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AMERICAN TWEEN GIRLS SIGNING ON

“Navigating the complexity of modern life as a girl is a full-time job.”

—CASSELL AND CRAMER 2008:68

In April 2016, a Fox news story out of Tampa, Florida, warned parent viewers about the dangers of sexual predators using social media and other Internet sites to target children. Along with the anchor commentary, the news network showed a public service announcement (PSA) video produced as a collaboration between the U.S. Department of Justice and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. In the video, a young White¹ girl (portrayed by an older female actor) sits in a pink-walled bedroom in front of her computer. She is characterized as being about thirteen or fourteen years old. Her curly blond hair is tied back with a headband, and her cheeks are flushed. She slowly removes her pink tank top—undressing for someone through the web camera who she thinks she knows but who is, in actuality, a stranger.

The two-minute video then shows an older White male on his computer watching the girl undress on the screen. Falsely posing as a younger male peer, the man solicits the girl for further explicit content. When the girl refuses, the man, continuing to pose as a known peer, threatens to circulate the video of her undressing to all her friends. As the video ends, a text card flashes on the screen, reading, “Anything private you share online could be used against you. If someone demands sexual images from you, stop immediately and report it.” The Fox news story positioned the PSA video as something “parents need to see,” a reminder that “the web can be a dangerous place, and that teens are easy targets, preyed upon time after time” (Tampa Fox 13 2016). This news story is far from the only example showcasing the potential threat of sexual predators online; what seems to occur time after time is the framing of young girls as primary targets for male sexual predators online. By the time they enter adolescence, girls have been warned repeatedly about the dangers of sharing images and videos in public digital spaces, and especially sharing content that shows their bodies.

There is a societal fear for girls in public spaces and for what may happen to girls in public spaces. But there is also a fear of girls (Doyle 2019). This old story is packaged in a new way for the digital age. Moral panics about youth (Banet-Weiser 2014; Cohen 1972; Driscoll and Gregg 2008; McRobbie and Thornton 1995; Thiel-Stern 2014) driven by adult fears of young people having sex, girls being targeted by men and boys for sex, girls being seen as objects for sex, girls desiring sex, girls engaging in risky (i.e., sexual) behavior, and girls damaging their reputations based on any of these behaviors are not new. But because the Internet has grown well beyond a mere cultural touchstone in the last two decades, and we are now seeing near ubiquitous use of social media platforms among American youth (Nesi, Mann, and Robb 2023; Pearson 2023; Vogels, Gelles-Watnick, and Massarat 2022), moral panic surrounding girls’ bodies and sexualities has seen a marked revival in the contemporary digital age.

Media plays a particularly powerful role in constructing moral panic around American girls and their bodies (Driscoll and Gregg 2008; McRobbie and Thornton 1995; Thiel-Stern 2014). As demonstrated by the story at the start of this chapter, narrative emphasis from news media in recent years has often been placed on the dangers wrought by the Internet: cyberbullying, mental health crises, sexualization, low self-esteem, negative body image, and online predators. As the old story goes, much of what defines contemporary moral panics is a nostalgic sensation and longing for some distant golden age marked by social stability and strong moral discipline (Cohen 1972; McRobbie and Thornton 1995). The alarmist, adult-centered response to girls being online—and more specifically, girls making their bodies visible and available online—would seem to suggest that social media is lacking stability and discipline. As McRobbie and Thornton (1995) explore in their revamped conceptualizations of Cohen’s (1972) theory of moral panics, concern for and about youth manifests via the perceived threat of young people having too much free time and the question of “Where are their parents?” This concern not only incites broad social anxieties but also discerns a culturally manufactured need for heightened surveillance of young people. Driscoll and Gregg examine this reaction in their work on moral panics, youth, and YouTube when they write,

My work, in part, considers YouTube as a site of production for contemporary tween girl digital cultures specifically through analysis of a tween girl−driven YouTube trend called “Am I Pretty or Ugly?” As demonstrated in more depth in the coming pages, the news media, mass media, and adult-centered response to the Pretty or Ugly YouTube trend exposed anxieties that have come to the fore once again regarding girls’ bodies, made plain through alarm over girls’ social media participation. Shayla Thiel-Stern writes in her work on moral panics and girls in public space:

The most recent cultural shift resulting in a notable uptick of protectionist discourses around girls is the irrefutable popularity and significant use of social media among American tween girls today. This moral panic about girls online is hypergendered and informed by entrenched, overarching narratives of girlhood in the United States that tend to paint girls (especially tween and teen girls) in simplistic ways: as salacious, sexual provocateurs who are distractions or temptations for boys and men; as badly behaved, aggressive, or even criminal; or as innocent, passive victims preyed on by boys and men. These narratives are jejune, well-trodden as the Madonna-Whore myth, and exacerbated by social and cultural shifts in phenomena such as popular culture, technology, fashion, and mass media (Banet-Weiser 2014; Best and Bogle 2014; Thiel-Stern 2014). American tween girls know they are being represented in popular and public media in ways that reproduce stereotypes, reify harmful tropes, and do not represent the authentic, dynamic mosaics of their lived experiences (Bulger et al. 2021). As Cassell and Cramer (2008) suggest in the epigraph, girls must traverse shifty terrain, managing the bristling expectations and fraught assumptions that imbue girlhood with social, cultural, and political meaning.

I did not grow up with social media in the same way as the current generation.² I dabbled on Myspace (released in 2003) during my senior year of high school, selecting my “Top 8” friends and curating my layout. I chatted and gossiped on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) with peers, carefully crafting my “away” message if another family member needed the computer or, in the days of dial up, the landline phone. Thinking of it in these nostalgic terms only affirms my feeling of incredulity in seeing what social media has become over the last two decades (Anderson et al. 2022; Bennett 2023). I was just entering college as an undergraduate student when Facebook took off, and at that point, it was only accessible to college students, not the social networking behemoth we know today. Notably, however, Facebook use by young people has dropped off massively in the last handful of years, with TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat now among the most favored platforms—though still not as popular as YouTube, which has a 95 percent user rate among thirteen- to seventeen-year-olds.³

I did not spend my tween years posting selfies and sharing “stories.” I spent those years building worlds for my Barbie dolls, playing board games and soccer, going to parties in friends’ basements, and tying up the landline phone for hours (much to my parents’ chagrin). Tween girls today are much the same. They are still playing with Barbie and going to see the much talked about 2023 movie by the same name. They are still playing board games and soccer. They are still goofing off outside, having parties, and sharing secrets. But there is one blatant difference between how tween girls are developing today versus in my own millennial generation: their social worlds are unequivocally marked by an increasingly blurry line between physical and digital worlds (Buckingham 2013a; boyd 2014; Nesi, Mann, and Robb 2023; Palfrey and Gasser 2016). Tween girls in America today are growing up on social media.

Key Terms

To clarify some terms, who or what is a girl? Using Jessalynn Keller’s framing, I situate girlhood subjectivities as “discursively produced through historical, cultural, and social contexts, rather than a static and biological or age-based category that is universally valid” (2016:3). Theorist Catherine Driscoll similarly defines girl as “an assemblage of social and cultural issues and questions rather than a field of physical facts” (2002:14). A girl is not necessarily defined by a certain age, race, or even sex category assigned at birth. Popular media dubbed 2023 “The Year of the Girl” (Dazed, The Cut, Elle, NPR), with intense social and political interest around girl culture, most notably how adult women have been reclaiming and celebrating elements of girlhood and femininity, especially those aesthetically in line with popular films like Barbie, the cultural phenomenon of Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour, and social media trends such as “Girl Dinner.” In this way, girl can be understood as a sensibility: a set of ideas, concerns, desires, and affects relative to a particular time, place, and social, cultural, and political context.

In this research, I understand American girlhood as defined by and made legible to the broader American public via cultural anxieties and related expectations and stereotypes surrounding female children’s and adolescent’s bodies and sexualities. These definitions are necessarily raced, classed, abled, and gendered. Girlhoods are broadly understood in the United States in relation to a restrictive, culturally inscribed gender binary that codes certain behaviors, activities, language, and expressions as belonging to girls (feminine) and others as belonging to boys (masculine). I frame girlhoods as associated with gendered behaviors of how girls may yield to and accommodate social and cultural expectations about their bodies and sexualities, resist and subvert those expectations, or do both at the same time (Butler 1990; Schilt and Westbrook 2009; West and Zimmerman 1987).

