The Cyber Effect (25 page)

Human beings dress with an outcome in mind, even if subconsciously. For a teenager, clothing is an intense and complicated affair. Teenagers are keenly sensitive about what they are wearing and how they present themselves, and use clothing to try on roles and identity, still feeling uncertain about where they may land. They are also enormously influenced by friends and popular culture. Teens want to look cool and knowing, perhaps often in direct proportion to how uncool and unknowing they feel inside.

It's a cliché that some adolescent and teenage girls like to wear provocative clothing in order to look more grown-up. But in recent years, the trend toward sexually provocative clothing in this age group has become more extreme. I can't help but think the Internet, and its effect of quickly normalizing extremes, has something to do with this. As fashion online becomes more revealing and more provocative, and as sexts become more prevalent (half the teenagers in the United States report having sent or received one), I believe that the clothing we see on teenagers in the real world has been impacted. Of course, what is “provocative” is subjective.

Trying to talk about this subject always reminds me of discussions of global warming. The average temperature across the planet may be increasing, but since it is happening incrementally—and we may be getting used to these changes, to the point of its seeming normal—it is hard to notice. But when you hear the words “last year was the hottest on record,” it is meaningful. And I think it's fair to say, without question, that the clothing of teenagers today is more sexually provocative than ever before. How do we judge what is appropriately “sexy” and what is inappropriately “too sexy for a young teenager”?

Reality check: Should we even be using the words
sexy
and
provocative
in the same sentence as “young teenager”?

I was recently doing a forensic cyberpsychology study and needed to assess a sample of digital images to analyze a number of behavioral factors; one of these was whether the clothing worn by young subjects in certain photographs was “sexually provocative” or not. After looking at one hundred images, I had to give up. It became clear to me, as I tried to scale the provocativeness levels of the supershort shorts, miniskirts, high heels, bare tummies, Playboy Bunny logos, and thongs on eleven-year-old girls, that I had researcher bias. What does that mean? It means that you are not able to study something in an objective way. Simply put, I find the trend of online posing by and provocative clothing on adolescent and young teenagers a worrying development. I am puzzled by the social pressure that girls are under to skip adolescence and go from ten to eighteen almost overnight. They have become increasingly consumed with making themselves sexually attractive to boys, just as young boys are consumed with attempts to present themselves as hypermasculine. This premature sexualization is happening before children and young people are capable of dealing with it emotionally, mentally, or physically.

Teenage sexuality has always been a challenging construct to society, and every generation seems to complain that its teenagers are growing up too quickly. “
Youth is subjected by our civilization to aggressive sex stimuli and suggestiveness oozing from every pore,” declared the education professor Clark Hetherington in 1914, who condemned the proliferation of racy movies and tell-all magazines.

While I am not advocating a moral panic regarding the phenomenon of sexualized teens, there is a whole new layer to it when we consider cyber effects. Setting aside developmental risks, in terms of identity formation and self-concept, there is also a problem with the images left behind. While provocative selfies are intended for peers, the reality is far more troubling. They now feed the deviant interests of adults and offenders who are sexually attracted to young teens.
These images are hacked and stolen from social media and have ended up on pornography sites. In some cases, young teens have located their own images on
these sites, read the lewd and disturbing comments, and been traumatized. Worrying about contemporary sexualization of teenagers is one thing. But worrying about actual forensic risk is another.

Plastic surgery among teenagers is another area that has been impacted by the norms online. The easy curating of selfies may be linked to a
rise in plastic surgery. According to a 2014 study by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (AAFPRS), more than half of the facial surgeons polled reported an increase in cosmetic surgery for people under thirty. There is also a rise in children and teenagers requesting teeth whitening and veneers reported at dental clinics. “Social platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and the iPhone app Selfie.​im…force patients to hold a digital microscope up to their own image and often look at it with a more self-critical eye than ever before,” explains Dr. Edward Farrior, president of the AAFPRS. “These images are often the first impressions young people put out there to prospective friends, romantic interests, and employers, and our patients want to put their best face forward.”

Sadly, surgeons have reported that bullying is also a cause of children and teens asking for plastic surgery, usually as a result of being bullied rather than a way to prevent it.

Okay, so let's put all these trends and technological developments together—from teenagers using apps to filter and “improve” the appearance of their selfies to the rise of plastic surgery among young people, the escalation in provocative self-presentation, and the quest for the perfect body. What do they tell us, given that we know that human beings look to feedback in order to develop identity?

Imagine for a moment the shy thirteen-year-old who feels uncomfortable speaking to others. For this child, posting a selfie will be easier and more rewarding—no actual contact! Now imagine that child progressing through the stages of identity formation and never having to practice being a human being on the stage of real life. This is what causes isolation in adulthood.

Now consider this phenomenon as it may impact slightly less shy
children—ones who, like many adolescents, find it stressful or difficult to express themselves in a real-world setting and prefer to retreat to the computer screen for social contact. There, it is easier to be the exciting, attractive person they wish to be. Why would you want your real self visible in the real world if your cyber self is so much better? But this creates a problem down the road.

