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“MY LIFE, MY BODY, MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL”

American Girlhoods for the Digital Age

“When they make media, girls explode limitations imposed by gender constructs and social norms; in fact, they may be the only ones who can.”

—PRESTON-SIDLER 2015:202

The titular quote for this final chapter comes from a Pretty or Ugly video made by June, a twelve- or thirteen-year-old White girl who films her video in a bathroom. While June does ask the pretty or ugly question in her video, she also champions social media as a space for her and other girls to share what they are really feeling. Speaking their truths and staying connected to each other and to their own thoughts and feelings are manifestations of courage and resistance for tween girls (hooks 1989; Sullivan, Taylor, and Gilligan 1995). June sums it up succinctly in her YouTube video: “It’s my life, my body, my YouTube channel.”

For the better part of a decade, I have been thinking about, investigating, and reflecting on what social media means for tween girls in the contemporary United States. Questions about girls online and the state of girlhood in America today are timely. In 2023, several public and news media articles circulated in response to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that states that more than 60 percent of U.S. girls indicate feeling persistent sadness or hopelessness (CDC 2023). The Washington Post declares a “crisis in American girlhood” (St. George, Lewis, and Bever 2023); the Associated Press asks, “Why Are Teen Girls in Crisis? It’s Not Just Social Media” (Tanner and Wang 2023). PBS NewsHour offers, “Analysis: There’s a Mental Health Crisis among Teen Girls. Here Are Some Ways to Support Them” (Englander and McCoy 2023). Social media could have quickly been assumed the primary culprit behind the mental health crisis of American girls, but the various commentary and op-eds offer a refreshing and nuanced take on the matter, some working to emphasize the voices of girls, who point to pressures, expectations, contradictions, and issues that influence their mental well-being. As the title of the Associated Press article suggests, “it’s not just social media.”

Author Alexe Bernier at The Conversation writes the following in response to the 2023 CDC report:

In my own research, I set out to understand some of the social and cultural meanings tween girls are making via their creation of digital girlhoods and their characterizations of and relationships with social media. I found that these meanings are complex and complicated, but, for better or worse, social media is a crucial part of American tween girls’ lives, and they are hard pressed to imagine existence without it.

No one book or piece of research stands alone in encapsulating the matter of tween girls on social media. The recent uptick in public and news media response is focused more on the well-being of teenage girls rather than the tween demographic. Yet this liminal space between childhood and adulthood, between empowerment and disempowerment, the “becoming” and process of “doing tween girlhoods” demands fervent attention. The tween years are the life stage during which many American girls make their forays into digital worlds. Though my research here provides only a small glimpse of understanding into a much larger, dynamic, shifting tapestry of inquiry, one thing is abundantly clear: American tween girls today navigate their lives, both offline and online, with the use of social media.

This work sheds light on the paradoxes of tween girlhood in the contemporary United States and seeks to understand how tween girls themselves negotiate and embody these paradoxes through social media participation. In examining a prominent contemporary example of digital girlhoods with the Pretty or Ugly YouTube trend and talking with tween girls about their experiences on social media, I argue that social media is not the cause of the social ills that plague American girlhood (negative body image, self-doubt, mental health issues, bullying, etc.). These issues have been prevalent far longer than social media has been a part of tween girl lives. Rather, how girls characterize their experiences on social media is an important reflection of the dominant, enduring, competing cultural models of innocent girls in need of protection and “Girl Power!” that precariously and continuously position girls on the fitful edge between empowerment and disempowerment. While social media is certainly not devoid of risk, these platforms, and the digital girlhoods American tween girls are creating within them, are salient cultural artifacts that reveal much about the importance of social media in self-representation, social capital, authenticity, self- and social development, engagement with interests, community building, and connection with friends. Social media is also a tool tween girls use to disrupt dominant, prescribed narratives of girlhood and create and define new tween girl digital cultures and subjectivities for themselves.

The user-generated nature of social media, its possibilities for self-representation, social capital, control over content, creative production, connection, and community building with other girls, all serve as meaningful grounds for why tween girls participate so prolifically on these platforms (Anderson et al. 2022; Nesi, Mann, and Robb 2023). As the Preston-Sidler (2015) quote that opens this chapter suggests, tween girls have the power and potential via social media visibility and further production of digital girlhoods to challenge, resist, and subvert dominant paradigms and reveal more nuanced realities of American girlhoods, establishing new understandings of what it means to be a tween girl coming of age in the “in between”—the blurred lines between offline and online space. For American youth, the line demarcating the realms of digital and physical has been all but blurred to indistinguishable (boyd 2014; Buckingham 2013b; Farrell 2022; Palfrey and Gasser 2016). Tween girls today move seamlessly between offline and online. Their experiences in physical spaces are a crucial impetus for why they use social media and are readily reflected in how they use these platforms.

