August 20, 2020 • 28 mins
Ali Wentworth invites bestie and supermodel Brooke Shields to discuss social media and the sexualization of teenage girls. Brooke opens up about her own complicated relationship with sexuality and both women dig into how they’re navigating monitoring their teen daughters’ activity on social media.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Go Ask Ali, a production of Shonda Land
Audio and partnership with I Heart Radio. Hi, I'm Ali Wentworth,
and welcome to my new podcast, Go ask Alli. We're
I'll be dissecting the ship show that is modern life.
You know, I've always been curious about how it all works,
(00:23):
in the chaos of our life, relationships, families, kids, sex, death,
all the basic ingredients that make up our human condition.
But nothing prepared me for a pandemic. I'm married to
George Stephanopolis, and I have two teenage daughters. I'm acting
and writing, and one day in March I got COVID
(00:43):
nineteen and my whole life came screeching to a halt.
And as I lay in bed, taking tail and all
and finishing Netflix, I thought to myself, how am I
going to raise a teenager in a pandemic? How is
any of us going to do that? My two daughters,
their whole life was upside down. They weren't seeing their friends,
they weren't going to school, they were watching all kinds
(01:06):
of bizarre TV shows like My One Thousand Pound Life.
So I decided that would be the topic of my
podcast this season, How to grow a teenager in a pandemic,
and so on, go ask Ali. I'm going to go
ask some other people, some doctors, experts, friends. I'm even
going to try to pull my teenage daughter into the
(01:27):
hot seat and have her answer some of these questions.
So on today's episode, I'm talking about the sexualization of
girls in social media. Social media has amplified age old
pressures for teenage girls to conform to certain sexualized narratives,
and those hyper sexualized models of what it means to
be feminine can affect the mental, emotional, and physical health
(01:49):
of our girls. I'm asking how do we help them,
how do we monitor them, how do we keep them
from ending up on the dark web? And who better
to talk to than one of my friends, Brookshields. She
is an American model and actress. She has so many
credits that we don't have enough time to listen all.
But what I will say is that at age twelve,
she was starring in a movie by Louis Mall called
(02:12):
Pretty Baby, where she played a child prostitute. She is
somebody who was sexualized as a young girl, and who
now has two teenage daughters who are just tiktoking their
way through the pandemic. Hello Brookshields, Hello Ali went Worth.
So I'm, as you know, fascinated by what is happening
to our teenage girls on social media, and we share
(02:36):
a lot of things. You and I not only are
exterior beauty, but also the fact that we have teenage
girls and we are constantly scratching our heads about how
to deal with this issue. The reason that you are
so I find particularly fascinating to talk to about this
was as a young girl, you lived in a very
public sexualized way, particularly you know, because of the modeling,
(02:59):
but also because of the Louie Mall movie. And my
first question is to you is can you imagine if
you were on social media when you were one through fifteen?
I could not imagine it, and my wildest dreams, even
my mom kept all of the press away from me,
(03:20):
so anything that was written, I never saw anything. So
I didn't even see the negativity. And I think she
did that on purpose, because they tried to eviscerate all
of us after that movie. Well, you know, it's interesting
because in our world, the sexualization of females is rewarded,
whether it's magazines, television, the media, and so here our
(03:42):
teenage girls have a platform and a place where they
can self sexualize themselves as much as they can. You know, you,
when you were young, your mother controlled sort of your brand,
But now they kind of they get to create it themselves.
I'm just curious, what are your kind of parental guidelines
when it comes to that. Do you have set rules
(04:03):
like you're not allowed to do bikini shots or nuties?
Are only their mother is allowed to do bikini No?
I mean we do. We have access to all of
their social media. We have the power to turn it
off for any reason. I can't follow her. I have
to follow her through another account just for security reasons.
(04:24):
Um them one of them is public and one isn't.
Why why is one of them allowed to be public?
I'm just curious. Well, because one of them is sixteen
and the others fourteen, and at sixteen, we said, all right,
as long as we can still have control of it,
and as long as you don't post anything inappropriate, we
will let you. Because and the public aspect of hers
(04:46):
is now that she's in high school, her friend group
has really opened up, so they're from all these different
schools and and everything like that. But we have it
monitored all the time, I trust her view, I trust
her fear. Um, we have put the fear of got
into them. With regards to whatever you post doesn't go away.
(05:08):
The words you choose have to be chosen very carefully.
Colleges look at your Instagram. Colleges review all of that,
and so they I think they're starting to get it
a little bit. So most parents should be monitoring their
children social media. They don't, but you know, we all
try to as best we can. We all hope that
(05:30):
they don't go behind our backs and create other accounts.
There are two things that I've noticed, particularly with my children,
which is likes have become so so important to get.
Alike is complete validation of who you are as a person.
And there's been so much research globally that show that,
of course, young girls need physical validation because they all
(05:55):
they see themselves is ugly or fat, And there's a
very specific narrative about what we're all supposed to look
like that they abide by. But the like seem to
initiate the desire to be accepted. And what happens is
they start almost like an addiction to the machines at Vegas.
They need the likes to kind of fill that hole.
(06:17):
And I found that when they are private, they know
that the likes can only go so far because it
is within their friend group or people they know. When
you open up to the public, it becomes kind of
a mad rush to get as many legs as you lot,
because that sort of informs how exciting, sexy, important you
(06:38):
are a likes and the validation it is such an addiction.
And what's weird about the contradiction or the being a
hypocrite in my world is that I have to have
the most followers that I can. Now followers and likes.
