The Girls Are Traumatized

Photo by Aimee Vogelsang on Unsplash

On a long drive home from visiting friends one recent sunny day, my partner and I listened to a progression of sugary pop songs. She drove as I pulled them up on YouTube, cranking the volume as loud as the car's Bluetooth speakers would allow. She chose Fergalicious. I picked Hollaback Girl. She requested Meghan Trainor. I queued up Kesha. With the windows down, we sang to the tops of our lungs, wind blowing in our hair. We laughed at each vapid lyric and our penchant for such guilty pleasures. What angsty teenage anthem would we blast next? Someone mentioned Rhianna, and Bitch Better Have My Money topped the search results. That sounded silly enough.

I ignored the content warning—when has that ever mattered?— but was shocked by the sight of Rhianna and her friends wrangling a buck naked, tied up woman into an abandoned barn, followed by six minutes of sadistic torture porn, culminating in a brutal murder.

Not just surprised, though. Taken down a notch.

I didn't feel like singing anymore. The previously jovial mood gave way to halfhearted chatter about the traffic and what kind of time we were making. I'd seen everything in my scrappier days, so it actually took me a minute to realize what had taken the wind from our sails. Sexual violence aimed at women isn't just some tacky cinematic trope, after all. It's real, it's all around us, and it's too often glorified by men's magazines and high fashion ads. Now it was being packaged for mainstream music audiences, young and old—and by a woman.

Later that month, while traveling to a conference, I browsed the in-flight entertainment offered on the screen in front of me. Having already finished The Office, I chose the opening episode of a new series following the escapades of an attractive, thirty-something single woman. It was filmed in a fast-paced, scene-skipping sort of way, so within two minutes, its protagonist had gotten drunk, fallen into bed with a date, been anally raped, and found herself charmed when the man thanked her for tolerating it the next morning. I'm no prude, but this ruined my mood, too. This was no mere alternative-sex scene, but the casual account of a woman winking at her own sexual assault. A veritable celebration of her porous boundaries—free and readily available to any child seated a row behind her parents.

As a young girl with ambitions beyond parenthood, I looked to music and television to learn the ways of the modern woman. In the seventies, models of womanhood were varied and often liberating, if imperfect. Bewitched suggested that even a housewife could be smart and feisty. Mary Tyler Moore showed me that a single working woman could fend for herself. Even the era's bad girls radiated a sort of detached control. Nick Gilder's Hot Child, while “running wild and looking pretty,” pursued her business with nary a thought for her admirers. Tube Snake Boogie may have taught me, before my time, that sex was fun. But it never suggested that sex meant sustaining personal injury.

There's a certain type of kid who's drawn to the weird and the dark, whether that's pornography or a photographic collection of 1800’s sideshow performers with extra limbs. I was that kid. In addition to that coffee-table book, I'd located a stack of dirty magazines, and I returned to them when I could do so without getting caught. Even kids without such tendencies find it hard to look away from the proverbial train wrecks they encounter. As a young adult, I was invited to watch Faces of Death, a compilation of gruesome death scenes¹ my friends were passing around. By then, I'd learned there were rabbit holes I'd rather not tumble into, and I declined. But children, who can't predict what scenes will sear themselves into their gray matter, lack the impulse control to thoughtfully choose what they consume.

For my generation, opportunities to overindulge were limited. Today, however, they're a click or two away. Singer Billie Eilish has reported watching porn as early as age 11. A quarter of teens, according to one survey, see their first porn in “primary school.” Even kids without phones see the sketchy stuff their classmates are browsing. And as Jonathan Haidt points out, even Instragram and selfies destroy girls' self esteem and increase the rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide for kids as young as ten.

This article by new substacker Zinnia explores girls' complicated relationship with sexual objectification. Citing the rise of OnlyFans accounts and “hypersexual online personas” among “normal looking girls,” she posits that the glut of beautiful and sexualized images with which young women are “bombarded” creates an illusion of competition that sends them into a “race to the bottom.”

I am reminded of an anthropology professor's claim that in geographical areas where women outnumber men, they're more likely, paradoxically, to be victims of male violence. This is because those who desire men debase themselves to compete for the few available. Though I couldn't find the study she cited, I found this one, which suggests that women so outnumbered are less “selective” and more likely to “[offer] sex without requiring high levels of commitment.” So Zinnia's insight seems correct. In our current environment, young and perpetually-online women may infer that airbrushed skin, sex-doll butt surgeries, and casual anal are the norm for women.

Is it any wonder that some girls, turned off by these gendered demands, conclude they aren't real women?

Detransitioner Helena confirms that for her, trans identity wasn't about seeking manhood, or even being a “masculine woman,” but about escaping womanhood as described by her thirteen-year-old peers: a call to “do porn, be prostitutes, or have dangerous, kinky, scary sounding sex with many different men.” The rise of “nonbinary” and “asexual” identities among girls is no doubt similarly motivated.

Kids can still see the darkest things my generation ever saw, but more often and in greater detail. Now they can see Rhianna videos, crime scene photos, P-Diddy beating his girlfriend, and pornography that bears no resemblance to the nude centerfolds I found in my grandpa's shed. What was once considered hardcore is now “nearly universal” in porn: sadism, bondage, gang bangs, even intentionally induced anal prolapse.

It's one thing to see pornography at a young age. It's another thing to see the porn that predominates online, where “gagging, choking and slapping” are found in 88% of scenes.

It's yet another thing to see it day in and day out, at home and at school, for long periods of time, whether by chance or by ill-advised adolescent choice.

It is another thing again to see that the violence in porn is directed at women, at your sex class, at you. To learn that you “live in a breakable takeable body,” as Ani Difranco wrote in a poem on coming of age as a female.

A stumbled-upon music video and a TV pilot brought this jaded, grown-ass woman to the brink of despair, challenging my faith in humanity in the process. And that was just the above-board shit. What's this culture of casual sexual violence doing to young girls?

They're under an unprecedented onslaught of trauma, one that should break our hearts, one we cannot afford to ignore. They are not queer, trans, nonbinary, asexual, or neurodivergent. They are normal little girls with hearts and brains who know brutality when they see it, even if they've been trained to never say its name.

1. Though some scenes were later exposed as fake.