Much of the public discourse surrounding tween girls’ use of social media is defined by adult anxieties and desires to protect them from online predators, stalkers, cyberbullies, and other possible harms such as social comparison, poor mental health, and Internet addiction. While these are sincere and valid concerns, my findings demonstrate that tween girls have concerns as well. They internalize adult concern as part of how they engage in social media participation. They set limits for themselves. They are aware of and feel the pull of social media addiction and its potential negative impacts. They know they need to be cautious about strangers online and about seeing and sharing particularly harmful or negative content. Tween girls value privacy and are keen to protect themselves online while balancing a desire and thrust toward visibility. They seek out content deemed appropriate for people their age. And they mostly interact with people they already know online. Recent research surrounding girls on social media affirms these findings (Bennett 2023; Farrell 2022; Malvini Redden and Way 2017; Nesi, Mann, and Robb 2023; Vogels, Gelles-Watnick, and Massarat 2022).

We need to trust tween girls’ abilities as digital vanguards and active agents more readily in producing digital girlhoods and listen to what they tell us about the role social media plays in their lives. This trust may be meaningfully cultivated through adult authorities and stakeholders in tween girls’ lives not taking harmful and limiting media representations of tween and teen girls at face value, instead creating opportunities for dialogue with the tween girls they know and care about—talking about what girls like and dislike about social media, asking questions about their self-representations, and continuing to help them develop practical and safe tools for exercising caution online without exigently essentializing social media as something girls should fear. Girls should be at the center of the research about their lives; their participation and their voices are vital (Mitchell and Reid-Walsh 2008; Vanner 2019).

Tween girls do rely on parents and adult authority figures to help facilitate their experiences on social media, but much of this reliance is marked by how tween girls internalize historically cyclical and well-established adult-centered moral panics surrounding their bodies in public spaces. To best support tween girls as they start to navigate social media and enter the online world, “adults and stakeholders invested in [girls’] well-being need to be slow and cautious in judgment, as the meanings, values, and significance of new digital cultures and media practices emerge” (Shields Dobson 2015:165).

I argue that contemporary American tween girlhoods are delineated by two competing cultural models: innocent girls in need of protection and “Girl Power!” The concurrent existence of these models generates contradiction and impossible expectations for tween girls to be at once empowered and disempowered, self-confident and self-deprecating, sexually desirable and sexually innocent, sure of themselves and consumed by self-doubt. To be a girl in the United States today is to be in a constant state of dilemma. At intersections of identity including race, class, ability, size, sexuality, and gender expression, the paradoxes of ideal girlhood compound.

These competing models are a result of the proliferation of enduring raced and classed protectionist discourses, postfeminist sensibilities, and a surge of popular feminist rhetoric within consumer culture. Tween girls’ body and sexuality narratives are made legible by notions of individual empowerment through “choice,” which is neoliberalism-driven consumption, capitalism, and self-improvement via body and beauty work. The distracting and flattening nature of the “Girl Power!” model is tied to how women and girls have historically been corporally objectified and sexualized in the public imagination and how girls’ bodies and sexualities have been routinely restricted in their available and acceptable expressions within a White supremacist, capitalist, ableist, cis-het normative system. Entrenched, gendered moral panics about girls’ bodies in public spaces are recycled over time, reemerging with each novel technological development or popular culture craze, manifesting as old stories in new bindings. Young girls on social media are the most recent iteration of this panic. Like panics in decades past, the onus is placed on girls to take responsibility for their bodies and behaviors (Thiel-Stern 2014) and balance expectations of self-exposure and digital visibility with staying safe amid various, and notably feminized, threats and risks associated with social media participation.

Gendered Politics of Visibility

Within a postfeminist digital culture (Banet-Weiser 2018; Shields Dobson 2015), the promise of self-empowerment is enacted through emphasis on visibility. Visibility on social media has become a tremendously important part of how tween girls “do gender” (Currie, Kelly, and Pomerantz 2009; Schilt and Westbrook 2009; West and Zimmerman 1987) in the contemporary digital age. While tween girls are expected to make themselves visible on social media in socially and culturally acceptable ways aligned with raced and classed iterations of ideal femininity, my research shows that they also give meaning to aspects of online visibility that grant opportunities for controlling self-representation and engaging their interests. They must balance this desire and expectation to be seen with a gendered politics of visibility and the enduring cultural and social imperative to protect girls’ bodies and restrict them from public spaces.