I don't look at the likes as much as I
do the followers. But now this whole world has turned
(06:58):
into if they want you to advertise X product, they
look at how many followers you have. So if I
happened to be a person that just wants to not
really live you know that way, and take pictures of
what I eat and and everything, well, then they're not
gonna want me because I don't have a million or
more followers. And try telling that to your kids. And
(07:21):
I have to say, this is for my business, this
is I'm having somebody else help me monitor it, so
I'm not subjected to the comments, I don't read the comments.
And Rowan actually said to me she posted something with me,
and I asked her how it was being received, and
she said, don't read the comments, mom. And I thought
that was really interesting because they were clearly not nice,
(07:44):
and she was kind of trying to protect me. So
it does tell me that somewhere in there there's a barometer.
What's weird for me is I know that I'm beautiful
and sexy. I feel that I'm perfect, So come on,
you don't need that validation, no, um no, but there
are there are always going to be people that just
(08:05):
want to rip me apart. And then I started seeing
some of the comments and they were, you know, not nice,
and and I thought, my god, this is just a
slight taste of what these kids are are doing and
what they're feeling. But it's seven, and it's not only
girls criticizing each other, but it's boys. And so they're
giving these boys all the power to kind of tell
(08:29):
them if they have any word wrong with them, Yeah,
and they do. They pointed out girls being in this
platform and in this position, we're pushing misogyny and sexism
at a much earlier age. You know, I feel like,
are we doing the right things as mothers to shield
them from this till they're older, till they're you know,
frontal lobe has developed and they can understand this the
(08:51):
way we do. I mean, I had a very strange,
strange relationship with sexuality as a child. Because this is
only a half our podcast, Brooke, but it's hard for
me to tell my kids, talk to my kids about this. Well,
this is why you're an interesting guest because you were
so sexualized as a young girl, and now you have
(09:11):
teenage girls. How do you set the rules without them
saying you were you played a child prostituted? I mean,
how do they not push it back in your face?
I mean it's like Hodd Lives and Tierra saying I
don't want to see you in a pageant. I mean no,
I'm dealing with this right now with one of my daughters.
There is an agency that wants her to start modeling,
and I kept saying, I need to understand the why
(09:34):
you know you need it's a very different industry than
it is now. And this man said to me said, look,
she's too young. She's fourteen, and we wait till sixteen
signing them and taking care of them. And the odd
thing for me was I was doing I was nine,
I was eight seven, you know, I was doing these
pictures since forever, and yet I do Pretty Baby. Then
(09:59):
all of a sudden, I come the most famous virgin
in the world. So I grew up with absolutely the
most conflicting, paradoxical way of living, and I just shut down.
But wasn't wasn't the fact that your virginity was publicized
as a way to counteract the part that made you
so sexualized. And probably your mother probably gotten a lot
(10:20):
of trouble for when you were younger because of Pretty Baby.
I mean she got in trouble for everything, and rightfully so.
She was sort of a train wreck that I was
always more interested in keeping her happy and keeping her alive.
I don't know if she did that intentionally. The truth
was I was very sequestered. I was very much in
(10:41):
a bubble. I didn't leave my mother's site for forever,
you know. And but most of these girls, most of
these girls, you know, they don't leave their room. To
my other point, this being a pandemic, I think teenagers
are so bored they want to be provocative and that
to me takes you to a very dark and scary place,
which is what I always live in terror of. And
(11:03):
I make sure that I talked to them about that
dark and scary place, because even if they look like
they're not listening or they roll their eyes, they hear me.
And as long as I can keep a little fear
in them. And I mean that like I I want
them to be afraid. I read them the news. I
make them watch certain documentaries about you know, abductions and
(11:24):
about relationships that seemed like they were really with a
nice guy and then they're tragic. And their response, because
they feel like they're invincible, especially at this age, is
it's not going to happen to me, mom. And that's
such an ignorant way of looking at things. And I
just keep reiterating it. I said it could. This does
not discriminate. It doesn't matter where you live, what you
(11:47):
look like, what you are. There's nothing that makes you
more prey than anybody else. And so you are not
exempt from it. And and the predators can find you.
It's very easy to find you social media, find them
on but you can also there's so many ways that
you can find people. You just tracked them. I mean,
you know, that's why I can't personally follow my kids,
(12:10):
because you can then track them to me easily. I
think that we're talking about a lot of things. I
think I've seen many kids post pictures that are inappropriate.
And they're fourteen there, fourteen years old, thirteen years old.
And my kind of question note that is it's not
(12:31):
my kid. What is our obligation to each other to
sort of say, hey, this came to my attention. Well,
I can tell you. I can tell you right now.
I had an experience with this. I have a friend
and her daughter, starting at age twelve, was posting, in
my opinion, inappropriate pictures. They were incredibly sexual. You know,
(12:54):
there were tiny bikini shots and pouty face and finger
in the mouth and you know, the come other look
and the whole thing. And I got sort of nervous
because my girls followed her and my girls looked up
to her, and I thought, this is a potential role
model for my children. And I got to stop this,
and I talked to the parents a few times, and
(13:16):
I said, you cannot have your child using this as
her only currency. And she has a public account, which
is very dangerous. I mean, it's like a predators smartest board.
You got to shut it down. And they weren't interested.
They didn't agree with me because they were and are
very proud of what their daughter looks like, and they
(13:37):
liked that she was out there, and they liked that
she got a lot of likes because the connection led
directly to them. And I finally had to kind of
pull back from the friendship and have my kids un
follow that girl because I was so terrified of the ramifications.
