The Mass Grooming of Gen Y

shut up and smize

16 year old me, doing my best America’s Next Top Model pose

When I was 13, I bought my first thong at Victoria’s Secret.

It had absolutely nothing to do with boys, believe it or not. I wouldn’t be fully nude in front of one for at least two more years, and I was a virgin until college (look at me, already trying to prove that I wasn’t a Child Whore, as if such a thing could exist).

Every pair of jeans for teens in the early 2000s was suuuper low rise. I remember a local boutique owner in my small town proudly brag that she carried jeans from Brazil “where the rise dips all the way down to show the top of your pubic hair.” My mom and I exchanged glances. Why the fuck would anyone want that?

I didn’t own any Brazilian jeans, but even the standard cut was so low, every woman and girl was constantly at risk of flashing her crack to the world.

You had two choices: Wear normal underwear, which everyone called “Granny panties” regardless of cut, color, or pattern, or you could wear a thong, which would stick out higher but actually cover your entire crack better than most of the Grannies. I knew I would never be able to convince my mother to buy me a thong at 13, so I leapt at the opportunity to go with my friend to Victoria’s Secret while her mom ducked into Macy’s at the mall. With my tiny stash of cash, I was able to afford one single thong. It was bright green with white stripes and lace along the sides. It was also horrendously uncomfortable. But after a year of seeing other girls’ “whale tails” peek out of their Abercrombie jeans, I finally felt like I could retain my modesty without losing coolness points.

My mom found that thong about a year later, long after I’d given up on experiencing an eternal wedgie to fit in. She was, understandably, horrified. “Where did you even GET this?” she cried. “Did a boy buy this for you?”

“Are you trying to be a little slut?”

I talked to my mom about it today. She remembers this moment, although the part where she called me a slut was somewhat fuzzy (daughters never forget, sorry Mama). To her, the concept of a child owning a thong was so prepostreous, its implications so terrifying, I think she blacked out. She went kinda feral after JonBenét Ramsey happened, putting little rocks on my windowsills to make noises in case anyone tried to get in, hanging windchimes from all the door handles, and waking up in the middle of the night just to check I was still there. I know that when she found that thong, she was just clumsily trying to protect me.

It didn’t help that I was totally frozen in that moment, unable to properly articulate that I was actually trying to be less revealing by wearing a thong, because that is an objectively insane argument unless it’s been heavily, intentionally normalized by the culture around you.

Looking back, I can see it’s no accident that the founder of Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie is a frequent flier in the Epstein files.

The early 2000s were a particularly difficult time to be a teenage girl. There was enough internet to give us AIM and MySpace, but not enough for there to be guardrails, social norms, or any forms of support to contrast with the garbage we were being fed by people we now recognize as monsters. It was also the golden age of trashy reality TV, where horrifically skinny women lived in bikinis and got sloppy drunk for their male producers’ entertainment. Friends might have had a gay wedding in S1, which was wildly progressive for the time, but it also got a ton of mileage out of Monica’s fat suit.

Go ahead, be a lesbian! Just be skinny about it.

Even in today’s Ozempic era, it’s rare to see celebrities as thin as they were in the “heroin chic” days. And when we do see it, as we currently are with Ariana Grande, we worry. Meanwhile, the only cool girl clothes in 2006 required you to have either tremendous self-esteem (lol), or the body of an underdeveloped child. Now that we know how many literal pedophiles designed and shaped that culture, it makes all the sense in the world. But at the time, all we could do was develop an eating disorder and hope for the best when our digital cameras flashed.

How did we not see it? They’re even wearing pigtails!

I heard recently that women are struggling even harder than when #MeToo retraumatized us all with memories of the time we were either assaulted or made a narrow escape. I spent my entire therapy session yesterday unloading about this feeling, trying to understand why I feel more violated today than I did in 2018 (or even in 2009, when I had my own narrow escape). I think it’s somewhat easier to cope with one or even a handful of horrible memories of assault than it is to face the truth that our entire girlhoods were shaped by pedophiles. At least with assault, we have a framework to push through our misplaced guilt. Some of us can even arrive at the conclusion that we were victims, and begin to heal with the blame squarely on our assailants.

There is power to reclaim in the word “survivor.”

So far, I haven’t felt any power in realizing that I spent most of my life hating my body because powerful sickos enjoyed raping children.

I remember looking at my body before my wedding, wishing I could cut thick chunks of my body off with scissors. I remember eating entire pizzas alone in my junior year dorm room, waiting for that nauseating feeling of fullness to claim me so that I could run to the bathroom and throw it all back up. I spent entire years of my adult life refusing to look at my naked body in the mirror. Years. I couldn’t handle having to deal with a shame spiral every time I took a shower, so I turned away from my own skin in its totality. I just denied having a body at all.

These are the behaviors of a traumatized victim. I know that now. But what do you do, when your abuser isn’t one single person? Your trauma caused not by an event, but an entire cultural period? How do you rewire a whole generation’s brain?

All I see when I look at this picture is a not-flat stomach. That is an illness.