Some of the benefits and rewards of social media visibility include tween girls being able to make themselves seen in ways they want to be seen. They can explore different digital mediums and learn how to use various software and applications, building their knowledge and skill sets and increasing digital adeptness. They can be creative, silly, social, and have fun playing with identities on various platforms. Jessalynn Keller writes,

They connect with other people and gain followers and supporters of the digital girlhoods they produce. They explore their interests in deep and purposeful ways. Social media helps tween girls expose themselves to new ideas and different modes of being. If they do not see themselves readily represented in popular media—or accurately represented, as is so often the case (Bulger et al. 2021; Hill 2017; Hill Collins 1990; Smith et al. 2017)—they can represent themselves and find others who identify and express themselves in similar ways, which promotes feelings of validation and acceptance (Berger et al. 2021; Erigha and Crooks-Allen 2020; Farrell 2022; Hill 2017; Wade 2019b).

Conversely, however, making their bodies visible online renders tween girls more vulnerable, particularly as they reckon with the protectionist discourses and social structures that inform their daily lives. Gendered power dynamics are not absent from social media; gradations of these dynamics manifest online as tween girls keenly balance the desire for visibility through contemporary forms of social capital explored in previous chapters with the associated risks, largely related to constructions of race, gender expression, sexuality, and ability, and adult-centered fears of girls’ risky online behavior—sharing too much information, creating and sharing sexualized content, engaging with strangers, or making themselves targets for sexual predation or cyberbullying. In response to this, tween girls learn from parents, peers, and through their own participation, developing practices and strategies that help them manage their visibility and center how they hope to benefit from social media participation (e.g., control over how they are seen, increased self-esteem, building social capital) while prioritizing privacy and protection.

Further related to this gendered politics of visibility on social media as a new and meaningful form of social capital, I found that while girls in a postfeminist digital context are being called to visibility and self-exposure in ways readily aligned with “ideal femininity” (e.g., appearance-related content, hetero-sexiness, self-effacing authenticity), the tween girls I interviewed are largely not ascribing to this push. Rather, they set themselves apart from this kind of social media content and emphasize a desire for online visibility and resultant social capital specifically related to their interests and passions, such as dance, art, and computer coding. Even tween girls who make and post Pretty or Ugly videos demonstrate resistance to constructions of ideal femininity in notable ways. The trend itself invites questions of how tween girls are discursively constructing new meanings of girlhood through public digital performances. Tween girls who exist outside of normative standards of body and beauty may also employ self-representation on social media to challenge those standards and incite conversation about a broader multiplicity of girlhood identities and embodied experiences. As one example of this, Sarah Hill’s work on girlhoods and disability suggests that

Though my sample is small and not generalizable, I see the production of different kinds of digital girlhoods as having the potential to confront impossible notions of ideal femininity that demand hetero-sexiness and conventional standards of body and beauty in the same measure that tween girls today are expected to just “be empowered.” Tween girls are seeing through some of these contradictions and exercising control over their digital girlhoods and online self-representations in exciting, emboldening, and politically significant ways. Tween girl digital cultures will continue to shift and evolve, taking on meanings from the sociopolitical contexts of which they are a part, and tween girls’ production of digital girlhoods will continue to be an essential site of sociological inquiry.

Too often tween girls are dismissed for having shallow interests or disdained for being petty or catty with other girls, but we need to take a critical look at why tween girls are framed in this way and what tween girls themselves bring to the fore in challenging these simplistic framings. American society does not frame girls in this way because social media exists or because girls are avid users of these platforms. Legacies of girls’ gendered oppression runs deep. That said, as scholar Kimberly Hall suggests, “[young girls] represent the new vanguard of political action; dismissing them risks missing significant dynamics of power and capital within neoliberal culture as it manifests as the very affective condition of everyday life” (2015:140). A selfie is not just a selfie. A Pretty or Ugly YouTube video is not just a Pretty or Ugly YouTube video. Tween girls are social and political actors who use social media to critically engage with and create their own meanings of girlhoods.

Connection and Community

Along with controlling self-representations and creating digital content related to their lives and interests, tween girls cite wanting to connect with friends and peer groups as much as possible as a primary motivation for how and why they use social media (Boudreau 2007; Ging and O’Higgins Norman 2016; Kennedy and Lynch 2016; Lenhart et al. 2015; Malvini Redden and Way 2017; Spies Shapiro and Margolin 2014). Though girls express complicated feelings about social media in terms of pressures of social comparison and negative relational behavior such as bullying and drama, they also emphasize how maintaining friend communities in digital space is a decisive source of homosocial support and affirmation. In some cases, social media can operate as a haven and crucial site of respite from elements of toxic girl culture and other modes of social oppression. In her work on Black girlhoods and digital cultures, scholar Ashleigh Greene Wade writes that “digital spaces create more possibilities for black girls to form support networks and exercise an agency to control space often denied them in their everyday school and home environments” (2019a:81). Establishing support networks and exercising agency online may be particularly important for American tween girls who are multiply marginalized, including but certainly not limited to Black, Brown, and Indigenous girls, queer, trans, and fat girls, girls with disabilities, girls who are foreign-born or second-generation immigrants, and undocumented girls—girls embodying any number of these identities.