Girlhoods are ever shifting, transforming, and being altered according to specific times, places, and circumstances. When one takes an intersectional approach (Crenshaw 1989; Smith, Frazier, and Smith 1977), exploring a prism of girlhoods mediated by nationality, race, ethnicity, age, ability, size, region, sexuality, and beyond, it becomes clear how stereotypes about girls—as well as biases—converge to create our relationships with girls themselves at individual, interpersonal, and institutional levels. Tween girls’ identities as girls do not exist in a vacuum or as individuals. We must think about their identities in relation to the historical moment, the institutions of which they are part, the communities they touch, and the communities they build. Only by seeing all these elements operating together as a whole, as an interlocking system that shapes the social and political conditions of their lives, does it become possible to consider solutions that actually grant girls the power to be and do anything—a power that has thus far been experienced mainly in theory.

Consideration of the politics of place are essential for imagining and contextualizing processes of girlhoods. Rentschler and Mitchell (2016) argue that focus on place renders meanings of girlhoods via their interaction with sociopolitical, historical, and media discourses. Vanner (2019) assures us that focus on location “enables a political analysis of the ways in which girlhood is uniquely gendered, sexed, raced, and classed in different spaces” (120). In this work, I think about girlhoods within the context of the digital age in contemporary America. The labels America and American are not necessarily suggestive of research subjects’ only or primary national identity or sense of belonging in any straightforward way. Rather, I use America(n) in this context in recognition of how girlhood cultural scripts are produced and disseminated across media landscapes within a specific geographic, spatial, and national cultural context. The production of digital girlhoods by tween girls themselves troubles limiting and oppressive representations, cultivating new imaginings and nuanced possibilities of girlhood embodiments across and within various subjectivities and identities.

Girlhood is often framed as a monolithic, idealized category in which the diverse experiences of girls are flattened to fit a societal norm. Who is the ideal girl in the American imagination? Who is the innocent girl in need of protection? She tends to be White, of middle- to upper-class circumstance, visibly able-bodied, educated, heterosexual, born in the United States, and growing up in the mythic nuclear family model (Coontz 1993). This is the American girl the media tells tween girls they should aspire to embody, the girl the media presents as the most vulnerable target for sexual predators. My research recognizes the reality of many and varied girlhoods and the nuances therein, subject to shift and change depending on how dimensions of difference intersect. In relation to how girl is categorized on social media, “nowadays, the category of girl in the contemporary mediascape extends to include the tween-age girl who is between 9 and 14 as well as older women in their 30s and 40s who are often referred to as girls” (Hill 2017:121). This expansion is reified by the recent, remarkable surge of intrigue around all things girl, from teenage girls’ mental health and well-being (CDC 2023) to girls’ place in popular culture, to ubiquitous pink, hyperfeminine fashion trends and “hot girl walks” (Miller 2023).

This research also considers the province of youth, particularly in digital space. Driscoll and Gregg’s definition of youth culture aligns well with my purview of tween girlhoods online:

American youth are now living fluidly between offline and online spaces and engaging in self- and social development in ways specific to their generation (boyd 2014; Buckingham, Bragg, and Kehily 2014; Farman 2012; Palfrey and Gasser 2016). The transition from adolescence to adulthood is facilitated by online participation, and specifically social media participation. Prior to the rise of the Internet and the near ubiquitous use of social media platforms as part of daily life, youth employed immediate peer groups, interactions in social spaces, relationships with friends and family, and media such as television and film to gauge where they fell in the scheme of what is “normal” in terms of body and behavior and build identities based on what is reflected back at them by these various agents.

While this process is still occurring, the Internet has also become a crucial agent of identity development (Farrell 2022; Kennedy 2020; Malvini Redden and Way 2017; Yau and Reich 2019). The social conditions of young people’s lives are reflected through social media participation and creation, and social interactions, relationships, and self-expression occur online with as much regularity and normalcy (if not more) as in any offline space. This has especially become the case for young people who came into tween- and teenhood during the COVID-19 pandemic, when virtually all peer interaction moved into the digital realm (Bulger et al. 2021), revealing important new information about how American youth navigate self- and social development through social media participation. We have yet to fully understand the impacts of the pandemic on young people in this context.

Along with girls, girlhoods, and youth, I situate tween in certain terms in this work. Tween as an idea and classification emerges with and through the production of popular media. In addition to its characterization as a consumer demographic and highly gendered, markedly feminine preadolescent-to-adolescent life stage, tween is also a discursive, constructed category that is not static, sometimes contradictory, and often filled with cultural anxieties and tensions (García-Gómez 2018; Kennedy 2018). Tween girls are constructed as “fun” (Coulter 2021) and packaged and sold as such. In the landscape of marketing and consumerism, tween girls are represented as carefree, empowered, confident—and notably hyperfeminine. They are still children but burgeoning, on the cusp of becoming women. As author Jessica Bennett notes from a parent interview in her piece “Being 13” (2023), tweens can be understood as “half adult, half child . . . [eating] a Lunchable while at a fancy hair appointment.”

Tween girls are hearts, stars, rainbows, flowers, and bubble gum. They are princess crowns, disco balls, lip gloss, glitter, peace signs, and smiley faces. They are pop culture, postfeminist girl power, and “riot grrrl” punk sensibility rolled into one, made palatable through neoliberal, capitalist co-optation. Mattie Kahn, author of Young and Restless: The Girls Who Sparked America’s Revolutions (2023a), writes in an op-ed piece for InStyle that “girls as spenders are cheered; girls as citizens are sidelined” (2023b). Tween girls are constructed as powerful individuals in processes of consumption but bereft of recognizable collective social power, except in the purview of popular culture (e.g., celebrities and tween icons such as Taylor Swift can have major influence over tweens within shared fandom, but this influence rarely translates to how tweens might wield tangible social or political power to affect policy or material conditions). Tween is a category that precedes adolescence but is entirely bound up with it. Melanie Kennedy’s 2018 monograph Tweenhood: Femininity and Celebrity in Tween Popular Culture considers how tween girlhoods are produced and constitutively expressed through both capitalism and feminism as a “transitional stage” in which tween girls work on and develop the self through consumption of celebrity. Kennedy frames tweenhood as “a construct of the postfeminist cultural context” (2018:3); a tween girl is sold empowerment in a system that keeps her disempowered.

Tween girls exist in a liminal space between childhood and adulthood, which influences their consumptive patterns and behaviors. Tween girls play around with makeup. They follow beauty tutorials. They are interested in knowing, following, and, in some cases, setting trends. They are fascinated by—at times, obsessed with—celebrities. Investment in popular culture, beauty and body work, and fashion drive tween girl consumer behavior. Tween girls are consistently engaging with media “beyond their years,” which informs their existence in a liminal space (García-Gómez 2018; Renold and Ringrose 2011). They are girls who are not yet grown up but exhibit markers of adulthood via interest in certain kinds of content, types of dress, patterns of language, and modes of behavior. They are in the process of becoming. They are also heavily laden with culturally constructed and projected conditions of female adolescence, including low self-esteem, negative body image, sexual uncertainty, fraught homosocial relationships, and a rejection of parental guidance in favor of peer approval (Crann 2017).

The Matter of Tween Girls Online

I chose to examine the tween girl category in this research because it is the demographic whose members are creating and posting “Am I Pretty or Ugly?” YouTube videos; they are also making their foray into the world of social media and “digitally networked publics” (boyd 2010; De Leyn et al. 2021). Because federal law dictates that a person must be thirteen years old to have a social media profile across various platforms (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule, or COPPA), girls younger than thirteen become an all at once hypervisible and invisible demographic in digital space. I am interested in the dynamic exchange and dissonance of how tween girls are represented in public and popular media and culture, how they are targeted in the consumer marketplace (especially in relation to being in crisis and sold empowerment and self-esteem in contemporary confidence culture) (Orgad and Gill 2022), and how they are representing themselves on social media and demonstrating a much more complex landscape of American girlhoods today. Tween girl selves are constituted and can be understood in a context of social media participation, digital space use, and content creation. When a tween girl posts a video on YouTube asking the world, “Am I pretty or ugly?” she is also asking, “Who am I?”

Over the last decade in the United States, social media participation has become the new normal for American youth. In her work on digitally networked publics and teenagers, danah boyd addresses how adults tend to view youth participation on social media in stark terms, as utopian or dystopian. But, as boyd suggests, what teenagers are doing on social media is more complicated; it “mirrors, magnifies, and makes more visible the good, bad, and ugly of everyday life” (2014:24). Though there has been a significant increase in academic inquiry on the matter of social media impacts on young people across a considerable variety of geopolitical and cultural contexts, we remain overall uncertain of the potential impacts and mediations that social media participation has on tween girls’ lives, for better or worse (Anderson et al. 2022; Valkenburg, Meier, and Beyens 2022; Valkenburg et al. 2022).