And I started educating my children in a way where
(13:57):
I would sit them in front of Instagram and say,
look at this picture. This is a girl to me
that has a hole to fill and she's choosing to
fill it by sexualizing herself and having unknown boys and
men out in the world tell her she's okay, you
are okay. You don't need to do that, you know.
(14:18):
So we had a million conversations about that, to the
point where I mean, my daughters won't even put like
a funny bathing suit shot going down a water slide
because I've because I've terrified them, and they'll be spinsters
living in a castle when they're eighty. I agree with you.
But another thing, which is really interesting to me is
I was so ashamed of everything growing up. I was
(14:41):
ashamed of the way I looked. I didn't have big boobs.
I always felt my butt was big. And so there
was all these different little weird messages that I was
getting that were so contradictory that I just I wanted
to hide, you know, And even if I were to
play a role, it wasn't liberating to me. So there's
a part of me that looks at the girls. They're
(15:02):
proud of their bodies, and I don't want them to
lose that. Like, I don't want them to get shame,
have shame on their bodies. And I don't want them
to be so puritanical. But I want them to be
enough fear and and I I was trying to say
to them, if they're so worried about likes and they're
so worried about being regarded and how they come across
(15:24):
to people, then wouldn't they want to know that they
missed the image that they're putting out there is not respectful. Yeah,
we're going to take a short break and we'll be
right back. Welcome back with more, Go ass Galley. The
(15:52):
problem is with this social media what's happening is mental
health is becoming a huge problem. You know, there's body
image stuff, there's eating disorders, depression, anxiety, suicide. You know,
there is a story I heard recently which was about
a young girl and she was, you know, not very popular,
(16:14):
and she wanted to get popular and the popular girls
were sexy and sexual, and her social media had only
been like, you know, puppies and cupcakes, and so she
went to a party and decided to perform oral sex
on a low crosse player because he was popular, and
she thought, this is my way in, and one of
(16:37):
the teammates filmed it, put it on social media, and
she was sledge shamed and she killed herself. Now this
is a particularly vulnerable girl. But you know, we're all
dancing in this kind of mine field of mental health
and of how our daughters are conducting themselves and viewing themselves.
(16:58):
So for me, I think it's a great thing to
educate your girls. And also it's not just them, Like
you brought up a really good point, someone else filmed it.
You could put something on and it can be screenshotted
and it can be disseminated, so it's not like, oh,
you're in control of it. You're not really in control
of anything. And you know, you go to the beach
(17:20):
and they're not having fun at the beach. They're just
taking pictures, selfies or pictures of each other or and
I'm thinking, when where's your childhood? You know, when when
do you swim on and play in the sand that
I don't mean make sandcastles like you did when you
were three, but just the joy of being outside. Or
that's the addiction in general. And so when you look
(17:42):
at social media when they're young and now they're getting
younger and younger and younger, you know, they're given these platforms.
You know, it is sort of an out of focus duckling,
and then as soon as they're sort of preteens, it's
suddenly the camera's turn and it's on them. You know,
it's funny faces and stuff. And then they get more
kind of aware and the faces pull back and suddenly
(18:03):
it's their bodies and they become more sexual and it's
less about goofy faces and now it's about presenting yourself
to the male population. It's like you could do like
one of those flipbooks of seeing you know, the ages
and how they deal with social media. It's also a
very curated platform. So even if you're a girl and
you maybe had issues with your body or your face,
(18:24):
you can now face tune them. You can make your
breasts bigger, you can make your acne go away, you
can sort of morph into your idealistic version of yourself.
So that's another thing that's being presented out there, which
to me feeds the anxiety, depression, and eating disorders because
you know that you're putting something out there that's false,
(18:47):
and every time you look in the mirror you are
reminded that you don't look like that image. You are
perpetuating the lowest self esteem that you could possibly have up.
I mean, it's just it's so devastating. And then you
have teenage girls who want to look like the image
that face tune has created, so they go get preemptive
(19:10):
botox and fillers at fourteen fifteen years old, again, before
the frontal lobe has developed, before you're capable of making
good decisions, you already cutting and pasting an image of
yourself that hasn't even formed yet. Before they even really
know who they are, they're painting a picture that's not
based on them, their own self and they're all it's homogenizing.
(19:36):
It's like everybody is starting to look alike. It's sort
of creating this avatar mbots this world, and you're putting
yourself in a position to inevitably have to fail because
you can't look like this Barbie doll or this this image.
But it's younger and younger. You know, my seventeen year
(19:58):
old daughter shouldn't be worried about how thin waste is,
but they see this kind of sexy hour glass figure,
you know. And of course the physicality is always changing.
Now big butts are really in, you know, so I mean,
now I need a big butt. It's constant. And the
reason I keep hammering social media is when we grow up,
you know, we saw them in monthly magazines, but our
(20:19):
kids are barraged by them all day long. These images,
hundreds of them, be this, B this, B this, B this,
B two B this. They're the guinea pigs. You know.
They're the first generation to grow up with social media.
And I just worry. I worry about the long term effects.
You know. I've I've sat with my daughter and she'll
take a picture and she'll show me what can be
(20:40):
done to it, and well, I'd lie if I told
you that the one that they docked or up doesn't
look better than the real one, right, But what's the
point of that, especially if everybody knows their doctor. It's
like when a woman walks into her and she's had
a horrible facelift. You think, you know, you're not fooling us.
(21:02):
We know that you've had a facelift. So what are
we proving? What are we saying exactly? What's the message?