A large part of this desire for continual connection to friend groups online is that girls feel like themselves in their digital communities, which matters significantly because of how contradiction and (mis)representation so readily structure the social and cultural conditions of their lives. Many of the girls I interviewed directly expressed a very real concern associated with no longer having access to these support systems, these platforms for visibility, expression, and connection. When I asked my interviewees how they would feel if social media suddenly disappeared and they could not use it anymore, they reacted in telling ways:

Genie, White and ten years old, emphatically groans, “Nooooooo.”

Marcie, White and ten years old, states plainly, “I would freak out.”

Noelle, Black and thirteen years old, explains, “If I didn’t have [social media], oh my lord, I just need social media. I would be so bored! I would probably have a heart attack.”

Sierra, Black and ten years old, quietly says, “If someone took my phone away, I would not survive.”

And Chrissy, Black and thirteen years old, explains, “It would be, like, so hard. Like, changing my whole life.”

Cassell and Cramer write, “The important identity construction, self-efficacy, and social network production work that [girls] do online is not only largely ignored, but too often condemned” (2008:54). In a cultural epoch defined by deeply contradictory narratives of girlhood, an epoch in which achieving “successful” girlhood is a true dilemma due to competing cultural models, the ability for a tween girl to go online, make herself seen in ways that feel authentic to her, create content, be creative, and foster and maintain positive, supportive relationships with other girls is powerful.

Other research shows that spending time on social media benefits youth by strengthening communication, social connection, and digital skills, as well as offering more abstract benefits of greater understanding of self, community, and the broader world (Anderson et al. 2022; boyd 2014; Buckingham 2013b; Bulger et al. 2021; Farrell 2022; Ito et al. 2009; Knorr 2017; Palfrey and Gasser 2016). Regarding further research, continued intersectional inquiry is necessary to examine and unpack the intricacies and nuances of American tween girls’ social media participation, the skills it can build, and the opportunities it presents to tween girls as active agents in navigating, challenging, and changing the social, cultural, and political conditions that inform their experiences and opportunities for inclusion.

Limitations and Future Directions

This research is part of a growing body of work centered on theorizing the role that social media plays in the lives of American tween girls. As consequential users of various platforms (YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, etc.), American tween girls can create space not only for themselves but also for broader understandings and imaginings of who American tween girls are—their desires, motivations, interests, concerns, and contributions. Referencing Cassell and Cramer once again,

There are many significant avenues of continued critical investigation into tween girls’ experiences and production on social media, how they navigate “doing girlhood” through the creation of digital girlhoods. Future research must consider how American tween girls who do not engage with social media, willingly or unwillingly, experience and create girlhoods within postfeminist digital confidence culture and economies of visibility (Banet-Weiser 2018; Orgad and Gill 2022). Given how I recruited for this study, with social media use being a necessary component of inclusion, every tween girl I interviewed was active on multiple social media sites. I did not speak to tween girls who choose not to use, or are restricted from using, social media with as much or any frequency. There remains a significant need for empirical investigation into the experiences of tween girls who do not use social media and what this means for their self- and social development.

Existing literature on the social media participation gap (Jenkins 2009) suggests that in addition to having potentially harmful impacts on digital literacy skills and knowledge of digital media, a lack of social media participation may have consequences for social development. As is the case with some of my interview subjects, a tween girl may only be using Snapchat to interact with friends and family she knows in her physical social world, and no longer having that outlet for connection may have meaningful, and possibly detrimental, impacts on her. This was particularly the case amid the COVID-19 pandemic, especially the first two years, 2020 and 2021, as digital participation became the primary or even sole mode of connection and socializing for a massive number of American youth (Bennett 2023; Bulger et al. 2021; Rideout et al. 2021). The girls I interviewed indicated that most people their age they know have social media and use it regularly. Someone not having it is viewed as an aberrant occurrence and considered abnormal. Though the vast majority of teens are active on at least one social media account at any given time (Nesi, Mann, and Robb 2023; Vogels and Gelles-Watnick 2023), there is still a percentage who do not participate; we have even less data on the tween demographic because they are technically not supposed to have accounts on social media if younger than thirteen years old. Only by understanding the realities of those social conditions, how tween girls who do not have social media experience their social worlds today, can we garner a fuller sense of the overall impact that social media has on this population.

The American-centric nature of my research and the bounded geography of my interview participants are weighty limitations. The qualitative study design offers rich perspective on how girls feel about and use social media, but these findings are from a small group. That said, the interest in gender, power, girlhoods, and impacts and potentials of social media around the world continues to deepen and expand. Recent scholarship has asked questions about girls online from Belgium to India (De Leyn et al. 2021; Subramanian 2021; Vyas et al. 2020), China to Pakistan (Abbasi and Huang 2020; Chang and Tian 2021; Liu and Li 2024; Shahid, Kauser, and Zulqarnain 2018), Saudi Arabia to Nigeria (Dunmade and Tella 2023; Gangwani, Alruwaili, and Al Safar 2021; Kutbi 2015), Australia to Brazil, and beyond (Castilho and Romancini 2017; Farrell 2022; Marôpo, Jorge, and Tomaz 2020; Papageorgiou, Fisher, and Cross 2022).