Public opinion and academic scholarship are frequently divided on the matter. Some suggest that social media, and the Internet more broadly, is a safe and useful space for girls to express themselves in myriad ways and engage in topics that matter to their gendered selves, such as body image, sexuality, menstruation, friendship, intimate relationships, and social justice and activism (Anderson et al. 2022; Bulger et al. 2021; Burnette, Kwitowski, and Mazzeo 2017; Davis 2010; De Leyn et al. 2021; Ging and O’Higgins Norman 2016; Hammond, Cooper, and Jordan 2018; Kanai 2019b; Kearney 2011; Mendes, Ringrose, and Keller 2019; Kennedy 2020; Markey and Daniels 2022; Mazzarella 2010; Shields Dobson 2011; Stern 1999; Takayoshi 1999; Wade 2024). Others contend that the content girls are creating and posting on social media (e.g., selfies, TikToks, snaps, and stories) is indicative of an ongoing “crisis of girlhood” (Choukas-Bradley et al. 2022; Cohen, Newton-John, and Slater 2018; Nurka 2014; Sales 2016; Chen, Luo, and Chen 2020) characterized by phenomena such as sexual objectification, sexism, body dissatisfaction, and other gendered social ills. People in the latter camp argue that social media is a vehicle that furthers gendered oppression, increases sexualization and objectification of girls, fosters patterns of unhealthy comparison, and promotes low self-esteem.

It would be quite easy to fall into one of these camps. I argue instead that the realities of how social media impacts American tween girls—and, more importantly, the realities of their relationships with social media—are more nuanced and multivalent. Tween girls’ social media use encompasses all the above: good and bad, risk and reward, pitfalls and potentials. And tween girls’ other identities, including race, sexuality, queerness, size, and ability, to name a few, certainly hold weight in how tween girls relate to and participate on social media and how adults and institutions respond to that participation. As girlhood studies scholar Marnina Gonick suggests, social and cultural anxieties about girlhood “[do] not . . . get conferred equally or in the same way on all girls” (2003:4, see also Rentschler and Mitchell 2014).

While in some ways social media can and does reproduce, reify, or even magnify problematic social ills, such as the ongoing objectification and sexualization of girls, these ills do not find their origin in social media. Objectification and sexualization have long been recognizable in narratives of American girlhoods (Egan 2013; Thiel-Stern 2014). We certainly should not be dismissive of potential harms of social media, but to consider them as existing in a vacuum or as the only side to the story obfuscates another truth: that social media is also a place where tween girls can make themselves central to conversations happening about their lives and create content that speaks to who they are. Much of the moral panic surrounding tween girls today is not about social media in and of itself, but more so, as the story goes, about the novelty of social media, the “new-ness” of the technology and what we are learning about it, and the sense on the part of many tween girl caretakers that social media feels unfamiliar, unregulated, and, therefore, unsafe. The moral panic manifests as a fear of the unknown, which unsurprisingly translates to increased anxiety about tween girls’ visibility online and participation in public digital spaces—and, more specifically, about what it means to make their bodies visible in those spaces. Kennedy and Coulter reflect on this question in the introduction to a special issue of the Girlhood Studies journal titled “Locating Tween Girls.”

Tween girl participation on social media is complicated and worth our collective attention. Rather than immediately resorting to alarmism and a despair mindset that casts tween girls as either in trouble or causing trouble (Harris 2004a), I suggest that tween girls’ content creation and social media participation are consequential invitations to listen, ask questions, and ultimately understand more about what matters to them today across and within their identities and interests. Tween girls are more media literate than in the past because social media is intrinsically bound up with their development and the sensibilities of their cultural conditions. Even if a tween girl is not actively participating on social media platforms, this fact can tell us much about how she is experiencing her social world (Bennett 2023). What do tween girlhoods look like and feel like in America today? And why and how does social media matter to tween girls?

While I offer a critique of the current heightened desire to control and restrict girls online, I do not want to be glib and suggest that tween girls’ social media use is somehow simple, straightforward, and devoid of risk. Social media platforms are owned by private corporations. Participation is mediated, and content creation is subject to scrutiny and surveillance (Farrell 2022; Wade 2019a). Algorithms suggest and promote specific content that drives consumer behaviors. Girls’ social media practices are not immune to existing structural inequities and power dynamics, and there is risk involved in participation. But tween girls know this. Their social media participation and engagement is a direct reflection of their social lives as a whole: nuanced and complicated, sometimes overwrought or overwhelming, sometimes practical, often playful, and at times plainly beneficial to tween girls themselves. What I hope to emphasize is that the impulse to protect girls by pulling them off social media, keeping them away from platforms, and policing and restricting their bodies and sexualities in these digital spaces substantiates damaging and persisting dominant narratives of girlhood and hegemonic gender norms that continually devalue girls, dismiss them, and tell them that they do not belong, that their value is wrapped up in aesthetic capital (Anderson et al. 2010), and that their worth (and liability) is situated squarely in the framing of their bodies as culturally fraught spaces, the sites of so many enduring social anxieties.

Tween girls have been taking up digital space and forging their own paths in the digital arena since the dawn of public Internet use and the rise of content creation (Kearney 2006; Kearney 2011; Keller 2019; Keller and Ryan 2018; Takayoshi 1999). They are the vanguards of the personal profile, cultivating networked publics (boyd 2010) and communities and creating content that speaks directly to their positionalities as tween girls in America (Keller 2019; Kennedy 2020; Shields Dobson 2015; Thiel-Stern 2014). Rather than use the term user-generated content, defined as online users generating content to disseminate information about products and brands, I use the broader term content creation, which includes contribution of content/information by digital media users for an audience. Pew Research defines content creation as “the creation of the material people contribute to the online world” (Lenhart, Fallows, and Horrigan 2004). I do not include sexting or texting in this definition because these kinds of digital communication may not take place on social media applications and are most often shared specifically and interpersonally between individual cellular phone numbers (Barrense-Dias et al. 2017; García-Gómez 2018; Gordon-Messer et al. 2013; Hasinoff 2015; Klettke, Hallford, and Mellor 2014). That said, if an image is shared via Snapchat or other social media application, it falls under the category of content creation. I consider any digital content created for an audience on a social media platform (whether for a group of friends on Snapchat or as a publicly available video on YouTube) as content creation.

The content tween girls create online is an assemblage of cultural artifacts I refer to as digital girlhoods. Digital girlhoods are all at once the tangible cultural material that tween girls create and produce on and across social media platforms (selfies, images, reels, stories, videos, vlogs, etc.) and the processes of becoming and enacting tweenhood and girlhood online that constitute and illuminate the liminal space between childhood wonder and adult interests in explicitly gendered ways. Digital girlhoods are both the creation by tween girls of sites of inquiry to understand more about contemporary tween girl digital cultures and the phenomenon of how tween girlhoods as a category of being and embodiment are constituted and made legible via social media participation today. American tween girls give meaning to contemporary American tween girlhoods as they create within and navigate digital space through the ongoing cultural and social production of digital girlhoods.

Digital girlhoods give us tremendous insight into how tween girls in the United States navigate, embody, and resist contemporary paradigms of “doing girlhood” (Currie, Kelly, and Pomerantz 2009) and the stringent expectations associated with ideal girlhood, which continue to privilege Whiteness, thinness, cis-hetness, and able-bodiedness. But beyond rendering a deeper, richer understanding of persistent and dominant cultural models of American girlhoods, digital girlhoods keenly demonstrate how tween girls use social media as a tool for visibility, self-representation, image control, social capital, community building, and connection. Tween girls’ participation on social media has the potential to foster meaningful change for girls as members of an oppressed demographic, create counternarratives, and contribute to social, cultural, economic, and political strides toward gender equity (Mendes, Ringrose, and Keller 2019; Preston-Sidler 2015; Wade 2019a).

There is tremendous potential in situating social media as a tool tween girls are leveraging for visibility and political participation in social and cultural discourses about their own lives. But social media is still messy. The often contradictory narratives that tween girls present on these platforms (when it comes to gender and sexuality in particular) shed light on the completely contradictory and conflicting social conditions that currently structure tween girls’ lives (Attwood, Hakim, and Winch 2017; García-Gómez 2018; Vares, Jackson, and Gill 2011; Renold and Ringrose 2011). Social conditions are further complicated depending on the identities of the tween girl in question. Popular culture and mass media tell girls to be confident, but not too confident. Be vulnerable, but do not show too much of yourself online. Be authentic, but only in appropriately self-effacing ways. Be pretty, but not vain. Be thin, but not too thin, but certainly not fat. Be smart, but not too smart. Be active, but do not bypass the boys. Be a leader, but in a suitably feminine way. Be sexy, but not slutty.