I mean, it's an unhealthy one, you know, it's let's
create this fake version of ourselves because in that one instance,
we get to live the fantasy of looking like that.
(21:23):
But then what does that do when the phone goes
off and when you wake up and you are just
in your own beautiful, different, unique, fabulous body. But the
way we describe each other versus the way we describe
ourselves is amazing. And the trainer that I work with said,
he sees hundreds, well he used to see hundreds of people.
(21:45):
And a guy can be overweight and whatever, but he'll
go to the mirror and he'll just, yeah, just find that,
like yeah, and the girls could be fit and gorgeous
and skin and like just amazing. And they'll find one
thing and now show it and look at it and
(22:06):
punish themselves for it. And he said, it's so sad
what he sees because the women don't even give themselves
a break. I've never used face tune or any of
those filters, but my daughters haven't either. But I know
that my eldest daughter will take a picture of me
(22:27):
and do stuff to it before she says, oh, you
can post it, or she does. She does, she's like, Mom,
don't you can't put that? No, Mom, you gotta, and
she'll do something. It's usually a wrinkle thing. I don't
suddenly have enormous breast or anything. Yeah. No, Rowan will say,
let me take another angle, let me take a different picture. Yeah,
(22:48):
I think that. I I think I rebel against that
a little bit because I'm so conscious of it. You know,
I rebel against my daughters wanted to do that by
saying no this, I don't care. So I am. I
know mom, but you have you know your roots are,
so I don't care to pandemic. I don't care. This
is who I am, and this is what I sort
of dig my heels in about it, which you know,
(23:09):
probably it's probably a terrible idea. And I don't think
they started retouching stuff until I mean, who knows you
and Ivory snow Baby was a yeah, I think they
retouched that. Yeah. Yeah, they made me a little chunky
little Yeah, they made me a little more rippled. And
(23:29):
you know, they got rid of the crows speed. Now
a quick word from our sponsors, welcome back to go
ask Ali, let's get back to the discussion. But I
wanted to go back a little bit about as a parent.
(23:50):
You know, with teenagers, you're doing a lot of like
don't drink, don't do drugs, don't drive under the influence,
don't let this person do that. But to me, the
social media component has become a whole education in itself
that I didn't have and you didn't have as a kid.
So it's not like our parents gave us any kind
(24:11):
of handbook to be able to deal with this. And
I feel like social media takes up much more of
my time in terms of educating my children than any
other aspect of teenagehood. And you know the reason that
I'm talking to you, and I'm going to talk to
some other doctors about the sexualization of girls and social
media in the pandemic is because my concern is right
(24:34):
now with with kids not going to school, not going
to camp, and not sort of venturing out and having
normal experiences, having you know, first kiss with the boy
or whatever that is, because they're insulated and because they're
alone in their rooms or their homes. I don't want
them to experiment in a way that will cause severe damage.
(24:57):
Like you said down the line, with college admission and
with with being sledge shamed, with predators, with eating disorders,
all that kind of stuff. I worry that during a pandemic,
these things all get amplified. So the only thing that
I can keep doing is instead of just being that
broken record and shaking my head when bad lyrics come on,
(25:18):
or or telling them don't use your butt like that,
I just then wait two moments that have nothing to
do with this, and just say you have to listen
to this conversation. This is not the image of you
that should be out there. It's dangerous, it's not fair
to you, and I would say you are. You have
(25:40):
to present yourself as the best possible version of yourself,
and that means being respectful. Because everything that's being done
now is setting the precedent for the rest of their lives.
I do a similar thing with my daughters. I say,
when it comes to social media, what is the story
that you're telling? What is your story? Is your story
(26:03):
that you're playing lacrosse and that you care about social
justice and you know you care about this, you care
about that? Or is your story that you're sexy and
you can bend your legs like that? I mean, so
that helps them with the big picture. You know, what's
the story that you're going to tell? What, as you said,
sort of what what's gonna propel you into the life
(26:26):
you want? Um, which I think are probably better ways
than I'm following you. I know what you're putting on
your social media because they're teenagers and they'll find ways
around it, you know. That's to me, that's the only
thing I can do. I can sort of show them
the much bigger picture than if Scooter likes or not
likes her bikini picture, but sort of what it means
(26:49):
for women in a much bigger and global sense, and
that there is a world outside of them, you know that.
I think what's happened to is it so insular? You
know that even though it's in one little screen, but
it's everywhere. One of them is just leaving right now,
um with a case of beer. No, but her skirts
(27:10):
doesn't look like skirt. There you go, there's God forbid,
somebody drops something and she has to pick it up.
That's not a skirt, that's a belt. Anyway, I just
don't want her to believe that her whole currency is
her beauty. Hey, listen, Brookshields played a child prostitute at twelve,
then was famous for being a virgin way after most
(27:33):
people had lost their virginity. Modeled actress went to Princeton.
I mean you are You are a hard lady to
pinpoint when it comes to this, but a great role
model for girls. So thank you for talking to me.
Thank you for talking about the hyper sexualization of girls
in social media. This is one of my best these Brookshields.
(27:55):
Thank you, Brooke, Thank you at Lee. Hey, really quickly,
speaking of I'm sending you an email about for a facelift.
Yea for a facelift and a book. Jog right, sign
me up. She's gonna do leg lifts right now, and
(28:15):
I'm gonna go finish my pint of chunky Monkey ice cream.
Thanks so much for listening, be sure to subscribe, rate
and leave a review, and follow me in my undoctored posts.