Sociological inquiry that brings together intersectional and transnational feminist frameworks around specific regional and spatial landscapes, geopolitical realities, and cultural constructions of girlhoods in digital space has yielded seminal scholarship on transnational girlhoods and girlhoods in global context at different axes of identity (Berents 2016; Erevelles and Nyugen 2016; Field and Simmons 2022; Mitchell and Rentschler 2016). Catherine Vanner implores us to continue to center girls’ voices in our efforts toward learning more about what girls need, suggesting,

What does girls’ participation on social media mean across various global contexts? What do the digital girlhoods they are creating tell us about processes of girlhood in those places? What possibilities are there for girls’ political resistance and transformation online? The work being done in this arena is exciting, innovative, and timely.

There remains a dearth of research on intersectional explorations of social media participation and its impacts on girls. Questions of how tween girls at various intersections of identity relate to and characterize their experiences on social media are vital. More sociological inquiry into queer girlhoods online is a fruitful area of research, as existing literature on LGBTQIA+ youth online suggests that social media can all at once heighten experiences of discrimination, harassment, bullying, and violence as well as be a refuge, providing access to resources and community and creating space for people to express themselves in authentic ways (Austin et al. 2020; Craig et al. 2015; Kuper, Adams, and Mustanski 2018; McInroy 2019). An avenue worthy of thoughtful exploration is how new media behaviors among girls may contribute to broader representation and understanding of varied girlhood sexual subjectivities, resistance to prescribed notions of hetero-sexiness, and the queering of girlhoods. Discursive constructions of American tween girls in public and popular media deploy controlling images of appropriate or acceptable expressions of body and sexuality for tween girls, begging important questions about how content creation may disrupt and subvert those images. Additionally, as social media has contributed to increased representation and visibility of gender and sexual diversity, I wonder how queer girls may experience phenomena such as gatekeeping, policing, and surveillance surrounding queer authenticity in their performances in digital space. Would a digital values system of authenticity like what is exhibited in reaction to the Pretty or Ugly YouTube trend find parallel with questions of whether girls are being “queer enough” online?

Regarding girls with disabilities, none of the tween girls I interviewed had a visible disability, and I did not explicitly ask about disabilities, visible or invisible. I also could not reasonably assess whether the girls in the Pretty or Ugly YouTube videos identify with having a disability unless explicitly mentioned. If disability is mentioned, it is not necessarily framed that way, as tween girls in the videos reference anxiety, depression, and/or neurodiversity in a way that is usually uncritical or unattached to conceptualizations of disability as political category. Stienstra asks,

Because of the vastness and multiplicity of disability as identity, social construct, and political category (Kafer 2013; Wendell 1997), intersections of disability and girlhood embodiments require much more attention, especially as disability often supersedes girlhood as an identity category (Erevelles and Mutua 2005), marring the unique and varied gendered embodied experiences of girls with disabilities in digital space (Hill 2017; Hill 2023).

Investigating further gendered dynamics of social media use, I note that tween girls routinely brought up differences in how girls and boys use social media from their perspectives during our interviews. Research that does not lump all youth together is necessary to explore how gender scripts and norms are enacted on social media and how tween boys characterize their experiences on social media in terms of gendered expectations and gender performances. Additionally, the politics of racial performance require more fervent investigation. I did not put substantial emphasis on racial identity and racialized experiences of social media in my interview guide, as it was not a central part of my research design. While this was a missed opportunity, my interview sample was predominantly Black and Latina girls (accounting for sixteen of the twenty-six girls I interviewed). What they shared with me during the interview process showcases the intricacies, overlaps, and divergences of digital girlhoods, invaluable in illuminating nuanced, everyday experiences of tween girls online.

Additionally, the interview findings offer a compelling interplay with how the Pretty or Ugly YouTube trend is overwhelmingly White in its makeup. Racial performance was a narrow thread of analysis in my exploration of the Pretty or Ugly YouTube trend. I primarily looked at how many White girls in the trend co-opt elements of Black culture and features of Black beauty and how some Black girls demonstrate performances of “ideal femininity” (i.e., Whiteness) in their videos. Existing literature on tween and teen girls and the politics of race online is fecund and growing (Barner 2016; Erigha and Crooks-Allen 2020; Hill 2019; Hobson 2016; Lindsey 2013; Wade 2019a; Wade 2024). More thorough exploration of racial performance and performativity (Butler 1990; Markus and Moya 2010) in the Pretty or Ugly YouTube trend, in addition to continued qualitative investigation into how racial identity mediates experiences on social media for tween girls, is a crucial area of inquiry. As Wade argues, “racially nuanced understandings of girlhood can lead to more expansive imaginings of what the Internet can do in the realm of social justice” (2019a:iii).