This endless list of paradoxes, set against a backdrop of constructed ideal femininity (White, thin, pretty, able-bodied, educated, middle to upper class, etc.), is reinforced and policed by institutions, adults, and girls themselves, both individually and interpersonally. Contrasting expectations are bound up with decades-old notions of postfeminism and newer, shinier, polished iterations of feminist ideology that are notably neoliberal, individualistic, and built on the premise of constant consumption to achieve empowerment (Banet-Weiser 2018; Orgad and Gill 2022; Zeisler 2016). Tween girls are, after all, a market demographic (Banet-Weiser 2014; Kennedy and Coulter 2018; Kennedy 2018). Within contemporary confidence culture, American girls are supposed to be sure of themselves, but with all these competing, contradictory expectations, they are surely confused. What is a girl to do?

Tween girls embody and negotiate these many contradictions via social media participation because it is their modus operandi of communication today. If we want to understand more about girlhoods in contemporary America, we need look no further than TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, or YouTube. How are tween girls living and experiencing girlhood in the digital age? I ask this question not only because of the lightning speed at which things seem to move and change these days (especially when it comes to which social media platforms are most popular and what starts trending or goes viral) but also because in the midst of all this change, some things remain notably unwavering—or at least, resurface again and again. These things include the ever-familiar, adult-driven moral panic, fear, and anxiety that define and shape dominant, restrictive ideas about what it means to be a successful tween girl in the United States. I deem these attitudes responsible, in no small part, for the ongoing oppression, suppression, and restriction of girls across identities and circumstances from full opportunity in social, cultural, and political life.

I argue that TikTok as a specific platform, for example, is not the thing that matters. Indeed, the TikTok platform is quite like other social media applications that have come before and will come after (e.g., Vine, Musical.ly). We cannot reasonably separate the astronomic rise of TikTok’s popularity from the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic and the collective shift into lockdown (De Leyn et al. 2021; Kennedy 2020)—the reality that so many American youth were at home, with cell phones and laptops as the primary conduits for connection to peers, social groups, popular culture, and political events (Bennett 2023; Bulger et al. 2021). What matters is TikTok as the unmistakable realm of youth culture and production (Jennings 2019). Part of what makes TikTok what it is in the current moment is the sheer volume of content being created and shared, and tween girls are highly visible and prolific content creators on the app.

The essence and ethos of TikTok is what resonates, and that essence and ethos will proliferate onto the next social media platform that gains traction. The social media app BeReal was, for a moment, a GenZ obsession, and it has now declined in popularity. Though it launched in 2020, the app did not see significant usership until 2022, further reifying the mysterious ways in which platforms start to trend among users and lose their shine seemingly overnight. BeReal asks users to “be real” and “show your friends who you really are, for once” (Rush 2022), removing the opportunity to add filters, edit photos, and meticulously curate content and putting a fresh spin on authenticity and vulnerability (something I speak to in more depth in later chapters). The tween girls I interviewed for this research articulated various reasons for using different social media applications (e.g., Snapchat for communicating with small groups of friends vs. Instagram and TikTok for scrolling through content vs. YouTube for posting public videos), but they made a larger point that it is not the app that matters, but rather what social media can be used for more generally in self and social development and what it means to them. They brought up themes of visibility, self-esteem, desirability, relationships, celebrity, popularity, privacy, and safety.

Taking a step back and considering how social media has evolved as a whole, from Myspace to YouTube to Tumblr to Facebook to Instagram to TikTok, we see that these platforms are spaces where content is created and shared, and that content reflects what tween girls care about and what they may be going through. Many interests and issues relevant to tween girls remain the same as in decades past. Certainly, social ills such as body dissatisfaction among young girls and the desire to fit in are not new (Brown and Gilligan 1992; Brumberg 1997; Orenstein 1994). But being able to share the minutiae of a day, giving the world a glimpse into your bedroom, your intimate spaces, your private life, speaking publicly to issues that impact you, and making your body visible on a public forum is new. Though we are only just beginning to grasp the impacts of social media participation on young people and tween and teenage girls in particular (De Leyn et al. 2021; Jarman et al. 2021; Nesi 2020; Maes and Vandenbosch 2022; Markey and Daniels 2022; Steinsbekk et al. 2021), research and resulting scholarship is finding that the gendered impacts of social media use are not clean, easy to categorize, or rendered essential across girlhood identities. When we put tween girl voices front and center, we learn that social media is both positive and negative (maybe even neutral), rewarding and frustrating, good and bad. There exists an exciting opportunity to continue to learn more about what these platforms mean to some of their most prolific users, so long as we are willing to ask questions and let tween girls speak for themselves.

Am I Pretty or Ugly?

How does social media, now a primary mode of social development, communication, and expression for tween girls, interact with historical and contemporary expectations of what tween girls are, how they are supposed to look and behave? How are the answers to these questions complicated by race, ethnicity, social class, gender identity, sexuality, and ability? I sought to understand more by talking with tween girls themselves, as well as investigating a tween girl−driven YouTube trend as a primary example of contemporary digital girlhoods.

Between October 2016 and March 2017, I interviewed twenty-six tween girls from a variety of racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. All were between the ages of ten and thirteen and living in Wisconsin. I asked them about their experiences on social media, how they use it in their daily lives, and what it means to them. Through these interviews, I learned that social media is not just important to them; it is a tool and vehicle they use to gain some semblance of control over how others see them and how they see themselves. It is a meaningful avenue for garnering visibility, social capital, and self-esteem. Though not without drawbacks, including its “drama-filled” moments (to use their terminology) and the reasons they are told to be wary, especially regarding public versus private content, social media is held up as a crucial mechanism for community building, maintaining connections with friends and peers, and developing and engaging interests. Much has changed in the last handful of years surrounding social media in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, but recent scholarship reifies and affirms these findings (Anderson et al. 2022; Keller 2016; Bulger et al. 2021; Nesi, Mann, and Robb 2023; Wade 2019a). Tween girls are savvy, strategic, and thoughtful in how they use social media and create digital girlhoods.

In addition to conducting interviews, I analyzed 260 YouTube videos from the prominent YouTube trend “Am I Pretty or Ugly?” The Pretty or Ugly YouTube trend began in 2011 with a handful of tween girls posting individual, publicly available videos on YouTube asking, “Am I pretty or ugly?” (or some variation thereof) and requesting that viewers leave comments about their appearances. The videos became so rampant on YouTube that they were recognized by the site as trending, and unsurprisingly, news media stories and other videos on YouTube started popping up in response to the trend. To date, it is estimated that more than one million Pretty or Ugly videos have been posted to YouTube by the tween girl demographic (Banet-Weiser 2014; Gallo 2013; Perle 2013; Rossie 2015), and in recent years, similar kinds of videos in which posters ask viewers to assess their appearance have trended on TikTok.

I became aware of the Pretty or Ugly YouTube trend in the fall of 2013 when I came across a news story published on the Slate magazine website titled “Young Girls Ask, ‘Am I Pretty or Ugly?’ on YouTube” (Waldman 2013). My initial reaction to learning about the trend was predictably aligned with much of the public and news media reaction to it at the time, boiling down to feelings of “this is so sad” and “we can’t believe girls are asking this question.” Reporters and media commentators were disturbed by the existence of the trend and suspicious of girls’ motives for posting this kind of video. But mostly, they focused on how sad and troubling they believed it to be. One source lamented,

Meanwhile, other sources sang a different tune, criticizing the Pretty or Ugly videos for what they saw as their attention-seeking nature. In the same 2013 Slate article, author Katy Waldman writes of one of the girls in a Pretty or Ugly video: “She smiles coyly, feigns insecurity. . . . [Maybe] she craves validation; maybe she is secretly consumed by doubt. Either way, she looks like she is having an awesome time.” So in one sense and reading of the trend, girls are feigning nonchalance. In another, they are feigning insecurity. Could it be that both are happening at the same time? Or is it possible that the girls making these videos are, in fact, not feigning anything?

The more I investigated the trend and the backlash on the part of many adult authority figures, the more I wondered about the seeming shock and awe at tween girls asking this pretty or ugly question when it is a question American society has collectively characterized as a natural part of growing up as a girl for more than a century (Brumberg 1997; Orenstein 1994). The obvious difference from decades past is that the tween girls taking part in this trend are not just asking their family, friends, or immediate peer groups to assess their appearances; they are asking the world on a highly popular public digital platform where anyone with access to YouTube could see and comment on the videos. And while this trend peaked on YouTube nearly a decade ago and may no longer seem relevant, there is no denying the enduring importance of being pretty in embodying “successful” girlhood (Adams and Bettis 2003; Harris 2004b; Currie, Kelly, and Pomerantz 2009; Sands 2012), demonstrative of how this question of continues to pop up regardless of the social media platform du jour.

