American Girls

Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

By: Nancy Jo Sales

Narrated by: Thérèse Plummer, Nancy Jo Sales

A New York Times Bestseller


Instagram. Whisper. YouTube. Kik. Ask.fm. Tinder. The dominant force in the lives of girls coming of age in America today is social media. What it is doing to an entire generation of young women is the subject of award-winning Vanity Fair writer Nancy Jo Sales’s riveting and explosive American Girls.

With extraordinary intimacy and precision, Sales captures what it feels like to be a girl in America today. From Montclair to Manhattan and Los Angeles, from Florida and Arizona to Texas and Kentucky, Sales crisscrossed the country, speaking to more than two hundred girls, ages thirteen to nineteen, and documenting a massive change in the way girls are growing up, a phenomenon that transcends race, geography, and household income. American Girls provides a disturbing portrait of the end of childhood as we know it and of the inexorable and ubiquitous experience of a new kind of adolescence—one dominated by new social and sexual norms, where a girl’s first crushes and experiences of longing and romance occur in an accelerated electronic environment; where issues of identity and self-esteem are magnified and transformed by social platforms that provide instantaneous judgment. What does it mean to be a girl in America in 2016? It means coming of age online in a hypersexualized culture that has normalized extreme behavior, from pornography to the casual exchange of nude photographs; a culture rife with a virulent new strain of sexism and a sometimes self-undermining notion of feminist empowerment; a culture in which teenagers are spending so much time on technology and social media that they are not developing basic communication skills. From beauty gurus to slut-shaming to a disconcerting trend of exhibitionism, Nancy Jo Sales provides a shocking window into the troubling world of today’s teenage girls.

Provocative and urgent, American Girls is destined to ignite a much-needed conversation about how we can help our daughters and sons negotiate unprecedented new challenges.

Holy moly parents of teenagers need to read this!

I'm totally floored by what's in this book. all parents need to see what's coming...do not give your kids phones!

A MUST READ for every parent

This book has shocked me to my core but I am glad I listened to it. It is so incredibly sad what children/ youth are going through these days. I had no clue!
I want to desperately protect my children from all of this. We must all know the situation and then do something about it - as a society.

I want to give this book a higher rating

If you work with young women you should read this book. It's warning about porn and social media culture are important and timely. But her portrayal of boys is at base disgusting, limited in scope, and flatly unfair. Her ideas about the solution seem to ignore huge swaths of her own discoveries.

I think we are letting young people down. This book is an example of how we do that. And should be rea.

A Must Read for anyone who has or works with teens

While the focus is on teen girls, listeners (or readers) will also gain insight into the minds of teenage boys. at once heartbreaking, enlightening, and entertaining, this is a must read for anyone with teens in their life.

Repetitive and painful to read

I read this book because I work with teenage girls. Although I initially found it informative and felt it provided a very vivid (albeit disturbing) portrayal of what teenage girls are experiencing, I felt that it beat its point to death. I kept continuing in the hopes that the second half would outline positive things that can be done to help protect or guide girls from the most negative of interactions, but there was no such research. Just a short opinion piece at the end. A glorified pamphlet would have been just as useful and would not have dragged me through so many dreadful hours.
Lastly, I found the narrator's tone to be affected and really irritating.