Deepening Inquiry into the Pretty or Ugly Question

The pretty or ugly question being asked on public digital platforms offers many continued veins of analysis, whether furthering analysis of the YouTube trend itself or furthering understanding of iterations of the trend on other social media platforms. Because I was most interested in analyzing Pretty or Ugly videos as a prominent example of contemporary digital girlhoods in and of themselves, I was less focused on the social meanings of the comments posted on the videos. And because of the tremendous volume of these videos and the incredible range of number of views and comments across the trend, I did not include a systematic analysis of number of views and content of comments on videos when designing this research project. We know virtually nothing about how the tween girls making these videos respond to and/or internalize comments, and contacting subjects of these videos brings up dubious ethical quandaries. Given the widespread media condemnation of the trend, as well as the significant number of response videos that popped up in reaction to it, it is fair to suggest we assume the worst as far as how girls might interact with comments on their content. But there is also the possibility of increased self-esteem and positive self-feeling inspired by affirming comments and likes (Cipolletta et al. 2020; Davis 2013). Viewer comments and Pretty or Ugly response videos warrant further study, especially as iterations of this trend and the question “Am I pretty or ugly?” have popped up on other social media platforms.

Additionally, I recommend investigation into the Pretty or Ugly trend surrounding identity development, psychoanalysis, and the unique and important function of the web camera as a mirror. Pretty or Ugly videos are a digital version of an explicitly gendered mirror stage. Jacques Lacan (1968) theorizes the mirror stage as a mode of development for identity and subjectivity—a child learns to identify himself in a mirror as an Other, able to see the body as an object outside of himself, giving way to a psychic representation of the self, or I. Catherine Driscoll (2002) offers a more gendered approach to the mirror stage. She writes, “If something approximating the mirror stage is necessary to the formation of body image, feminine adolescence might locate processes comparable to the mirror stage” (2002:238). Pretty or Ugly videos are an example of this process. Through use of a web camera, whether on a computer, tablet, or mobile phone, girls see, watch, and assess themselves before ever posting a video for public consumption. This policing via the web camera (which literally acts as a mirror) works to construct a body image and visual representation of the self that is Othered through the screen. Self-assessment occurs first, and girls then make the choice to post these videos on YouTube. The question of pretty or ugly is not as simple as girls asking and getting answers from viewers; the fact that they are seeing themselves during the making of the video matters immensely.

In coding the Pretty or Ugly memos, it became readily apparent that most girls are not looking at the web camera as they record their videos; they are plainly looking at themselves on the screen. Often, they will move their faces and bodies and position themselves at different angles, playing with their hair and pursing their lips just as they might when looking in a mirror. A significant number of the videos in the sample do not have any verbal language or script. Rather, the viewer is only made aware of the intent of the video through the title and tagline at the bottom of the screen. Sonia’s video is a clear example. For approximately thirty seconds, the viewer watches Sonia (White and approximately eleven or twelve years old), smile into the screen, tilting and shifting her head to various angles and running her fingers through her hair. She is looking at herself, not at the camera. The only way a viewer would know to comment on her appearance is because the video, titled “Pretty or Ugly?” has a tagline below that reads, “Please tell me what you think! Am I pretty or ugly?” An investigation of the more abstract meanings and possibilities of the Pretty or Ugly trend through a framework of psychoanalytic feminist theory could yield compelling empirical and theoretical contributions to girlhood studies and questions of identity development.

Though the Pretty or Ugly YouTube trend raises several other questions, a final one I wish to highlight is around the blurred boundary between the physical and the digital and what it might mean for American tween girls to situate themselves as sexual subjects on YouTube. Many of the videos I analyzed (41 of the 260) are coded as “sexy”—coded as such because the video subject in question positions herself in ways that align with heteronormative scripts and constructions of what is considered sexy appearance and behavior within a cis-hetero normative patriarchal social order. In some videos, girls are in various states of undress, contorting their bodies in ways that emphasize legs, torsos, and breasts. They smile coyly at the web camera, bite their lips, play with their hair, and perform their bodies in ways that resemble Western pornified images from popular men’s magazines and media. In these videos, the tensions of tweenhood are amplified.

