Nancy Jo Sales > Quotes

“And yet, despite the high numbers of girls experiencing sexual harassment in schools, only 12 percent said they ever reported it to an adult. "Some researchers claim that sexual harassment is so common for girls that many fail to recognize it as sexual harassment when it happens," said the AAUW report. A 2014 study, published in Gender & Society, of students in a Midwestern city also found that girls failed to report incidents of sexual harassment in school because they regarded them as "normal." Their lack of reporting was found to stem from girls' fear of being labeled "bad girls" by teachers and administrators, who they felt would view them as provoking how they were treated. They also feared the condemnation of other girls, some of whom were shown to be unsupportive, accusing them of exaggerating or lying. Many girls saw everyday sexual harassment and abuse as "normal" male behavior male behavior and something they had to ignore, endure, or maneuver around.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“Now it was as if everybody had become their own fan. Everybody was their own paparazzi.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, The Bling Ring: How a Gang of Fame-Obsessed Teens Ripped Off Hollywood and Shocked the World

“To se someone really getting to know who they are is a beautiful, beautiful, thing.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, The Bling Ring: How a Gang of Fame-Obsessed Teens Ripped Off Hollywood and Shocked the World

“But whether or not teenagers are using dating apps, they're coming of age in a culture that has already been affected by the attitudes the apps have introduced. 'It’s like ordering Seamless,' says Dan, the investment banker, referring to the online food-delivery service. 'But you’re ordering a person.' The comparison to online shopping seems apt. dating apps are the free-market economy come to sex.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“Emily swiped right on every picture, indicating interest, and within minutes she was getting matches. Her picture, now centered in a little circle, came rolling toward a boy's picture in another circle, and collided with it, with a little ding. "See," she said, "it's like a game.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“We are in uncharted territory" when it comes to sex and the internet, says Justin Garcia, a research scientist at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. "There have been two major transitions" in heterosexual mating, Garcia says, "in the last four million years. The first was around ten to fifteen thousand years ago, in the agricultural revolution, when we became less migratory and more settled," leading to the establishment of marriage as a cultural contract.
"And the second major transition is with the rise of the Internet," Garcia says. Suddenly, instead of meeting through proximity, community connections, and family and friends, people could meet each other virtually and engage in amorous activity with the click of a button. Internet meeting is now surpassing every other form. “It’s changing so much about the way we act both romantically and sexually,” Garcia says. “It is unprecedented from an evolutionary standpoint.”
And yet this massive shift in our behavior has gone almost completely unexamined, especially given how the internet permeates modern life. While there have been studies about how men and women use social media differently- how they use language and present themselves differently, for example- there's not a lot of research about how they behave sexually online; and there is virtually nothing about how girls and boys do. While there has been concern about the online interaction of children and adults, it's striking that so little attention has been paid to the ways in which the Internet has changed the sexual behavior of girls and boys interacting together. This may be because the behavior has been largely hidden or unknown, or, again, due to the fear of not seeming "sex-positive," mistaking responsibility for judgement.
And there are questions to ask, from the standpoint of girls' and boys' physical and emotional health and the ethics of their treatment of each other. Sex on a screen is different from sex that develops in person, this much seems seems self-evident, just as talking on a screen is different from face-to-face communication. And so if talking on a screen reduces one's ability to be empathic, for example, then how does sex on a screen change sexual behavior? Are people more likely to act aggressively or unethically, as in other types of online communication? How do gender roles and sexism play into cybersex? And how does the influence of porn, which became available online at about the same time as social networking, factor in?”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“Young women's expectations of safety and entitlement to respect have perhaps risen faster than some young men's willingness to respect them," says Stephanie Coontz, who teaches history and family studies at Evergreen State College and has written about the history of dating. "Exploitative and disrespectful men have always existed. There are many evolved men, but there may be something going on in culture now that is making some more resistant to evolving.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“So why was Kim Kardashian famous? Because she was very good at marketing herself, that was all - and today, that was enough. Corporations are now people and people are now products, known as "brands". At a time when the 1 percent was getting richer, the 99 percent was suddenly trying to Keep up with the Kardashians.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, The Bling Ring: How a Gang of Fame-Obsessed Teens Ripped Off Hollywood and Shocked the World

“Kids are spending so much time communicating through technology, they're not developing basic communication skills that humans have used since forever,' says psychologist Jim Taylor, author of Raising Generation Tech: Preparing Your Children for a Media-Fueled World. "Communication is not just about words. It's about body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, even pheremones, all of which can't be conveyed through social media. Emoticons are very weak substitutes."
And when nonverbal cues are stripped away, it can limit the potential for understanding, arguably the foundation of empathy. When researchers at the University of Michigan reviewed data from seventy-two studies conducted between 1979 and 2009, all focused on monitoring levels of empathy among American college students, they found that students today were scoring about 40 percent lower than their earlier counterparts.”
― Nancy Jo Sales