“Where are the parents?” was yet another sentiment made popular in news media response to the trend. Commentators leveled blame against parents for not keeping a closer eye on their daughters, who they felt, by nature of their age and gender, had no business making public YouTube videos for any potential Internet predator, pedophile, or troll to see. Still other sources framed the matter as girls “setting themselves up” for cyberbullying (Kennedy 2013). Among the parental, popular, and news media response to the trend, the common denominator appears to be a protective attitude toward girls, a suggestion that the girls making these videos do not fully comprehend the risks associated with posting them and the potential repercussions. Many vilified tween girls for being attention seeking—but why is this trait necessarily bad, especially when girlhood concerns and interests are so often dismissed and disparaged? Little has been done to examine the social conditions surrounding the Pretty or Ugly trend, and critical inquiry into why tween girls might use the specific platform of YouTube to ask this age-old question is notably absent.

Public perceptions and media representations of girls (in both news media and popular culture) have greatly contributed to contrasting dominant narratives about girls that position them as either innocent and in need of protection or as dangerous, promiscuous, and rebellious. Abiding paradigms of “girls in trouble” versus “girls as trouble,” “can-do girls” versus “at-risk girls” (Harris 2004a), reinforce harmful girlhood stereotypes related to race and class and continually position girls as an oppressed, marginalized, and vulnerable population. In recent years, news stories about girls sharing private information via the Internet have spread far and wide and have resulted in increased policing of girls’ behavior, especially in reference to acting or appearing sexy online.

In certain states, young people can be prosecuted for sharing sexy images or videos (Best and Bogle 2014; Hasinoff 2015). What began as discrete news media moments and individual reporting on incidents of sharing sexual content is now legible as a far-reaching cultural phenomenon and source of moral panic, manifesting as a fear of what could happen to girls’ bodies—and of what girls’ bodies are capable of. Sady Doyle writes in her book Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers that there is a “madness that ensues when a society locates the threat to its own existence in the body of the young girl” (2019:6). An entire social values system—one that simultaneously obsesses over and fears sex, purports to believe in self-love while constantly pushing for self-improvement, and emphasizes personal fulfillment measured by a heteronormative notion of happy family life concurrent with an entrenched ethos of individualism, competition, and capitalist enterprise—is being cast onto the bodies of today’s American girls.

Competing Cultural Models: Innocent Girls Who Need Protection and “Girl Power!”

A clear avenue that helps situate these dueling dualisms is Andrew Cherlin’s theory of competing cultural models, which he defines as ways of viewing and understanding social life. In his 2010 book The Marriage Go Round, Cherlin thinks about marriage and divorce in the United States as competing cultural models. On the one hand, people in the United States love marriage. The wedding services industry in the United States earned yearly revenue somewhere north of $57 billion in 2021 and upward of $70 billion in 2023 (McCain 2023). American society considers marriage the ideal end point for every monogamous, romantic relationship. Yet divorce has become a very common occurrence in this country in the last half century. Divorce, though not regularly viewed as a desirable event or outcome and not always welcomed, is accepted, an unmistakably established norm. Cherlin argues that much of this contradiction has to do with competing models of what Americans are effectively conditioned into desiring—a happy, fulfilling marriage and home life, as well as individualism in identity, achievement, and success in the workplace. I use Cherlin’s framework of competing cultural models to shed light on the contested nature of girlhood in America today, shaped by two competing cultural models that provide girls with conflicting guidelines on identity, appearance, and behavior: innocent girls who need protection versus “Girl Power!”

With each new development in media, technology, and fashion (or other cultural shift) comes another turn of the moral panic cycle perpetuated by girls participating in the public sphere. In the innocent girls who need protection cultural model, girls have historically been represented and thought of as “in crisis” (Banet-Weiser 2015; Harris 2004a; Mazzarella and Pecora 2007; Rentschler and Mitchell 2014). Constructions of girls as in crisis have been heavily marked by race and class connotations, situating girls as either in trouble or as trouble, “can-do” or “at risk” (Abrams 2003; Downe 2005; Harris 2004a). The social thrust of protectionist discourse around girls is White centered; girls of color, especially Black, Brown, and Indigenous girls in lower-economic circumstances, are framed in crisis in a different way from White girls and girls in middle- and upper-economic circumstances, often toward criminalization, adultification, or narratives of delinquency (Carter Andrews et al. 2019; Morris 2015; Wade 2019a). Girls with disabilities have been rendered essentially invisible in broader cultural discourse around girls in crisis because disability so often obfuscates gender, race, and sexual subjectivities, even as experiences of disability are themselves vast and impossible to essentialize (Hill 2017; Wendell 1997). Expectations of ideal girlhood are not experienced the same way across identities. Sarah Banet-Weiser writes,

Through a more specific lens of tweenhood, De Leyn et al. write that “in the Global North, childhood is oftentimes nostalgically imagined as a state of innocence, naivety, and protection (Sabry and Mansour 2019). Adolescence on the other hand is considered a phase of expanding autonomy but also of reckless risk-taking (Durham 2017)” (2021:3). As an added layer to the discursive girlhood studies framing of the can-do girl and the at-risk girl, the tween girl exists somewhere between these imaginings of innocence and needing protection versus expanding autonomy and recklessness by virtue of limi­nality and slippage in the tween category.

Considering how girls’ bodies are restricted in the name of protection, we can point to several examples, such as the ongoing promotion of virginity prominent across many social arenas, especially in Christian denominations and within public education. Girls routinely have earlier curfews than cis male siblings or peers and are more often monitored by parents outside of the home. Sex education in public schools (if it exists at all) rarely discusses girls’ sexualities with any nuance, let alone entertaining the possibility of girls identifying with nonhetero desires. Curriculum most often focuses on menstruation, anatomy, and reproductive cycles (and frankly, the information is severely lacking in depth and detail). While this knowledge is important, it does little to question how sex education, even if advertised as comprehensive, fails to promote transparent and direct conversations about desire, queer experiences, pleasure, and the cultivation of sexual subjectivities. Boys are framed as active sexual agents, and girls are passive receivers or victims (Fields 2008; Fine and McClelland 2007; Orenstein 2016; Tolman 2005). This curriculum reproduces a restrictive and simplistic gender binary.

It seems American society would collectively prefer not to acknowledge girls as sexual subjects capable of desiring and asserting that desire, yet girlhood itself is sexualized throughout American public and popular media. If attention is paid to girls’ sexualities in the sex ed curriculum, they are often represented in terms of romanticism, emotional connection, and emotional intimacy rather than corporeal drive and desire for physical pleasure. When we consider this reality through a lens of disability justice, girls with disabilities, whether cognitive or physical, are more likely to be viewed as entirely nonsexual or lacking sexual subjectivity and agency. The framework of girlhood innocence becomes even more firmly entrenched, and efforts toward protection are escalated (Fine 1988; Hill 2017; Steele and Goldblatt 2020; Stienstra 2015; Tepper 2000). The invisibility of girls with disabilities across social institutions, including media, renders their self-representation in new media landscapes even more important in intersectional analyses of tween girls’ embodied experiences (Hill 2017; Reinke and Todd 2016).

School dress codes unjustly target girls and punish them for wearing “sexual” clothing (leggings that fit the form, for example), yet girls are effectively encouraged to wear such clothing through media messaging, marketing from mass retailers, and its availability in the places where they consume (or where parents consume for them). Peggy Orenstein, author of Girls and Sex (2016), argues that, though perhaps well intentioned, parents and educators alienate girls from their own bodies by exacerbating their vulnerability and positioning sex as something to fear, all under the banner of protection. Sarah Banet-Weiser suggests,

The projection of adult anxieties, fears, and moral panic onto girls’ bodies ultimately places an onus on girls to protect themselves from boys and men, dress modestly, behave appropriately, and take full responsibility for their bodies as distractions to boys and men at best—and targets for sexual violence at worst.

The second cultural model is “Girl Power!” The term “Girl Power!” was born out of the third wave feminist movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s and coined by members of the feminist punk band Bikini Kill, who also wrote and published the Riot Grrrl manifesto in 1991. Originally, the “Girl Power!” sentiment encapsulated an underground, do-it-yourself, antiestablishment feminist ethic focused on intersectionality and inclusion, as well as individualism, choice, and agency—notably set apart from the collectivist politics and dubious, homogenizing “sisterhood is global” rhetoric of the feminist second wave. “Girl Power!” was a movement established by girls for girls, and it centered reclaiming, owning, and celebrating the identity of girl, emphasizing neofemininities, confidence, independence, subcultural performance, and choice (Riordan 2001).