Netflix recently released a documentary about America’s Next Top Model. ANTM was one of the biggest shows of my adolescence. Girls would mainline ten episodes in a row at sleepovers. Reaction shots from the show were some of the first GIFs I ever saw. Tyra’s “I was rooting for you! WE WERE ALL ROOTING FOR YOU!” remains a staple of meme culture, 20 years later.

Most importantly, ANTM gave us a blueprint for the ideal young woman’s body. The show’s thesis was that any pretty girl in America could be a model, which at the time felt incredibly empowering. Even better, extremely successful Black supermodel Tyra Banks ran the show, promising to use her platform to include every kind of beauty on the runway and change modeling culture forever. Tyra felt like one of us. She introduced us to Miss J, the first drag queen I’d ever routinely seen onscreen who wasn’t the butt of a joke. She mentored the girls every season, and genuinely seemed to root for them. We trusted her.

Looking back at the horror show she created, I cannot believe we didn’t see it sooner. But all Tyra ended up doing in the end was damage. Not a single winner of ANTM went on to become even medium-famous. Name one! Full name? I sure can’t. And in the interim, while the competition raged, she routinely put girls in horribly degrading, dangerous positions. The fat-shaming was constant and public. Dozens of girls passed out or got hypothermia over the years due to their lack of body fat, only to be criticized later for “not being strong enough to work through it” like a real model.

I can’t bring myself to post all the examples, but you get the idea.

I knew a girl at Yale who was on ANTM. She got so drunk at one of our Yale/Harvard football games, the biggest game of the year, she fell down the steep concrete steps of the Yale Bowl and had to be taken to the hospital. She was drunk in the dining hall. She was drunk in the courtyard in the middle of the day. I never once saw her smile. I didn’t understand! She was so beautiful! So thin! She had a shot at becoming America’s Next Top Model! Why would a dream girl be so unhappy?

I don’t know what happened to Victoria, but I do know what happened to Shandi. She was 21 when she became a contestant, and finished 3rd overall. She also got blackout, unresponsively drunk on camera, and “had sex” with another man while she had a boyfriend back home. In today’s terms, that’s rape. In 2006, it became such a massive cheating scandal, Tyra came into the girls’ quarters the next day and lectured Shandi about how horrible it feels to have an unfaithful partner.

The producers forced a rape victim to call her boyfriend on camera and tell him she was a cheating whore. They then filmed her calling her assailant to ask him about the risk of STDs. Shandi had to apologize hundreds of times, on camera, in magazines, and online. People came up to her on the street and called her a whore to her face for years afterwards, right next to her boyfriend. She did not become a model. He eventually left her. And while she was brave enough to tell her story for the documentary, it’s obvious she still struggles to this day.

For what? A TV show that was supposed to empower us. Change the game more in our favor. Give us a big sister in Tyra, who we trusted with our bodies and hearts.

Turns out she’s just another fuck-you-pay-me parasite. Not as egregious a monster as, say, former prince Andrew, but certainly a bigger betrayer of trust, because we truly thought she was one of us. Some of those girls will never fully recover from what ANTM did to them. That show will always be a milestone of millennial cultural history. And it was abusive, time and time again.

It didn’t just stop at body image. Those girls were berated for standing up for themselves, showing too much personality, or not taking it on the chin when something unconscionable happened.

Keenyah was sent home because she couldn’t stop crying while her assigned male model, pictured above, harassed her on set (on camera!) and groped her. They looked at this picture of him actively assaulting her, after she had made it clear she was wildly uncomfortable during the shoot, and told her she wasn’t serving enough face. Dream gone, all because she didn’t just shut up and smize.

I was a pretty strong-willed teenager, and even I found myself shrinking my personality, my opinions, and my needs to meet those of the men around me, even when they were my peers. I had a close male friend growing up, someone I referred to as my big brother. I loved Trey! We both liked Eminem and dirty jokes. He listened to my problems and gave me real advice, even though he was a dumb teenage boy. He never once made a move on me. I held his hand when he cried over the death of his brother, who got out of his car to help someone out of a burning wreck when a drunk Dallas Cowboy hit him going over 100 mph. He died for being a good man, and it broke Trey. We were family for a good ten years.

So when he was about 16 and I was 13, and he told me to “pop a squat” on his lap, I didn’t say no. It was my dad’s 40th birthday, and I didn’t want to make a scene.

It ended up being quite the scene! Multiple people commented loudly within earshot how inappropriate my behavior was. My grandfather asked my mother, “Is that Tara’s boyfriend?” And my mom, still seeing me as a little girl, told him he was like a brother to me, and we were just sitting together.

The thing is, both were accurate. I genuinely don’t think Trey was trying to make me uncomfortable. There’s video of all this happening, since it was my dad’s birthday, and my face is super pale, my laugh stilted, but I’m “passing” as comfortable. I think he probably saw movies where men were more manly with a pretty girl in their lap, and he was 16 and stupid, and that was literally all there was to it. Again, he never made a move or indicated he was into me. I think he just wanted to feel like a man.

But my acquiescence to his desire to look cool made me feel so dirty. Used. Uncomfortable. I knew people were staring at us! I didn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. I also didn’t want to hurt my big brother’s feelings, so frankly I just let him tell me what to do because it was easier than being myself. My independent, takes-no-prisoners, men-ain’t-shit self. She packed herself down for his ego.