On social media, I'm on Twitter at Ali E. Wentworth
and on Instagram at the Real Ali Wentworth. Go. Ask
Ali is a production of Shonda Land Audio and partnership
(28:35):
with I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite show.
Welcome to Go Ask Ali, a production of Shonda Land
Audio and partnership with I Heart Radio. Hi, I'm Ali Wentworth,
and welcome to my new podcast, Go ask Alli. We're
I'll be dissecting the ship show that is modern life.
You know, I've always been curious about how it all works,
(00:23):
in the chaos of our life, relationships, families, kids, sex, death,
all the basic ingredients that make up our human condition.
But nothing prepared me for a pandemic. I'm married to
George Stephanopolis, and I have two teenage daughters. I'm acting
and writing, and one day in March I got COVID
(00:43):
nineteen and my whole life came screeching to a halt.
And as I lay in bed, taking tail and all
and finishing Netflix, I thought to myself, how am I
going to raise a teenager in a pandemic? How is
any of us going to do that? My two daughters,
their whole life was upside down. They weren't seeing their friends,
they weren't going to school, they were watching all kinds
(01:06):
of bizarre TV shows like My One Thousand Pound Life.
So I decided that would be the topic of my
podcast this season, How to grow a teenager in a pandemic,
and so on, go ask Ali. I'm going to go
ask some other people, some doctors, experts, friends. I'm even
going to try to pull my teenage daughter into the
(01:27):
hot seat and have her answer some of these questions.
So on today's episode, I'm talking about the sexualization of
girls in social media. Social media has amplified age old
pressures for teenage girls to conform to certain sexualized narratives,
and those hyper sexualized models of what it means to
be feminine can affect the mental, emotional, and physical health
(01:49):
of our girls. I'm asking how do we help them,
how do we monitor them, how do we keep them
from ending up on the dark web? And who better
to talk to than one of my friends, Brookshields. She
is an American model and actress. She has so many
credits that we don't have enough time to listen all.
But what I will say is that at age twelve,
she was starring in a movie by Louis Mall called
(02:12):
Pretty Baby, where she played a child prostitute. She is
somebody who was sexualized as a young girl, and who
now has two teenage daughters who are just tiktoking their
way through the pandemic. Hello Brookshields, Hello Ali went Worth.
So I'm, as you know, fascinated by what is happening
to our teenage girls on social media, and we share
(02:36):
a lot of things. You and I not only are
exterior beauty, but also the fact that we have teenage
girls and we are constantly scratching our heads about how
to deal with this issue. The reason that you are
so I find particularly fascinating to talk to about this
was as a young girl, you lived in a very
public sexualized way, particularly you know, because of the modeling,
(02:59):
but also because of the Louie Mall movie. And my
first question is to you is can you imagine if
you were on social media when you were one through fifteen?
I could not imagine it, and my wildest dreams, even
my mom kept all of the press away from me,
(03:20):
so anything that was written, I never saw anything. So
I didn't even see the negativity. And I think she
did that on purpose, because they tried to eviscerate all
of us after that movie. Well, you know, it's interesting
because in our world, the sexualization of females is rewarded,
whether it's magazines, television, the media, and so here our
(03:42):
teenage girls have a platform and a place where they
can self sexualize themselves as much as they can. You know, you,
when you were young, your mother controlled sort of your brand,
But now they kind of they get to create it themselves.
I'm just curious, what are your kind of parental guidelines
when it comes to that. Do you have set rules
(04:03):
like you're not allowed to do bikini shots or nuties?
Are only their mother is allowed to do bikini No?
I mean we do. We have access to all of
their social media. We have the power to turn it
off for any reason. I can't follow her. I have
to follow her through another account just for security reasons.
(04:24):
Um them one of them is public and one isn't.
Why why is one of them allowed to be public?
I'm just curious. Well, because one of them is sixteen
and the others fourteen, and at sixteen, we said, all right,
as long as we can still have control of it,
and as long as you don't post anything inappropriate, we
will let you. Because and the public aspect of hers
(04:46):
is now that she's in high school, her friend group
has really opened up, so they're from all these different
schools and and everything like that. But we have it
monitored all the time, I trust her view, I trust
her fear. Um, we have put the fear of got
into them. With regards to whatever you post doesn't go away.
(05:08):
The words you choose have to be chosen very carefully.
Colleges look at your Instagram. Colleges review all of that,
and so they I think they're starting to get it
a little bit. So most parents should be monitoring their
children social media. They don't, but you know, we all
try to as best we can. We all hope that
(05:30):
they don't go behind our backs and create other accounts.
There are two things that I've noticed, particularly with my children,
which is likes have become so so important to get.
Alike is complete validation of who you are as a person.
And there's been so much research globally that show that,
of course, young girls need physical validation because they all
(05:55):
they see themselves is ugly or fat, And there's a
very specific narrative about what we're all supposed to look
like that they abide by. But the like seem to
initiate the desire to be accepted. And what happens is
they start almost like an addiction to the machines at Vegas.
They need the likes to kind of fill that hole.
(06:17):
And I found that when they are private, they know
that the likes can only go so far because it
is within their friend group or people they know. When
you open up to the public, it becomes kind of
a mad rush to get as many legs as you lot,
because that sort of informs how exciting, sexy, important you
(06:38):
are a likes and the validation it is such an addiction.
And what's weird about the contradiction or the being a
hypocrite in my world is that I have to have
the most followers that I can. Now followers and likes.