Over time, the girl power idea has become intensely bound up with consumer culture, a cornerstone of postfeminist ideology and, more recently, a recognizable thread in the resurgence of popular feminism (Banet-Weiser 2018; Zeisler 2016). Postfeminism posits and parades the myth of achieved gender equality: the belief that we are beyond feminism, that we no longer need it. Postfeminist sensibility (Adamson 2017; Gill 2007; McRobbie 2008) can be understood acutely through the feminist politics of late 1990s and early 2000s media such as Ally McBeal and Sex and the City, which champion a particular brand of female empowerment marked by Whiteness, wealth, individualism, neoliberalism, and adaptation to masculine-coded spaces while performing conventional femininity via beauty and body work (Tasker and Negra 2007). Postfeminism is especially and particularly concerned with the body as project (Gill 2007).

More recently, feminist scholarship on “confidence culture” (Orgad and Gill 2022) and “empowerment” (Banet-Weiser 2018) has complicated the postfeminist sensibility through recognition of an unmistakable rise in feminist branding, “femvertising,” and popular feminisms available for purchase. Orgad and Gill (2022) identify the paradox of the confidence revolution that has emerged alongside increasingly stringent expectations and standards of body and beauty, professional success, and familial success. This “have it all” narrative comes from postfeminism and is played out in how “Girl Power!” is packaged and sold. “Girl Power!” glosses over the specificity of oppressions faced by tween girls at various intersections of identity. It is very White, cis-het, ableist, and thin oriented. These competing cultural models of innocent girls who need protection and “Girl Power!” demonstrate how contradictory social and cultural conditions create the paradox and dilemma of “ideal girlhood” (Renold and Ringrose 2013). Though rooted in postfeminist notions that feminism has done its job and that gendered empowerment can be achieved and maintained through the performance of ideal femininity, the more recent twist on popular feminism promotes authenticity, vulnerability, and the promise of empowerment and confidence through continual, individual work on the self. Popular feminism suggests that if tween girls are indeed in crisis, they can readily buy their way out and achieve confidence through consumption, so long as they also be themselves.

Thus, rather than destabilizing entrenched gender norms that continue to oppress girls with marginalized identities that mark them as “trouble” or “at risk” by virtue of raced and classed embodiments—or disrupting a logic of White, middle-class girls as at once in need of protection and confident, bold, empowered, and future subjects—“Girl Power!” and its promise delivered by purchase functions as a distraction from enduring gender inequities. “Girl Power!” has been turned into a capitalist project, and the body along with it. From British pop band sensation the Spice Girls of the early aughts to astronaut Barbie (“If you can dream it, you can be it!”) to Frozen’s Elsa (2013) to T-shirts you can buy with just one click (“I’m a Girl . . . What’s your Superpower?”), tween girls are certainly a primary market for self-empowerment via consumption (Banet-Weiser 2014; Kennedy and Coulter 2018; Kennedy 2018).

The coexistence and discordance of these competing cultural models illuminate how American culture simultaneously values girls’ opportunities for achievement and ability to assert themselves, speak their minds, and exhibit success in historically male/masculine dominated arenas such as sports, science, and technology, while continuing to value them for their beauty, presumed innocence, gentleness, femininity, and purity. And again, it depends greatly on which girls we are talking about, as competing cultural models play out differently and inform adult responses to girlhood narratives based on race, class, ability, gender, and sexual expression.

Surveillance and policing of tween girls online has increased in recent years alongside the proliferation of resources that seek to equip girls with tools to not only smartly and safely navigate digital spaces but also take full advantage of the rewards, pleasures, and opportunities those spaces have to offer. It matters that we are seeing more recognition of tween girls as agential subjects on social media. The stories news media feature, however, are often (and predictably) the most extreme and sensational, as they capitalize on public anxieties and panics about tween girls and sex, cyberbullying, suicide, and other social ills associated with digital youth culture, making it seem as though young people cannot be trusted to not engage in risky online behaviors (Attia 2023). But the tween girls I interviewed shared that they frequently talk to their parents and peers about safe social media use and value privacy and protection online, keenly balancing the benefits of making certain content public in these contemporary economies of visibility (Banet-Weiser 2014; Shields Dobson 2015).

It is the feeling of social media as a less restricted place that allows for both the alarmist responses on the part of adults and the possibilities of freedom and authenticity of expression exercised by young people online. There is ambiguity and ambivalence in how tween girls feel about social media and express themselves on these platforms. Often, tween girls conform to conventional ideas of femininity or resist and subvert these conventions. Conformity and resistance frequently happen at the same time, in the same performance, and sometimes in the same breath. These moments of seeming contradiction are embodied manifestations and reflections of the contradictory and paradoxical nature of achieving ideal girlhood today. Just as in their physical worlds, tween girls on social media must reckon with the constrained agency and normative Whiteness, cisgendered-ness, ableism, and classism of the “innocent girls who need protection” model and the discordant messaging in popular and consumer culture that they can be anything and do anything according to the “Girl Power!” model. Tween girls are certainly not wholly empowered, nor are they passive victims. It is precisely in the in between that tween girls live their lives and grapple with themselves in processes of becoming agential subjects on social media.

Methods and Ethics

This research presents novel understandings of how tween girls negotiate the competing cultural models of innocent girls who need protection and “Girl Power!” via participation on social media platforms and how they give meaning to their experiences as tween girls and social media users in a digitally driven society. As danah boyd writes, “social media platforms have been taken up around the globe at an unprecedented speed, revealing the extraordinary nature of the social media phenomenon. For this reason alone, it is imperative to analyze the phenomenon of social media” (2014:2).

This is a multimethod study. The first method is a textual analysis of YouTube videos from the Pretty or Ugly YouTube trend that began in 2011, peaked in 2013 (my best guess), and continues today at a low rumble with new videos being created and uploaded, the trend itself replicated to varying degrees on other platforms such as TikTok. The second method is in-depth interviews with tween girls between the ages of ten and thirteen living in Wisconsin. This research takes a cultural studies approach and captures interplay between a tangible example of how tween girls perform their bodies online and make themselves visible on social media (on YouTube specifically) and how tween girls themselves articulate and characterize the why and how behind their social media participation and content creation (Sloan and Quan-Haase 2016).

Textual analysis (Smith 2017) of Pretty or Ugly YouTube videos reveals interesting patterns of language and body performance that demonstrate notable variations in how tween girls present themselves within the context of this trend. I analyzed 260 Pretty or Ugly videos posted publicly and available for anyone on YouTube to view. My sample predominantly featured White tween girls between the conjectural ages of ten and fourteen years old. All the tween girl subjects in the videos had access and ability to post to YouTube channels, whether their own channels (technically illegal for those under thirteen years old) or the channels of family members or friends. Videos in the trend vary according to how a girl presents herself and where the video is shot (most often in a bedroom, sometimes a bathroom, rarely a kitchen or other living area in a home, and quite rarely outside or in a public space). The videos range in length from ten seconds to several minutes long but often follow a similar formula or script. A tween girl records herself with a laptop, tablet, or mobile phone, and the video usually goes something like this:

This video script comes from Kerrigan,⁴ a young White girl approximately eleven or twelve years old who wears a red Hollister sweatshirt and plays with her blond hair while she speaks, swiveling around on a desk chair in the room where she records the video. Kerrigan’s video demonstrates the overall ethos of the Pretty or Ugly trend and a specific formula recognizable across a significant number of the videos. A tween girl making one of these videos often references friends or peers at school or some other faction of her social life commenting on her appearance. She frames her question as a desire to learn the truth and implores YouTube viewers to be honest with her and comment on whether she is pretty or ugly. She often projects a sense of objectivity onto the YouTube audience, recognized as a network of strangers, people she does not know but a community she can tap into nonetheless. This objectivity seems to be what she wants and her ostensible reason for making the video public on a wide-reaching platform like YouTube: she is getting mixed messages from friends and other people she knows in physical space such as at school, and she can perhaps garner a more objective assessment of her appearance from people she does not know in digital space.

