Are they seeing too much, too young?
The 15-year-old did this in response to a dare. Giovanna, who wears low-cut tops in her videos, then took issue online with ‘imposters’ who had claimed to be her. ‘Tampon girl’ was her “achievement”, nobody else’s, she posted, and detractors were just jealous, she said, because she “was now famous”. This is the kind of degrading, sexualised behaviour that is worrying parents and making them fearful of social media. But how vulnerable are teenagers to 24-hour social media?
‘Tampon girl’ went online in January and, by the end of the summer, we had the ‘Slane girl’ video, the ‘rugby threesome’ controversy and Miley Cyrus’ ‘twerking’ at the MTV Music Awards.
Is our children’s concept of acceptable behaviour being eroded? Is porn influencing teenage relationships? Or is this just traditional angst from older generations? The Irish Examiner met eight teenage girls to ask them these questions.
“I think it is the case that social media is a vulnerability for people who are missing something in their own lives, same way as alcohol can be. ‘Tampon girl’ put up her video as she didn’t get enough attention in her own life,” said one 17-year-old.
“Yeah,” another said. “She actually said ‘if this gets so many likes, I’ll do this video’. She imagines if she does this people will like her and think she’s mental, cool mental”.
“She was delighted with herself, well-pleased with herself,” said another of the girls.
Another girl had more sympathy for ‘tampon girl’ than for the ‘Slane girl’, whom she said “got caught”.
“People like ‘tampon girl’ are more vulnerable than people who get caught, like ‘Slane girl’. I feel more sorry for this person, she did it herself, she isn’t able to see what harm she is doing to herself,” she said.
“I don’t know. In a way, it was her own fault for what she did. She shouldn’t have been exploited the way she was, though I think she would never have put those pictures up herself,” said one girl.
“I think she was at a festival and she lost control, lost the run of herself a bit. She wasn’t the only person doing it, I bet, she just got caught,” said a second.
The rest of their friends were less forgiving. “She knew what she was doing. If you do something like that in public, in the middle of the day, you’re hardly going to expect to get away with it and not get in any trouble for it,” she said.
“She’s not a victim. It was her own decision to get drunk. She has to take responsibility for her actions while she’s drunk”.
“It’s not as if a guy went around asking ‘oh, give me a blow job’. It was a girl selling herself out,” said another of the girls, all the same age as Slane Girl.
“To be fair,” said her friend, “she put herself out in the open, she didn’t get caught. It was too easy to catch her. She was putting the guy in a position of power”.
“I don’t think she was a victim, at the time,” said another girl. “But afterwards, when it was videoed, she became a victim, she had no control. At the time, she had control, but afterwards she had no control. It couldn’t have been controlled”.
Friends are a powerful influence on teenagers and the teenage girls I spoke to were scathing about ‘Slane girl’s’ friends failure to look after her at the Eminem concert.
“You shouldn’t let your friends do that. I’d like to think, if that was me that was drunk, that one of the girls here would have given me a slap,” said one.
“Absolutely, they left her down,” said another. “Definitely, her friends let her down,” said a third. “If I had seen someone doing that, even if I didn’t know her, I would have picked her up and dragged her off.”
“There was no need for what her friends did. Her friends kind of left her there. There was no need for that. You look after each other if you’re drinking. You have to take some responsibility.”
“The people who videoed it, and the people that forwarded it on, they’re just as bad as her for doing it because, fair enough, she shouldn’t have done it, but the ones who put it up on the internet, there was no need for it,” said one girl.
“I think it was disgraceful,” said a second. Look at how that will affect her. That will affect her for the rest of her life, because somebody thought it would be funny to put it on the internet,”
“Well, she messed up and they exploited her,” said a third.
“If I saw something crazy like that, I’d send it to a friend and she’d send to a close friend, but it would be done privately. That’s different to those who’d post it publicly,” said one of the girls.
“I think it’s the fact that we don’t know her. If it was someone I knew, I’d be like ‘this picture is going around, what’s the story?’, but if I didn’t know her, probably not,” another said.
“She did nothing wrong. The guys did nothing wrong. It was more her friends did something wrong, by passing on a private message,” said the first.
“It was blown up hugely,” said a second, who said the threesome was the trio’s own business. “She might not have told them if the guys weren’t well-known, she wouldn’t have told her friends. It’s all because the boys are famous and it shouldn’t make a difference”.
Her friends was harshly criticised by the 17-year-olds. “If you tell your friends something, the last thing you suspect is it to go on the internet. That was her personal life and that is something you share with somebody you trust, she was a victim afterwards,” said one.
“Threesomes are going on every day. It’s not something unusual. She could have had an orgy with seven people, but if they weren’t famous nobody would have cared,” said another. “I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who were giving her abuse who have done the exact same thing, but with people that aren’t famous.”
“The thing with the ‘rugby threesome’ that’s different to ‘Slane girl’ is it was a private message that somebody else put online, but with ‘Slane girl’ it was her own decision to act irresponsibly in public and put herself at risk.”
The girls were reserved when discussing porn. They didn’t want to discuss porn; nor did the boys I interviewed. They discussed it in the abstract, but were not comfortable talking about their own experiences, even amongst each other.
“The boys watch it. We know they watch it. They don’t talk about it with us, but they watch it. I suppose the danger is that it would set false expectations for boys and that would put a lot of pressure on us,” said one girl.
“Yeah, like if they never had sex before and they think this is what it’s like,” said one.
“And, yeah, and if they think this is what girls look like,” said another. They all nodded. “All those women, everywhere on them has been altered, it’s not fair to girls.”
“Its hard to know what they’re thinking about it,” said another. “They don’t talk much about what they’re thinking, boys don’t voice their thoughts”.
“I think it’s the ones without a brain who are thinking like that, though, the thick ones who can’t see the difference,” said her friend. “Other guys, and older guys, should have more sense to realise that it’s not real. I would imagine, at 20, men would realise that airbrushed models are not real.”
The girls (all sixth-year students who use Twitter, Facebook and, to a lesser degree, askfm) were black-and-white about who is a victim online.
“‘Tampon girl’? Seriously. She was missing something. There’s a want in her and that is sad, and she has probably been destroyed by social media. But the problem was there first. She did another video months afterwards, bawling crying at how she’d been treated and saying her friends had all dumped her,” said one of the girls.
A second girl had a different take: “I feel sorry for those who get caught, having done all they can to do something privately... that way social media makes all of us more vulnerable. If they go somewhere and think it’s private and get caught, its awful, but when they doing something dodgy in an open space? You can’t say it’s not their fault,” said another.
The girls said they would playfully taunt their friends with pictures that could ‘get them into trouble’. They also said, as did the boys, that there is a ‘line’ among teenage friends that isn’t for crossing. All think sending nude pics to boyfriends is asking for trouble.
“We had this discussion earlier. I wouldn’t, haven’t and they wouldn’t as, basically, it’s not rocket science, down the line, you don’t know what’s going to happen with that person and then they have that power?” one said.
“There’s a line between funny and being stupid. And most people just know. All teenagers aren’t stupid.”
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