I paid close attention to my own reactions to these videos coded as sexy, and I understood just how entrenched our cultural notions of girls as pure and innocent and as objects of desire are. My instinct was not to celebrate what these tween girls are doing but rather to cringe, suck in my breath, and hope that they are being careful with how they make themselves available to viewers. I question these seemingly inherent feelings of fear and horror and how my reaction would change if these video subjects were in any way different from how I perceive them in terms of age, race, gender, and so on. I see these videos as negotiating a cultural landscape of American girlhood that presumes innocence while also presuming the power of girls’ bodies as distracting and enticing to men and boys (Doyle 2019; Renold and Ringrose 2011). And I see that maybe through all the contradictions that tell these girls who they are supposed to be, what they are supposed to look like, and how they are supposed to behave, girls are making a justified choice, a valid choice, in playing with the public and private, playing with intimate space by making it visible (Ashton and Patel 2020; Kearney 2011; Kennedy 2020; McRobbie and Garber 2006), expressing and playing with sexuality via digital girlhoods.

Some of these Pretty or Ugly performances can be categorized as what Shields Dobson calls “hot and hostile” (2015:67): girls gazing directly at the camera with assertive body language, baring parts of their bodies while covering others. Feminist logic is present in these performances in strange and novel ways. Because tween girls are the producers of these videos and images, they can present themselves as sexual beings while maintaining a barrier between themselves and a viewer who may desire to do more than gaze. In the fluid space of the digital, girls can create and perform while troubling the cultural weight of the male gaze (Mulvey 1975).

Compulsory visibility on social media, how tween girls perform their bodies online, is inherently connected to sexuality. Though not as central to my analysis as questions of authenticity, social capital, and homosocial relationships, the push-pull between desperation and desire that shows up in the Pretty or Ugly YouTube trend intrigues me. It is difficult to parse what might be exploitation versus empowerment for a tween girl living in a heteronormative, masculine hegemonic culture. Girls do not exist in a vacuum; they are influenced by the culture in which they live and must reckon with heteronormative expectations, both overt and covert. Girls are not supposed to come off as desperate, and yet they are often categorized as such by viewers in comments on videos and images. They are also not supposed to come across as openly confident, overtly sexual, or desirous. Culturally speaking, we flatten girls as being desirable, as objects of desire, even as we provide them with endless consumer options to present themselves as empowered, even sexually empowered. That empowerment, within the “Girl Power!” model of contemporary American girlhood, remains heavily constrained by persistent oppressive gendered norms. Preston-Sidler writes, “Girlhood, especially the transition to womanhood, is a negotiation of the tension between cultural imperatives and individual and collective desires” (2015:199).

There are some feminist empirical studies of girls’ sexualities, but questions of where and how tween girl sexualities interact with the digital must be substantially deepened. Sexual desires are complex feelings for adolescent and teenage girls (Fine 1988; Fine and McClelland 2007; French 2013; McRobbie 1993; Orenstein 2016; Renold and Ringrose 2013; Tolman 1994; Tolman 2005). In her work on adolescent female sexuality and desire, Deborah Tolman (1994) suggests that during adolescence, girls lose touch with embodied desires and start to view themselves from the perspectives of men. Historically, women and girls have been theorized as sexually passive—ideal femininity has traditionally been linked with passivity, while masculinity is associated with the active in sexual relations (Bordo 1993; Brumberg 1997; Tolman 1994). The idea that tween girls can and do desire sex remains abstract and distressing in the American cultural imagination. The “Girl Power!” model of contemporary girlhood has put emphasis on empowerment through sexy femininity, but the protectionist imperative is still alive and well. Shields Dobson explains:

There is work being done in academia and some forms of media to change this long-accepted convention of passive feminine sexuality, but I suggest that tween girls, amongst the top users of visibility-oriented social media sites, are doing the most groundbreaking and important work of dismantling social and cultural restrictions on their sexualities via online visibility and body performances, and it is worthy of attention.

Recommendations and Signing Off

American society is still grappling with social media becoming a normalized part of everyday life. Only within the last fifteen years or so has social media really proliferated and youth participation on social media exploded. The most popular platforms among tween girls today (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat) are being used for different purposes, whether for creating a video demonstrating an interest, sharing selfies, documenting daily life, building social capital, engaging in self-expression, or connecting with friends. Given how new social media is in the scope of everyday life for American youth, continued sociological investigation of and phenomenological approaches to the digital arena are prudent.

The onset of social media use among adolescents to such a significant degree mobilizes cultural anxieties and persistent questions. But social media is something we are all navigating, adults included, and we are still learning what its impacts are, both good and bad. Tween girls may be figuring out who they are online as they are in the physical spaces they move through, but to suggest that they are only vulnerable, only at risk, implies that social media is not for them, when really, girls have been on social media from the beginning and have made social media what it is.

As a society, we cannot discount the voices of American tween girls that characterize the why and how behind their social media use or dismiss the digital girlhoods that constitute contemporary tween girl digital cultures and the issues they bring to the fore. This research finds that tween girls have complicated relationships with social media but deeply value and give powerful meaning to their ability to control how they are seen and who can see them; to create content that they believe in, that they are passionate about, and that makes them feel good; and to connect with friends and foster digital interactions centered on homosocial support and affirmation.