I analyzed 260 of these videos, but there are upward of an estimated one million available to view (Gallo 2013; Perle 2013; Rossie 2015). A Pretty or Ugly video might only have a handful of views, or it may have gone viral and garnered millions of views; videos with more clicks and views helped catalyze the Pretty or Ugly video trope as a trend. Public response to the trend, as well as my own assessment of it, substantiates that it is most certainly a trend among tween girls, driven by this demographic. Tween girls contributed to the growing nature of the trend by watching other girls post videos and then posting their own. Many girls posting Pretty or Ugly videos explicitly identify seeing other girls posting the videos as motivation for making and posting one.

YouTube video results are not generated randomly in searches (Burgess and Green 2018). Specific search terms are required to view desired content. Because of the large volume of videos in the trend, I created a fairly diverse sample through the application of four different configurations of a set of search terms: 1) “Am I pretty or ugly?” 2) “Am I ugly or pretty?” 3) “Am I pretty?” 4) “Am I ugly?” I reviewed video results to determine relevance to the trend and ensured that each video in my sample met the following criteria: it must be generated by one of the four specified search terms; the title of the video must include the words pretty, ugly, or some combination thereof; the subject(s) of the video must identify as girl or have an assumed sex category of girl;⁵ and the subject(s) of the video must have an estimated age of fourteen or younger.

The ethical considerations of this research are not straightforward, and I made several context-specific decisions. Though I cannot know for certain the intent of video subjects in terms of wanting to reach a broad audience or wanting only friends and family to watch, as every video I analyzed was public and available to view without a specific login, password, or requirement to follow or subscribe to the YouTube channel in question and because the girls in the videos are crowdsourcing for honesty about their appearances, my ethical standpoint follows that the girls in the videos understood to a reasonable degree that their videos could be watched by any number of people. I did not seek out any information about video subject identity beyond what was posted by the creator (title of video, username, YouTube channel name, date of posting), and I chose to use pseudonyms for analysis of the videos because even though the videos are posted publicly, the video subjects are minors (Graham et al. 2013; Greig, Taylor, and MacKay 2013; Sui, Sui, and Rhodes 2022), and I wanted to establish some degree of anonymity.

I generated a sample of 260 Pretty or Ugly YouTube videos by selecting sixty-five videos from the results of each of the four search terms listed. I cleared my Internet history between each search term and vetted each video for relevance and to ensure there were no repeats in the sample. I did not select videos based on number of views or comments. Though I thought about analyzing comments on the videos in addition to the videos themselves, as doing so might indicate popularity of certain videos in the trend and provide compelling data on notions of “micro-celebrity” (Abidin 2018; Banet-Weiser 2017; Jerslev 2016; Marwick 2013b), it was outside the scope of this research. It is a fruitful vein of analysis that warrants further examination and has already been addressed by at least one scholar (Rossie 2015). I was focused on investigating how tween girls perform their bodies publicly and present themselves on social media in asking this question on YouTube specifically and analyzing what social and cultural meanings of contemporary American girlhoods emerge from individual videos as well as the existence of the Pretty or Ugly YouTube trend as a whole.

I coded the video transcripts and wrote observational notes and memos after viewing each video. These notes included information such as the girl’s perceived gender identity and expression, racial identity, age, dress, demeanor, body language, and the environment in which the video was filmed (bedroom, bathroom, shared space in a home, etc.). I also looked at body language and considered how much of a girl’s body was visible in a video (e.g., close-up, face only, full body, etc.).

The demographic breakdown of the 260 Pretty or Ugly videos in my sample included a total of 269 video subjects, as seven of the videos in my sample featured more than one girl. Six of the videos featured two girls, and one featured four girls. In terms of perceived racial categories, 214 of the videos featured girls who were assumed White, twenty-four featured girls assumed Black, twenty-one featured girls assumed Latina, three featured girls assumed Asian, one featured a girl who was mixed race (she identifies herself in this way in the video), and the six remaining videos were classified as other or undetermined, as I was not able to reasonably perceive racial category for those video subjects, whether their faces and bodies were somewhat obscured or covered or they were not close enough to the web camera. There is a great deal of Whiteness centered within the trend I explore in more detail in subsequent chapters.

In the second part of my study, I conducted in-depth interviews with twenty-six ten- to thirteen-year-old girls over a six-month period between the end of 2016 and the beginning of 2017. Even though we have seen increased attention in research and scholarship toward female adolescents and social media in recent years, there is still a dearth of research that actively centers the voices and experiences of tween girls growing up with social media (Bulger et al. 2021; De Leyn et al. 2021; García-Gómez 2018). I wanted to know more about the experiences, practices, and content creations of tween girls on social media in relation to the competing cultural models American tween girls exist within. Pairing interviews with tween girls with the textual analysis of the tween girl−driven Pretty or Ugly YouTube trend allowed me to develop a richer understanding of contemporary American girlhoods in the digital age. The YouTube trend is a tangible, public example of digital girlhoods, and the specific tensions this trend calls forth are a compelling demonstration of how tween girls negotiate, conform to, and resist the cultural models of innocent girls who need protection and “Girl Power!” The interviews with the twenty-six tween girls provide rich insight into the trend, as I showed interviewees a sample of Pretty or Ugly videos and asked for their reactions. The interviews also allowed me to see more gradation and distinction between how adult authority figures and public media perceive tween girls in terms of their social media behavior and what tween girls are actually doing on social media. Not unlike how girls are represented in popular media and culture through overly simplistic tropes and stereotypes, the realities of tween girls’ lives on social media are much more complicated.

The logic of my study design seeks to understand how tween girls as social actors give meaning to their social worlds in a specific cultural and temporal context (Warren and Karner 2010). Understanding tween girls to be the main target demographic for “Girl Power!” and the self-esteem market (Banet-Weiser 2014), as well as a demographic that adults seek to protect (and police and control), I question how and why tween girls use social media, how they navigate the social conditions of competing cultural models of girlhoods, and what the implications of their social media use are. Tween girls use social media in part to reconcile and make sense of what is happening to them in physical spaces—school, home, with friends, peers, and in other social activities.

I got institutional approval from the University of Massachusetts Boston review board to conduct interviews with ten- to fourteen-year-old girls and recruited study participants through purposive sampling from three sites in Wisconsin: Girls Inc. of Greater Madison, the Boys and Girls Club of Dane County, and the Boys and Girls Club of West Central Wisconsin. These sites serve girls in the tween age category, primarily through after-school programming. Participants were all female adolescents within a specific age range who identify as girls, but they were diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic circumstance. My interview participants did not have visible disabilities, and I did not ask about disability identity directly, so I cannot speak to the presence of disabilities among interviewees.

Through recruitment materials, I obtained consent from guardians for each girl to participate in a one-on-one interview at the established after-school site. Other eligibility requirements included having regular access (defined as at least one hour each day) to the Internet through use of an Internet-capable device and being self-reportedly active on at least two of the following social media sites: Facebook, Instagram, Musical.ly, Snapchat, Twitter, or YouTube. (Musical.ly was at the height of its popularity during 2016 and 2017 and notably merged with and ultimately became TikTok in 2018. TikTok did not enjoy immense popularity until two years later, with the onset of the COVID-19 global pandemic.)

Interview subjects were recruited by adult liaisons at each site. Program managers assisted in getting word out about the project and distributing study materials to parents and guardians of girls in the programs. Interested parents and guardians were able to reach out to me and ask questions about the study. They provided consent forms granting permission for the girls to participate in the interviews. Girls whose guardians gave their consent were then asked again whether they wanted to participate to ensure that they understood what participation entailed. I scheduled interviews with girls who agreed to participate during after-school hours, and all interviews took place at the respective after-school program sites, settings familiar and comfortable for the girls.

At the outset of each interview, participants signed the assent form, as well as a consent form for audio recording the interviews for analysis. Girls were read the parameters of the study in terms they could understand and given the opportunity to ask questions about the process. Additionally, I made it clear to each participant that they could refuse to answer any questions they did not want to answer, stop the interview, or withdraw from the process altogether at any time. All identifying information was kept strictly confidential throughout the data collection and analysis processes, and each participant was given a pseudonym at the outset of the study. Data was stored in accordance with university policy. Audio recordings of the interviews were deleted on completion of the analysis. A small gift card incentive was given to each girl at the conclusion of her interview. Interview subject demographics are broken down in Table 1.1.

Of the twenty-six tween girls I interviewed, thirteen were Black, ten were White, and three were Latina. Thirteen of the girls were ten years old, six were eleven years old, two were twelve years old, and five were thirteen years old. I had an overrepresentation of younger girls and did not have any fourteen-year-olds in the sample. Twenty-one of the twenty-six girls were living in a more urban area, while the remaining five were in a more rural or smaller town setting. The interviews lasted anywhere between twelve and ninety minutes, around thirty-five minutes on average, with some participants wanting to share more than others. There was no obvious pattern or predictor of interview length in terms of who spoke more or less; the longest interviews were split across interview sites, age, and racial categories. I took field notes during and immediately following each interview to capture specific information about girls’ appearances, dress, demeanors, and body language. Each interview was audio recorded and transcribed using a transcription service. I coded field notes as well as interview transcripts for analysis.