It was so far from the last time I would make myself feel small and used for the boys around me. I gave blowjobs I didn’t want to give, just so they would stop pressuring me for sex, or, even better, shut up and drive me home already. I once let a boy I didn’t even like anymore check us into a motel for sex I absolutely wasn’t gonna have with him, to avoid hurting his feelings. His. FEELINGS. And then I faked an orgasm when we “compromised” on oral! What the fuck?! What’s worse, I still feel shame about that day. Shame he should be feeling.

How do we reckon with all this? How do we recover from such enormous cultural grooming? Particularly when it seems our government is not only involved in both sexual and societal crimes, but is deeply invested in…not investigating themselves?

Forget about our President, if you can, and just think about the amount of money and power in men like Bill Gates and Elon Musk. We can have all the revelations we want about the monsters they are, but what is actually going to happen to hold them accountable?

No matter what happens, it’s not like you can get reparations on lost girlhood innocence. The past is the past. All we have is the body we’re in, the mind we’re gifted with, and the actions we decide to take to prevent such things from happening to our daughters. I have always been terrified to have a daughter, because I am so afraid of what she’ll have to endure. I’m so afraid I haven’t grown enough to keep her safe from the broken foundation of my own self worth. I just wanted to raise a good man.

I’m a Big Sister now for Big Brothers Big Sisters. It means I mentor local girls at a school in my deeply impoverished neighborhood of immigrants and fellow people driven out of the rest of Boston by cost of living. It can be hard to connect with 12-14 year old girls, especially when you’re the only white girl in the room. We use a lot of icebreaker questions, and they’re always my favorite part of our time together, because I get the best answers from these girls.

From Kendall, who is 12, loves snakes and drew me a picture of myself that will sit on my fridge forever: “If I had a spaceship, I would fly it to another planet and make friends with those aliens, then use their tech to come back and burn up all the billionaires and save the planet.”

The prompt was: If you could live in space or the ocean, what would you choose? No surprise, Kendall is my favorite.

When I did a lesson last week on self-esteem and identity, our icebreaker was stupid, so I asked what everyone’s favorite part of herself was. What made her unique and proud? “I’m a good friend,” Bryanna said. “I’M A BIG WEIRDO!” Kendall announced. My favorite answer came from Samariah. No makeup, hoodie scrunched up around her nose, zero hesitation: “My face card.”

The casual confidence of these girls inspires me every day. They’re not immune to insecurity, of course, but even with social media’s siren call of self-hatred, they still seem to retain a solid sense of self, at least for now.

“You won’t always feel confident,” I told them after they gave me their answers. “Sometimes you will feel out of place. It might hurt, or make you feel small. But please, when you feel that way, try to remember what you just told me. Try to remember the things you love about yourself, especially the unique ones. Be proud to be weird. Work that face card. Be the best friend you can be. Don’t ever let anyone take away the certainty you have, right now, that you have something great in you.”

When I quit my preaching and snapped out of my speech, I felt a little embarrassed. Obviously I wasn’t just talking to their adolescent selves. I was talking to me, too. Some of the girls gave me some well-earned side eye, but Genysys called me wise, so I’ll say it was a draw.

I know one speech from some white girl you see once a week isn’t going to fix how broken girlhood has been. But I wish someone young and (hopefully) cool had told me that kind of thing when I was their age. I wish I could go back to myself in 8th grade and tell her she was a wildly beautiful girl who deserved to be kind to herself.

You too, Abby.

I think it is past time that we stopped trying to measure ourselves based on what other people want us to be. It’s clearly making the wrong people happy! And one can only ever be themselves; why on earth would we expect every human to possibly conform to one right way to look/act/work? What is the cost of our constant anxieties? How many beautiful things whizz by our heads, as we obsess over bodies we will dearly miss someday? How much damage do we inflict on ourselves by trying to please people who may never like or respect us? What do we gain by…any of it?

I write, in part, to try to reclaim the aspects of myself I used to love. I don’t mince words, and I don’t shy away from conflict. These are things the world has tried to beat out of me, and I want. Them. Back. I want to take a damn compliment without deflecting. I want to wear clothes that make me feel good about myself, and take no negative commentary on my body, ever again. Especially from my own brain. I want to face my own body in the mirror and marvel at her strength.

I want to keep learning from my Little Sisters. And someday, from my daughter.

Not-A-Prince Andrew was arrested today. Forensic searches have begun for bodies that may have been buried during the Epstein Era. Europe appears to be far less forgiving of these atrocities than America, which is ironic from a place that has France in it (sorry to my ancestors). I do believe accountability will come for the people who made our lives difficult, and others’ a true Hell.

What we can do is forgive ourselves. Try to forgive the people in our past who called us sluts because they loved us (love you too, Mama). Refuse to forgive those who inflicted real trauma on our bodies and souls. Reach out to the women in our lives and be a lifeline, because y’all, we are not all right.

Embrace the imperfections. They’re what makes us weird, and Kendall says being weird is her favorite thing about herself.

What’s yours?

Love,

T.