Which is the ideal self?

And which self is in the locked room?

This matter is complicated by the legitimacy of the virtual world. Much of our lives—for adults as well as teens—now occurs online. How we present ourselves socially matters, which is the central idea behind the socioeconomic term
social capital
—meaning that our social networks have actual economic value. In other words, who we know and how we look could have an impact on our earning potential.
Online, social capital can be important, even for teenagers, as they hear about schools and find employment and internships, and can earn real money on social-network sites with product endorsement and ad monetization. This simply makes their online presence more credible and important, and adds to the time and energy that goes into the commodification of self. (Sure, build a social network, but be careful, you may not get that internship if your Facebook wall is smothered in your own selfies.)

Things don't end well for Dorian Gray. In every way, his existence is corrupt. Decades of pleasure-seeking and debauchery bring him, finally, to a moment of truth and self-loathing. In a fit of anger, he kills the artist who painted his portrait; later he slashes the painting, trying to destroy the evidence of his guilty conscience. Dorian is found dead on the ground below the portrait, which has been magically restored to its youthful, beautiful version, while his own body—deformed, ugly—now reflects the true state of his soul.

In our contemporary metaphor, it is the cyber self that does not age—but can potentially live an idealized life forever online. But there is another self that is aging and human. This is the self that needs to be cared for, respected, nurtured, and nourished.

This is the self that needs the most love.

But if it's kept in the locked room, how will love find it? And can you love
that self
as much as you love your selfie?

The story of Tallulah Willis illustrates how a teenager's life can spiral out of control when the cyber self doesn't seem to measure up and isn't accepted. The daughter of actors Bruce Willis and Demi Moore spent her early years idyllically on a ranch in Idaho, offline and away from the spotlight. It wasn't until she was in third grade, when her family moved to Los Angeles, that she discovered how truly famous her parents were and what that meant for her—in terms of reflected glare and heightened expectations. She began to feel unworthy and, by comparison, unspecial.

In a candid personal essay in
Teen Vogue
, she traces the moment her life began a sad descent into self-hate and drugs. She was thirteen, sitting in a New York hotel room, looking at a photograph of herself online:

By the time Willis arrived at college, her depression was overwhelming. She couldn't sleep, wouldn't talk to anyone, hated eating, and felt
“so removed from my body and from my mind that it was like I was living in a cardboard replica of what life should be.” Her sister Scout came to her rescue, and “forced me to see what I was doing. There wasn't a huge, horrible moment, but I knew I needed to go take care of myself.” She went to inpatient treatment for forty-five days and faced her substance abuse and self-hatred. What she realized seems simple, but it's a lesson that bears repeating.

For Tallulah Willis to reconcile the cyber self who was attacked, she dug deep and went back to her authentic, younger, real-world self and tried to reconnect. It took courage to tell her story so openly, which is undoubtedly inspirational for many.

The struggle with self-image, self-esteem, and self-love doesn't just affect teenage girls. Boys can suffer just as much from confusion during the years of identity formation, and flounder—turning to alcohol, drugs, and other intoxicants to numb the sense of being out of control. And they can become just as fixated on appearance.

In 2015, a significant rise in the number of
boys and young men suffering from eating disorders—which includes anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating—was reported in Ireland and the U.K., a jump of as much as 30 percent since 2000, a problem that is linked to concern for having a “gym body” and looking buff. It is not a coincidence that this echoes the rise of social media, or the proliferation of those full-length mirror shots posed as selfies. “In the gym, emphasis is not on exercising for fun or sport, it is actually on exercising in front of a mirror to become bigger,” said Dr. Terence Larkin, consulting psychiatrist at Saint John
of God Hospital in South Dublin. “Men are beginning to go down that road of overvaluing physical appearance, and self-esteem is becoming more and more dependent on that.”

Take Danny Bowman, a teen in Britain who aspired to a life of Internet celebrity. He was fifteen when he began posting selfies on Facebook, not unlike millions of teens across the world. Seems innocent enough, right? But he became increasingly focused on his appearance, how good he looked in his selfies, and he began dreaming about becoming a model. Judging from his selfies, he felt confident that he had a shot. When a modeling agency turned him down, he was devastated. By the age of seventeen, he was a self-proclaimed “selfie addict” who had lost interest in school, friends, and sports. Perfecting his selfies was his passion, his cyber self a work of art.

The problem was his real self. By the age of nineteen, Bowman was unable to leave the house and spent up to ten hours a day preoccupied with taking his own photograph with his phone, trying to improve on his self-portrait. “
I was constantly in search of taking the perfect selfie,” Bowman told the
Mirror
, a British newspaper, “and when I realized I couldn't, I wanted to die.” In frustration and despair, he took an overdose—but fortunately, he was found in time by his mother.

Doctors prescribed intensive therapy for Bowman, who was treated for technology addiction, OCD, and body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), a form of anxiety that causes sufferers to worry excessively about their appearance—a condition that apparently has become more common in the era of the selfie. I believe this condition could be aggravated or facilitated by the virtual mirror, so it is worth discussing in a bit more detail.