I don't look at the likes as much as I
do the followers. But now this whole world has turned
(06:58):
into if they want you to advertise X product, they
look at how many followers you have. So if I
happened to be a person that just wants to not
really live you know that way, and take pictures of
what I eat and and everything, well, then they're not
gonna want me because I don't have a million or
more followers. And try telling that to your kids. And
(07:21):
I have to say, this is for my business, this
is I'm having somebody else help me monitor it, so
I'm not subjected to the comments, I don't read the comments.
And Rowan actually said to me she posted something with me,
and I asked her how it was being received, and
she said, don't read the comments, mom. And I thought
that was really interesting because they were clearly not nice,
(07:44):
and she was kind of trying to protect me. So
it does tell me that somewhere in there there's a barometer.
What's weird for me is I know that I'm beautiful
and sexy. I feel that I'm perfect, So come on,
you don't need that validation, no, um no, but there
are there are always going to be people that just
(08:05):
want to rip me apart. And then I started seeing
some of the comments and they were, you know, not nice,
and and I thought, my god, this is just a
slight taste of what these kids are are doing and
what they're feeling. But it's seven, and it's not only
girls criticizing each other, but it's boys. And so they're
giving these boys all the power to kind of tell
(08:29):
them if they have any word wrong with them, Yeah,
and they do. They pointed out girls being in this
platform and in this position, we're pushing misogyny and sexism
at a much earlier age. You know, I feel like,
are we doing the right things as mothers to shield
them from this till they're older, till they're you know,
frontal lobe has developed and they can understand this the
(08:51):
way we do. I mean, I had a very strange,
strange relationship with sexuality as a child. Because this is
only a half our podcast, Brooke, but it's hard for
me to tell my kids, talk to my kids about this. Well,
this is why you're an interesting guest because you were
so sexualized as a young girl, and now you have
(09:11):
teenage girls. How do you set the rules without them
saying you were you played a child prostituted? I mean,
how do they not push it back in your face?
I mean it's like Hodd Lives and Tierra saying I
don't want to see you in a pageant. I mean no,
I'm dealing with this right now with one of my daughters.
There is an agency that wants her to start modeling,
and I kept saying, I need to understand the why
(09:34):
you know you need it's a very different industry than
it is now. And this man said to me said, look,
she's too young. She's fourteen, and we wait till sixteen
signing them and taking care of them. And the odd
thing for me was I was doing I was nine,
I was eight seven, you know, I was doing these
pictures since forever, and yet I do Pretty Baby. Then
(09:59):
all of a sudden, I come the most famous virgin
in the world. So I grew up with absolutely the
most conflicting, paradoxical way of living, and I just shut down.
But wasn't wasn't the fact that your virginity was publicized
as a way to counteract the part that made you
so sexualized. And probably your mother probably gotten a lot
(10:20):
of trouble for when you were younger because of Pretty Baby.
I mean she got in trouble for everything, and rightfully so.
She was sort of a train wreck that I was
always more interested in keeping her happy and keeping her alive.
I don't know if she did that intentionally. The truth
was I was very sequestered. I was very much in
(10:41):
a bubble. I didn't leave my mother's site for forever,
you know. And but most of these girls, most of
these girls, you know, they don't leave their room. To
my other point, this being a pandemic, I think teenagers
are so bored they want to be provocative and that
to me takes you to a very dark and scary place,
which is what I always live in terror of. And
(11:03):
I make sure that I talked to them about that
dark and scary place, because even if they look like
they're not listening or they roll their eyes, they hear me.
And as long as I can keep a little fear
in them. And I mean that like I I want
them to be afraid. I read them the news. I
make them watch certain documentaries about you know, abductions and
(11:24):
about relationships that seemed like they were really with a
nice guy and then they're tragic. And their response, because
they feel like they're invincible, especially at this age, is
it's not going to happen to me, mom. And that's
such an ignorant way of looking at things. And I
just keep reiterating it. I said it could. This does
not discriminate. It doesn't matter where you live, what you
(11:47):
look like, what you are. There's nothing that makes you
more prey than anybody else. And so you are not
exempt from it. And and the predators can find you.
It's very easy to find you social media, find them
on but you can also there's so many ways that
you can find people. You just tracked them. I mean,
you know, that's why I can't personally follow my kids,
(12:10):
because you can then track them to me easily. I
think that we're talking about a lot of things. I
think I've seen many kids post pictures that are inappropriate.
And they're fourteen there, fourteen years old, thirteen years old.
And my kind of question note that is it's not
(12:31):
my kid. What is our obligation to each other to
sort of say, hey, this came to my attention. Well,
I can tell you. I can tell you right now.
I had an experience with this. I have a friend
and her daughter, starting at age twelve, was posting, in
my opinion, inappropriate pictures. They were incredibly sexual. You know,
(12:54):
there were tiny bikini shots and pouty face and finger
in the mouth and you know, the come other look
and the whole thing. And I got sort of nervous
because my girls followed her and my girls looked up
to her, and I thought, this is a potential role
model for my children. And I got to stop this,
and I talked to the parents a few times, and
(13:16):
I said, you cannot have your child using this as
her only currency. And she has a public account, which
is very dangerous. I mean, it's like a predators smartest board.
You got to shut it down. And they weren't interested.
They didn't agree with me because they were and are
very proud of what their daughter looks like, and they
(13:37):
liked that she was out there, and they liked that
she got a lot of likes because the connection led
directly to them. And I finally had to kind of
pull back from the friendship and have my kids un
follow that girl because I was so terrified of the ramifications.
