From Vanity Fair columnist Nancy Jo Sales—a provocative, urgent, utterly of-the-moment book about how social media is shattering the lives of young girls and women. Instagram. Whisper. Yik yak. Vine. You Tube. Kik. Ask FM. Tinder. The dominant force in the lives of girls coming of age in America today is social media. How it is influencing their experience of adolescence and sexuality, and wrecking their self-esteem, is the subject of Sales’s riveting and explosive American Girls.
What does it mean to be a girl in America in 2016? It means coming of age online in a hypersexualized culture that has normalized extreme behavior, from pornography to the casual exchange of nude photographs; a culture rife with a virulent new strain of sexism and a sometimes self-undermining notion of feminist empowerment; a culture in which teenagers are spending so much time on technology and social media that they are not developing basic communication skills. From beauty gurus to slut-shaming to a disconcerting trend of exhibitionism, Sales provides a shocking window into the troubling world of today’s teenage girls.
Provocative and urgent, American Girls is destined to ignite a much-needed conversation about how we can help our daughters and sons negotiate unprecedented new challenges.
We’ve put together an event kit for libraries to help foster discussion with parents and teens (together and/or separately) about the new and challenging issues that our social media use and online lives are creating. The main tool in the kit are the two discussion guides one with questions that will spark discussion among parents and one with questions geared towards teens. The discussion guides will also include a letter from Sales and a glossary of terms in the book. The kit will include buttons with feminist slogans (#RespectYourSelf, Selfies, etc), an easel with an infographic of eye-opening statistics about girls and social media use, and a slit card. Request one here and below.
Request an Event Kit, While Supplies Last.
Click for Sales’s Vanity Fair Article “Tinder and the Dawn of the Dating Apocalypse.”
Click for Sales’s Vanity Fair Article “Friends Without Benefits.”