The interviews were semistructured and followed an interview guide centered around five themes with suggested questions: 1) basics of online participation, 2) social media behavior and content, 3) digital behavior and gender, 4) the Pretty or Ugly YouTube trend, and 5) perspectives on the importance of social media. During a portion of each interview, I showed each participant a sample of three videos from the Pretty or Ugly trend and asked for her reactions to the videos. All interviewees watched the same three videos, which were randomly selected from my sample of videos for the textual analysis. This catalyzed conversations about social media and gender. In response to the videos, tween girls reflected on how, from their perspectives, girls and boys use social media differently and are judged differently in how they use it.

The interview data revealed a great deal about the experiences of tween girls on social media in the contemporary United States and captured distinct characteristics within tween girls’ individual social media use. The girls I interviewed certainly articulated shared themes and experiences, but they also demonstrated significant differences in personal interests, how they use social media, how they experience judgment online, the kinds of choices they make in terms of what and where they post, the degree to which they post and why, how they navigate notions of privacy and safety, and their feelings about their social media participation overall.

I hope to represent these nuances as fully and accurately as possible while recognizing how my role as an adult, White, cis woman researcher informed how girls answered my questions and told me about their experiences and feelings. This research presents the shared meanings created between myself and the tween girls I spoke with (Guba and Lincoln 1994). My focus was to ensure the girls felt safe and comfortable during the interview process, minimizing potential harm while creating space for girls to bring up any topics they wanted to address in an organic way (Farrell 2022; Willig 2013). Because the girls did not know me outside of the context of the interview, and given my position as an adult authority figure, I cannot entirely rule out the possibility of social desirability bias, or them answering questions based on what they thought I wanted to hear. But I also wanted to be cautious of how routinely girls are dismissed in their concerns, to follow their lead and be open to whatever they were telling me as their truths. Regarding my analytical and ethical position, I kept the interview questions quite open ended and followed the girls’ lead in our conversations, demonstrating a commitment to their perspectives and experiences and centering their voices in the research.

Tween girls, and girls more generally, are a persistently understudied population. Most of the tween girls I interviewed had never given an interview before—and never specifically about social media. I wanted to be sensitive to this reality, giving the girls plenty of space to ask questions and talk about themes and ideas that came up for them. In analysis, I employed qualitative interpretation frameworks used by girlhood studies scholars (Mitchell and Reid-Walsh 2008; Singh 2021) and the work of Sorsoli and Tolman, who write that

Tween girls vocalized quite a bit of ambivalence about social media being good or bad; they often felt it was both, appreciating certain elements of social media while bemoaning others. Indeed, they had, as Sorsoli and Tolman suggest, “multiple and contradictory perspectives.” These complex and contradictory perspectives speak to the nature of social media as a whole—as a reflection of social interactions and societal norms and mores, a complicated tapestry that influences tween girls’ daily lives, choices, and behaviors and continually blurs the boundaries between the physical and the digital. This research presents nuanced accounts of how tween girls “do girlhood” on social media, how they create digital girlhoods, and how they characterize their experiences online, considering what all this means in a contemporary moment defined by competing cultural models of girlhood and increased normalization of social media use in the day-to-day lives of American tween girls.

Mapping Digital Girlhoods

Chapter Two further situates and historicizes the contemporary social and cultural conditions of American girlhoods by more thoroughly exploring the origins of the competing cultural models of innocent girls who need protection and “Girl Power!” Looking at how women’s and girl’s bodies have been and continue to be controlled and restricted over time, I illuminate how overt and covert manifestations of competing cultural models are tangibly felt and embodied by tween girls in the digital cultural landscape. Reflecting on enduring phenomena, theories, and framings such as the Madonna-Whore myth, biopower, docile bodies, stringent gendered aesthetic ideals, and well-worn controlling images of the at-risk girl and the can-do girl in popular media (Hill Collins 1990; hooks 1992), I explore how the tension between protectionist discourses and postfeminist-turned-popular-feminist neoliberal “Girl Power!” results in today’s tween girls having to navigate a perpetual push-pull between empowerment and disempowerment.

Mapping this tension onto girls’ social media use, Chapter Three explores how the “Girl Power!” cultural model, which emphasizes individualism, empowerment, and confidence via consumption, has fostered the expectation that tween girls make themselves visible online. However, tween girls are notably policed (often by other girls) when modes of visibility resist or subvert conventional and/or acceptable performances of femininity (Attwood, Hakim, and Winch 2017). Tween girls both conform to and resist the conventions and gendered politics of these economies of visibility (Banet-Weiser 2015) in various ways. Visibility on social media has become a normal part of girls’ daily routines but also a significant and widely recognized (and sought after) form of social capital among their peers. They exercise control over their self-representations on social media and strategically use social media to engage their interests and build social capital. Tween girls keenly balance the desire to be seen with the pressure of presenting themselves in culturally specific and socially acceptable ways.

Chapter Four digs deeper into the politics of tween girls’ visibility on social media through the specific lens of the Pretty or Ugly YouTube trend and the reactions I got from the tween girls I interviewed when I showed them videos from the trend. The Pretty or Ugly trend, as an example of contemporary digital girlhoods, demonstrates clear tensions between empowerment and disempowerment, public and private, confidence and insecurity, and authenticity and affect. The responses my interviewees had to the videos reveal important questions about a digital authenticity values system—what constitutes being real or fake on social media—as well as the idea that being bullied in physical space, such as at school, is a logical or practical motivation behind why a tween girl might post a Pretty or Ugly video on YouTube. Tween girls responded to the Pretty or Ugly videos in complex and often contradictory ways, showcasing how the competing cultural models of girlhood and paradoxes tween girls exist within influence how they relate to one another in their social worlds.

Continuing in this vein of how tween girls relate to each other, Chapter Five takes an in-depth look at a spectrum of tween girl social behavior—ranging from girls bullying girls to relational “drama” between and among girls to intragroup affirmation, homosocial support, and friendship—and investigates how this spectrum plays out on social media. Toxic girl culture is wrought by competing cultural models of innocent girls who need protection and “Girl Power!” This behavioral spectrum is reflected in the meanings tween girls give to social media. Tween girls are conditioned into certain relational behaviors, primarily reflected in media representation of girls as mean, catty, or relationally aggressive (Mikel Brown 2003; Chesney-Lind, Morash, and Irwin 2007; Crann 2017; Currie, Kelly, and Pomerantz 2007; Mcqueeney and Girgenti-Malone 2018; Simmons 2002). There is much social and cultural emphasis on competition among girls, as well as normalization of self-deprecative talk to relate with one another. Tween girls characterize social media as a site where bullying between and among girls can and does occur, but they also view social media, especially apps such as Snapchat, as a crucial vehicle for maintaining continual connection with friends, particularly in terms of seeking and offering support and affirmation. They indicate meaningful connections with friends as a primary motivation for using social media.

Tween girls mainly interact on social media with people and peer networks they already know in physical space (Bulger et al. 2021; De Leyn et al. 2021). This reality goes against some adult-centered fears and perceptions of tween girls engaging in the risky behavior of interacting with strangers and potential predators online. Chapter Six investigates how tween girls are often represented in news and popular media in a simplistic way—either as passive victims of online predation or as reckless and irresponsible in their social media use. Contrary to this popular belief, my research shows that tween girls are keeping much of their content private, interacting primarily with people they know in physical space, following parental guidelines, seeking out “appropriate content” on social media, and internalizing what their parents teach them about approaching social media with a measured amount of fear and caution.

We should not be roundly alarmed or totally emboldened by what tween girls are doing online. The reality is that tween girls are still figuring themselves out. As the creators and negotiators of digital girlhoods, they are using social media as an important tool in processes of self- and social development: to exercise control over how they are seen and how they see themselves, create content they care about, manage relationships, and connect with their communities. In centering tween girls’ voices in their experiences with social media and demonstrating how they leverage these platforms (YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.) to build confidence, gain social capital, create visibility, and foster and manage homosocial relationships, this research offers a fresh approach to American tween girl digital cultures and argues that social media is not the cause of the gendered social ills (low self-esteem, bullying behavior, negative body image, etc.) it is often made out to be. Rather, social media is a consequential tool that tween girls are using in strategic and compelling ways to participate in cultural conversations that so often happen about them but generally fail to happen with them.