And I started educating my children in a way where
(13:57):
I would sit them in front of Instagram and say,
look at this picture. This is a girl to me
that has a hole to fill and she's choosing to
fill it by sexualizing herself and having unknown boys and
men out in the world tell her she's okay, you
are okay. You don't need to do that, you know.
(14:18):
So we had a million conversations about that, to the
point where I mean, my daughters won't even put like
a funny bathing suit shot going down a water slide
because I've because I've terrified them, and they'll be spinsters
living in a castle when they're eighty. I agree with you.
But another thing, which is really interesting to me is
I was so ashamed of everything growing up. I was
(14:41):
ashamed of the way I looked. I didn't have big boobs.
I always felt my butt was big. And so there
was all these different little weird messages that I was
getting that were so contradictory that I just I wanted
to hide, you know, And even if I were to
play a role, it wasn't liberating to me. So there's
a part of me that looks at the girls. They're
(15:02):
proud of their bodies, and I don't want them to
lose that. Like, I don't want them to get shame,
have shame on their bodies. And I don't want them
to be so puritanical. But I want them to be
enough fear and and I I was trying to say
to them, if they're so worried about likes and they're
so worried about being regarded and how they come across
(15:24):
to people, then wouldn't they want to know that they
missed the image that they're putting out there is not respectful. Yeah,
we're going to take a short break and we'll be
right back. Welcome back with more, Go ass Galley. The
(15:52):
problem is with this social media what's happening is mental
health is becoming a huge problem. You know, there's body
image stuff, there's eating disorders, depression, anxiety, suicide. You know,
there is a story I heard recently which was about
a young girl and she was, you know, not very popular,
(16:14):
and she wanted to get popular and the popular girls
were sexy and sexual, and her social media had only
been like, you know, puppies and cupcakes, and so she
went to a party and decided to perform oral sex
on a low crosse player because he was popular, and
she thought, this is my way in, and one of
(16:37):
the teammates filmed it, put it on social media, and
she was sledge shamed and she killed herself. Now this
is a particularly vulnerable girl. But you know, we're all
dancing in this kind of mine field of mental health
and of how our daughters are conducting themselves and viewing themselves.
(16:58):
So for me, I think it's a great thing to
educate your girls. And also it's not just them, Like
you brought up a really good point, someone else filmed it.
You could put something on and it can be screenshotted
and it can be disseminated, so it's not like, oh,
you're in control of it. You're not really in control
of anything. And you know, you go to the beach
(17:20):
and they're not having fun at the beach. They're just
taking pictures, selfies or pictures of each other or and
I'm thinking, when where's your childhood? You know, when when
do you swim on and play in the sand that
I don't mean make sandcastles like you did when you
were three, but just the joy of being outside. Or
that's the addiction in general. And so when you look
(17:42):
at social media when they're young and now they're getting
younger and younger and younger, you know, they're given these platforms.
You know, it is sort of an out of focus duckling,
and then as soon as they're sort of preteens, it's
suddenly the camera's turn and it's on them. You know,
it's funny faces and stuff. And then they get more
kind of aware and the faces pull back and suddenly
(18:03):
it's their bodies and they become more sexual and it's
less about goofy faces and now it's about presenting yourself
to the male population. It's like you could do like
one of those flipbooks of seeing you know, the ages
and how they deal with social media. It's also a
very curated platform. So even if you're a girl and
you maybe had issues with your body or your face,
(18:24):
you can now face tune them. You can make your
breasts bigger, you can make your acne go away, you
can sort of morph into your idealistic version of yourself.
So that's another thing that's being presented out there, which
to me feeds the anxiety, depression, and eating disorders because
you know that you're putting something out there that's false,
(18:47):
and every time you look in the mirror you are
reminded that you don't look like that image. You are
perpetuating the lowest self esteem that you could possibly have up.
I mean, it's just it's so devastating. And then you
have teenage girls who want to look like the image
that face tune has created, so they go get preemptive
(19:10):
botox and fillers at fourteen fifteen years old, again, before
the frontal lobe has developed, before you're capable of making
good decisions, you already cutting and pasting an image of
yourself that hasn't even formed yet. Before they even really
know who they are, they're painting a picture that's not
based on them, their own self and they're all it's homogenizing.
(19:36):
It's like everybody is starting to look alike. It's sort
of creating this avatar mbots this world, and you're putting
yourself in a position to inevitably have to fail because
you can't look like this Barbie doll or this this image.
But it's younger and younger. You know, my seventeen year
(19:58):
old daughter shouldn't be worried about how thin waste is,
but they see this kind of sexy hour glass figure,
you know. And of course the physicality is always changing.
Now big butts are really in, you know, so I mean,
now I need a big butt. It's constant. And the
reason I keep hammering social media is when we grow up,
you know, we saw them in monthly magazines, but our
(20:19):
kids are barraged by them all day long. These images,
hundreds of them, be this, B this, B this, B this,
B two B this. They're the guinea pigs. You know.
They're the first generation to grow up with social media.
And I just worry. I worry about the long term effects.
You know. I've I've sat with my daughter and she'll
take a picture and she'll show me what can be
(20:40):
done to it, and well, I'd lie if I told
you that the one that they docked or up doesn't
look better than the real one, right, But what's the
point of that, especially if everybody knows their doctor. It's
like when a woman walks into her and she's had
a horrible facelift. You think, you know, you're not fooling us.
(21:02):
We know that you've had a facelift. So what are
we proving? What are we saying exactly? What's the message?
I mean, it's an unhealthy one, you know, it's let's
create this fake version of ourselves because in that one instance,
we get to live the fantasy of looking like that.
