline dug up by Weigel. They escaped adult scrutiny via that supreme agent of American sexual freedom, the automobile. They danced dirty. And they drank—a lot. “Hold me up, kid; I’m ginned,” a girl at a social slurs to a fraternity brother in the 1924 campus novel “The Plastic Age.” Looking around for backup, he sees that just about everyone else is either crying or vomiting in the bushes.
The point of all this canoodling wasn’t to get married. No woman expected to traipse down the aisle with her dance partner from last Saturday night, regardless of what they had done in the dark. The point, Weigel notes, was to compete. Students “rated” one another’s social credit; the better you rated, the more you dated, and the more you dated, the higher you rated. None other than the anthropologist Margaret Mead characterized college dating as “a competitive game” rather than a proper courtship ritual. Students weren’t playing for emotional keeps. The stakes were the admiration and envy of one’s peers.
This state of affairs changed during and after the Second World War, at least in part as a matter of wartime necessity. With so many men away, Weigel explains, girls had to hang on to the boys they could get. During the years of postwar abundance, dating became a crucial feature of the American consumer economy, something that teens of the rapidly expanding middle class, newly awash in disposable income and unencumbered by dark memories of the Depression, could spend their dollars on. Everybody was doing it, and so, for once, romantic supply equalled demand: people paired off.
You’d think that adults would have cheered their offsprings’ coupling tendencies. “One boy to laugh with, to joke with, have Coke with,” sings Kim MacAfee, the fifteen-year-old heroine of “Bye Bye Birdie,” expressing the fantasies of her generation: “One boy, not two or three.” Having a Coke with a single beau seems a lot more wholesome than attending a petting party with a bunch of them.
But grownups didn’t cheer. Advice columns lamented the “ridiculous custom” of teen-age couples “pairing off to the exclusion of everyone else on the dance floor.” The Baltimore Afro-American, one of the country’s biggest black-owned papers, told its younger readers that trying out multiple romantic partners was healthier, in the long run, than “settling down” too fast. Young people were encouraged, in fittingly consumerist terms, to “shop around,” so that they wouldn’t find themselves saddled with a lacklustre steady for life. Playing at marriage, they were told, would leave them with all the institution’s ills and none of its benefits. This was objectively true in one respect at least: teen-pregnancy rates soared, both in and out of wedlock. Trying to stay one step ahead, Catholic schools across the country started expelling students found to be in monogamous relationships.
On the plus side, Weigel argues, the culture of going steady allowed couples a degree of emotional intimacy that earlier dating models lacked. But its restrictive mores also put the onus on girls to regulate both their own sexual urges and those of their boyfriends. The result “was a setup that subjected girls to constant stress, self-blame, and regret.” Weigel describes an illustrative scene from a forties teen novel in which a group of boys—“The Checkers,” they’re ominously called—hang out in front of a favorite date spot in their Wisconsin town in order to report, the narrator says, “any violations on the part of the girls who are supposed to be going steady.”
The history of dating, then, is also the history of the surveillance of daters. As young people figured out how to conduct their private lives away from the supervision of parents, teachers, and chaperones, they took it upon themselves to do the supervising, creating and enforcing their own codes of behavior. They proved to be remarkably adept at it. No one, it turned out, regulates the sexual and romantic lives of young people as effectively as young people themselves.
That’s one conclusion to draw from “American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers” (Knopf), by the Vanity Fair reporter Nancy Jo Sales. Even if you’ve been following teen social-media horror stories—the recent case of an Ohio girl live-streaming her friend’s rape comes to mind—Sales’s book makes for an urgent, dispiriting portrait. Teen-age girls are the largest group of social-media users in the country. “For the first time,” Sales writes, “most American girls are engaged in the same activity most of the time.” Curious to see what effects such constant digital engagement were having on teen-age girls, she interviewed a diverse group of more than two hundred of them.
Sales learned that girls are being bombarded on their phones with images, videos, comments, and the like that “are offensive and potentially damaging to their well-being and sense of self-esteem.” She writes about an American Psychological Association report published in 2007, just before the iPhone launched, which found that girls were “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.” The report saw links between such sexualization and mental-health problems, including anxiety, depression, and eating disorders. Sales argues that sexualization has become “a prevailing mode, influencing how girls see themselves, as well as how they present themselves.”
Sales begins her book with the story of Sophia, a thirteen-year-old in Montclair, New Jersey, who receives a text one day after school from Zack, a boy in her eighth-grade class: “SEND NOODZ.” (Sales has changed her subjects’ names.) Girls are often solicited for naked pictures, and, as Sophia knows, it isn’t uncommon for the photos to be compiled and shared on virtual “slut pages.” Still, it hasn’t happened to her before: “ ‘I was like, Whoa, he finds me attractive?’ ” Sophia hasn’t yet had her first kiss; she wonders if it might be with Zack. Actually, Zack confesses, he just needs the photo so that he can trade it to a high-school senior in exchange for booze. “Lol,” Sophia responds. There’s a consensus among her friends that humor is the de-rigueur response, a way to demonstrate “chill”—detachment, a feigned attitude of control in situations designed to wrest it from them.
One way to get back at the boys is by posting selfies, a declaration, at least in theory, that girls have the right to present themselves however they want. Sophia has an Instagram account full of selfies, all capturing the same pose—“bite-tongue smile”—which she laughingly calls “my brand.” (It’s a knockoff; here, as throughout the book, Sales spies the long shadow cast by the likes of Miley Cyrus and the Kardashians.) She and her friends use apps to edit their pictures, and, like a pop star dropping an album, post them when they think most people will see them. Sometimes, Sophia tells Sales, it takes up to seventy tries to get the shot right. Then she monitors the comments and the likes as they come in. “I feel like I’m brainwashed into wanting likes,” Sophia says.
Weigel would point out that girls like Sophia are expending an enormous amount of labor to compete in the online sexual marketplace run by their peers. And boys are hardly the only ones who dictate the terms. “It’s like you spend half your time managing your reputation,” another one of Sales’s subjects says, referring to the effort it takes to keep up the requisite stream of flattering commentary on other girls’ Instagram selfies. Sierra, a fifteen-year-old from Jamestown, Virginia, who is frequently cyberbullied, monitors her Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Ask.fm accounts as she speaks with Sales, deleting negative comments the moment they appear. It’s “a lot of work,” serving as her own censor, Sierra admits. Another girl tells Sales that social media is “destroying our lives.” Sales asks why she doesn’t quit. “Because then we would have no life,” she is told.