“The APA surveyed multiple studies which found links between the sexualization of girls and a wide range of mental health issues, including low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, cutting, even cognitive-dysfunction. Apparently, thinking about being hot makes it hard to think: "Chronic attention to physical appearance leaves fewer cognitive resources available for other mental and physical activities," said the APA report.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“A landmark 2007 report by the American Psychological Association (APA) found girls being sexualized--or treated as "objects of sexual desire... as things rather than as people with legitimate sexual feelings of their own"--in virtually every form of media, including movies, television, music videos and lyrics, video games and the Internet, advertising, cartoons, clothing, and toys. Even Dora the Explorer, once a cute, square-bodied child, got a makeover to make her look more svelte and "hot.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“The girl was surprised when Freitas referred to the experience as sexual assault. "She had no idea that that's what it was, Freitas said. "I'm not sure some young women know what consent is anymore." It's ironic that there has been such outrage in the media about young women crying rape, when in actuality there seems to be a lack of understanding among some young women and girls about whether their encounters are rape or not.
"We've learned to be distant from our bodies, " Freitas said.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“So, schools will say they have a ‘zero tolerance’ for bullying, but they really don’t want to deal with anything.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“Misogyny now has become so normalized,” says Paul Roberts, the Impulse Society author. “We can’t even see the absurdity and the inequity of it, it’s so pervasive. When the male gaze was digitized, it was almost as if it was internalized. With smartphones and social media, girls had the means of producing the male gaze themselves, and it was as if they turned it on themselves willingly in order to compete in a marketplace in which sex was the main selling point.
And the social media companies aren't going to do anything about it, as long as it's driving traffic.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“It all goes together,” Montana said. “Society wants to sell them things, so it makes them grow up faster. Sexism serves capitalism.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“Communication is not just about words. It’s about body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, even pheromones, all of which can’t be conveyed through social media. Emoticons are very weak substitutes.” And when nonverbal cues are stripped away, it can limit the potential for understanding, arguably the foundation of empathy. When researchers at the University of Michigan reviewed data from seventy-two studies conducted between 1979 and 2009, all focused on monitoring levels of empathy among American college students, they found that students today were scoring about 40 percent lower than their earlier counterparts.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“The mainstreaming of porn is tremendously affecting what’s expected of them. They’re learning sex through porn. What it means to have sex, a lot of the time, is to mimic what they see in pornography.”
(Donna Freitas quote from book)”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“Once upon a time, the American girl was a shining symbol of something fresh, spirited, and fully self-confident. Mark Twain said, “The average American girl possesses the valuable qualities of naturalness, honesty, and inoffensive straightforwardness; she is nearly barren of troublesome conventions and artificialities.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, The Bling Ring : How a Gang of Fame-Obsessed Teens Ripped Off Hollywood and Shocked the World

“In an interview om WNYC in 2015, Willliam Arkin, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, national security expert, and the author of Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Prefect Warfare, compared the military's compulsive data-collecting with unmanned drones to our collective addiction to our smartphones. "You can't just stop yourself from checking your e-mail or texting," Arkin said. "And that's the world of drones in a nutshell." Are we using our phones like drones? Compulsively checking on one another? And when we don't like what someone has to say, or perhaps how they look, dropping destructive speech bombs whose after-effects we never have to see in person?”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“I’ve gone to visit her several times now and I can really see the growth and the change and the lightbulb really starting to turn on. And it’s really an incredible thing to watch. To see someone really getting to know who they are is a beautiful, beautiful thing.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, The Bling Ring : How a Gang of Fame-Obsessed Teens Ripped Off Hollywood and Shocked the World

“In 1998, I did a story for New York my editor headlined “Make Moves, Blow Up, Get Paid,”
― Nancy Jo Sales, The Bling Ring : How a Gang of Fame-Obsessed Teens Ripped Off Hollywood and Shocked the World

“Kids started having their own cameras, en masse, in the 1960s. Kodak Instamatics, which came out in 1963, were inexpensive ($16) and easy to use, durable and small, the perfect size to fit in a child’s pocket or the upper tray of a footlocker on its way to summer camp. The Instagram logo, in a conscious nod, echoes the look of the early Instamatics—a dark stripe on top, metallic on the bottom, with a round flat lens and viewfinder in the middle. The”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“But another important question is, what is making some boys think sexual harassment is normal?”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“They could have come around to the back parking lot like everyone else, but instead they came in the front, where the cameras were.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, The Bling Ring : How a Gang of Fame-Obsessed Teens Ripped Off Hollywood and Shocked the World

“Women go out with men for years until they really figure out who a man is.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, The Bling Ring : How a Gang of Fame-Obsessed Teens Ripped Off Hollywood and Shocked the World

“They were slim and slinky and wearing eyeliner wings and sheer sleeveless tops, short shorts, and ankle boots. It was a sort of hipster, fashionista version of provocative.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“Many things were returned, but all of the celebrities said in Grand Jury testimony that they only got back a fraction of what was stolen. Many said they were still finding things missing.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, The Bling Ring : How a Gang of Fame-Obsessed Teens Ripped Off Hollywood and Shocked the World

“He further said Neiers “seemed to be a good girl” and had achieved the “highest level in Pilates you can earn.” (When I later contacted the Pilates Method Alliance, the governing body of Pilates in the United States, they said no such ranking exists.)”
― Nancy Jo Sales, The Bling Ring : How a Gang of Fame-Obsessed Teens Ripped Off Hollywood and Shocked the World

“And it might have blown over, if Nick had not confessed. The police, at this point, did have very little evidence. They had no stolen property. They had some fingerprints they couldn’t place. The Patridge video was grainy enough that some good defense lawyer conceivably could have argued it away. If Nick hadn’t confessed to committing multiple crimes with his friends, it’s possible that nothing much would have ever happened to any of them. Why he did confess is one of the most puzzling aspects of this story.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, The Bling Ring : How a Gang of Fame-Obsessed Teens Ripped Off Hollywood and Shocked the World

“Two days later after Rachel left, on August 26, the LAPD, with Lohan’s permission, released the surveillance footage of her home to TMZ. Now there were two videos circulating, Lohan’s and Patridge’s, making it all but plain to see that they had captured images of the same people, and that there was a connection between the Hollywood Hills burglaries.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, The Bling Ring : How a Gang of Fame-Obsessed Teens Ripped Off Hollywood and Shocked the World