(21:23):
But then what does that do when the phone goes
off and when you wake up and you are just
in your own beautiful, different, unique, fabulous body. But the
way we describe each other versus the way we describe
ourselves is amazing. And the trainer that I work with said,
he sees hundreds, well he used to see hundreds of people.
(21:45):
And a guy can be overweight and whatever, but he'll
go to the mirror and he'll just, yeah, just find that,
like yeah, and the girls could be fit and gorgeous
and skin and like just amazing. And they'll find one
thing and now show it and look at it and
(22:06):
punish themselves for it. And he said, it's so sad
what he sees because the women don't even give themselves
a break. I've never used face tune or any of
those filters, but my daughters haven't either. But I know
that my eldest daughter will take a picture of me
(22:27):
and do stuff to it before she says, oh, you
can post it, or she does. She does, she's like, Mom,
don't you can't put that? No, Mom, you gotta, and
she'll do something. It's usually a wrinkle thing. I don't
suddenly have enormous breast or anything. Yeah. No, Rowan will say,
let me take another angle, let me take a different picture. Yeah,
(22:48):
I think that. I I think I rebel against that
a little bit because I'm so conscious of it. You know,
I rebel against my daughters wanted to do that by
saying no this, I don't care. So I am. I
know mom, but you have you know your roots are,
so I don't care to pandemic. I don't care. This
is who I am, and this is what I sort
of dig my heels in about it, which you know,
(23:09):
probably it's probably a terrible idea. And I don't think
they started retouching stuff until I mean, who knows you
and Ivory snow Baby was a yeah, I think they
retouched that. Yeah. Yeah, they made me a little chunky
little Yeah, they made me a little more rippled. And
(23:29):
you know, they got rid of the crows speed. Now
a quick word from our sponsors, welcome back to go
ask Ali, let's get back to the discussion. But I
wanted to go back a little bit about as a parent.
(23:50):
You know, with teenagers, you're doing a lot of like
don't drink, don't do drugs, don't drive under the influence,
don't let this person do that. But to me, the
social media component has become a whole education in itself
that I didn't have and you didn't have as a kid.
So it's not like our parents gave us any kind
(24:11):
of handbook to be able to deal with this. And
I feel like social media takes up much more of
my time in terms of educating my children than any
other aspect of teenagehood. And you know the reason that
I'm talking to you, and I'm going to talk to
some other doctors about the sexualization of girls and social
media in the pandemic is because my concern is right
(24:34):
now with with kids not going to school, not going
to camp, and not sort of venturing out and having
normal experiences, having you know, first kiss with the boy
or whatever that is, because they're insulated and because they're
alone in their rooms or their homes. I don't want
them to experiment in a way that will cause severe damage.
(24:57):
Like you said down the line, with college admission and
with with being sledge shamed, with predators, with eating disorders,
all that kind of stuff. I worry that during a pandemic,
these things all get amplified. So the only thing that
I can keep doing is instead of just being that
broken record and shaking my head when bad lyrics come on,
(25:18):
or or telling them don't use your butt like that,
I just then wait two moments that have nothing to
do with this, and just say you have to listen
to this conversation. This is not the image of you
that should be out there. It's dangerous, it's not fair
to you, and I would say you are. You have
(25:40):
to present yourself as the best possible version of yourself,
and that means being respectful. Because everything that's being done
now is setting the precedent for the rest of their lives.
I do a similar thing with my daughters. I say,
when it comes to social media, what is the story
that you're telling? What is your story? Is your story
(26:03):
that you're playing lacrosse and that you care about social
justice and you know you care about this, you care
about that? Or is your story that you're sexy and
you can bend your legs like that? I mean, so
that helps them with the big picture. You know, what's
the story that you're going to tell? What, as you said,
sort of what what's gonna propel you into the life
(26:26):
you want? Um, which I think are probably better ways
than I'm following you. I know what you're putting on
your social media because they're teenagers and they'll find ways
around it, you know. That's to me, that's the only
thing I can do. I can sort of show them
the much bigger picture than if Scooter likes or not
likes her bikini picture, but sort of what it means
(26:49):
for women in a much bigger and global sense, and
that there is a world outside of them, you know that.
I think what's happened to is it so insular? You
know that even though it's in one little screen, but
it's everywhere. One of them is just leaving right now,
um with a case of beer. No, but her skirts
(27:10):
doesn't look like skirt. There you go, there's God forbid,
somebody drops something and she has to pick it up.
That's not a skirt, that's a belt. Anyway, I just
don't want her to believe that her whole currency is
her beauty. Hey, listen, Brookshields played a child prostitute at twelve,
then was famous for being a virgin way after most
(27:33):
people had lost their virginity. Modeled actress went to Princeton.
I mean you are You are a hard lady to
pinpoint when it comes to this, but a great role
model for girls. So thank you for talking to me.
Thank you for talking about the hyper sexualization of girls
in social media. This is one of my best these Brookshields.
(27:55):
Thank you, Brooke, Thank you at Lee. Hey, really quickly,
speaking of I'm sending you an email about for a facelift.
Yea for a facelift and a book. Jog right, sign
me up. She's gonna do leg lifts right now, and
(28:15):
I'm gonna go finish my pint of chunky Monkey ice cream.
Thanks so much for listening, be sure to subscribe, rate
and leave a review, and follow me in my undoctored posts.
On social media, I'm on Twitter at Ali E. Wentworth
and on Instagram at the Real Ali Wentworth. Go. Ask
Ali is a production of Shonda Land Audio and partnership
(28:35):
with I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite show.
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