Popular and public media that frames girls as irresponsible online participants, shallow consumers, narcissists, or passive victims of online predatory behavior do not reflect what is going on with American tween girls online. Societal focus should not be on restricting tween girls’ social media use in a bid to protect them from predators and preserve their culturally constructed innocence. Girls deserve to be safe, and they deserve our attention, but so often the response to their social media use is either dismissive of girls as vapid or panicked that girls are going to behave recklessly and therefore experience harm. Too often, girls are dismissed simply because they are girls. I do not suggest that we do nothing in the face of tween girls experiencing harm on social media, but I implore us to consider how we frame the solution as individualized, positioning girls as personally responsible for how others engage with them online, or as self-regulation, which I learned tween girls are already doing to a significant degree, primarily in prioritizing privacy and personal safety on these platforms.

Education and social practice should be geared toward safe and responsible use, but I think it needs to be framed as a collective enterprise and an evolving conversation between and among tween girls and adult stakeholders that continually recognizes tween girls as agential subjects across social arenas, including on social media. Cyber safety programming should strive for mixed methods research and various modes of knowledge production toward a more holistic understanding of social media participation, in particular privileging the voices of youth who are using these platforms daily. The sociocultural landscape is ever shifting, and digital challenges young people face are context specific and change over time.

Relatedly, response to tween girl social media use should be sensitive to the discursive positioning of the tween age category. Tween girls demonstrate familial dependence (socially, emotionally, materially, etc.), but they are coming into themselves in a new way, developing independence and autonomy and engaging in self- and social development in both physical and digital space (Nesi, Choukas-Bradley, and Prinstein 2018; Abiala and Hernwall 2013). Tween girls should be supported in their experimentation and play online, and resources for ensuring harm reduction on social media must be attuned to the realities of American tween girls as a tremendously heterogeneous group of humans (Livingstone 2009). Channeling more resources into education and programming that teaches critical thought, and critical social media literacies specifically (Pangrazio and Cardozo Gaibisso 2020), can help tween girls self-reflect, connect to broader social and political realities, and consider the role of their digital girlhoods in the production of new tween girl digital cultures.

Emphasis on diverse experience and identities can also help foster inclusion and create equitable opportunities for young people in utilizing digital space. Tween girls are open to these messages and desire to stay safe online. Actively listening to tween girls, centering their voices as expert digital stakeholders, and looking at what they produce online as sources of valuable knowledge about contemporary digital girlhoods can work toward dismantling the social ills that plague American girlhoods.

While social media reflects these ills, I argue that the competing cultural models of innocent girls in need of protection and “Girl Power!” have buoyed heteronormative patriarchal structures, mobilized toxic girl culture, spurred and naturalized girls bullying girls, and reinforced girlhood confusion, self-doubt, negative body image, and dangerous associated behaviors such as eating disorders and self-harm. A surge of body-positive rhetoric online has primarily served to bolster neoliberal, individualized efforts toward the empowered body as capitalist consumer project and product. It has not meaningfully disrupted or transformed the systems that reproduce and reify gender-based oppressions. Confidence culture (Orgad and Gill 2022) has fostered conditions for American women that suggests they can have it all, but they also need to do it all. This translates to how American tween girls are growing up and negotiating contradiction both online and offline. American girlhoods are not monolithic. They are informed by identity politics, sociopolitical realities, economics, and cultural expectations.

Through the normalized production of digital girlhoods on visibility-oriented platforms and the cultivation of meaningful digital communities, American tween girls have found ways to make social media their own and have granted us the opportunity to get to know them better by engaging with them and what they create online. Tween girls may be hearts, stars, rainbows, flowers, and bubblegum. They may be princess crowns, disco balls, lip gloss, glitter, peace signs, and smiley faces. If we devalue these things, it is only because they are associated with conventional femininity, which we have theorized as shallow and material. Tween girls claim it as their own while also demonstrating their dynamic interests and values online. So yes, they are all those things. Those things are awesome. And they are also coders, artists, athletes, entrepreneurs, poets, dancers, musicians, bakers, chefs, activists, crafters, creatives, and comedians.

Palfrey and Gasser suggest that “as a culture of fear emerges around the online environment, we must put these real threats into perspective; our children and future generations have tremendous opportunities in store for them, and not in spite of the digital age, but because of it” (2016:9). The onus should not be on tween girls to keep themselves offline for fear of voyeurs and trolls; indeed, if that fear is the grounds on which we are restricting girls, we need to seriously consider the foundations of that fear, the histories and cultural incongruities that champion a girls’ ability to be and do anything but keep her suppressed in practice. Rather, it is our responsibility, as the people invested in the well-being of our girls, to open further avenues of communication and investigation so that tween girls, in all their identities, intersections, and nuance, may continue to play, create, explore, act, participate, build community, and take full advantage of all the contemporary digital landscape has to offer them.