American Girls by Nancy Jo Sales

herself and stuff, and the school didn’t do anything,” Sophia complained.
    “People were like, So, how many blowjobs did you give?” Riley said in her downcast tone. “Everyone posted about me, You’re a terrible person, stay away from my friends. People commented that they don’t like me. It was completely humiliating.”
    “It was horrible, horrible,” said Sophia.
    “People kept posting about me on all their personal accounts,” Riley said. “And I didn’t do anything. I really didn’t do anything. Everyone just believes what they hear.”
    “Like I could post that Victoria has a secret mansion underground and everyone would believe it,” offered Sophia.
    Riley said that she’d tried calling Danny to talk it over with him, but “he hung up. We have never talked about it in person and now he hates my guts…He thinks I flirted and am a huge slut, but I’m not a slut. And now he’s trying to get revenge.”
    Instead of talking to her, she said, Danny sent her Snapchats, those picture and video messages of one to ten seconds, which instantaneously disappear. Snapchat’s nearly 100 million users were sending 700 million photos and videos a day in 2014, according to the company. When its founders introduced the idea for the app, naysayers said that no one would want to use a social media site where pictures go away; but, as it turned out, that was exactly what proved appealing to people, including, sometimes, people who had something hurtful to say, or who wanted to share nude images.
    Sometimes Danny appeared in the Snaps with the girl who’d told him Riley was flirting with other guys. “I was like, Can you stop sending me Snapchats?” Riley said. “And he was like, When you stop being a slut. I got really upset. I didn’t come to school for like a week.”
    When she refused to go to school, Riley’s parents demanded to know why, and she finally told them. Until then, they had no inkling of their daughter’s problems on social media. Now they supported her totally. “My parents think it’s ridiculous,” she said. “I was never close with them until this happened.” They “got really involved,” she said, informing the school that she was being cyberbullied by other students. But her parents were told there was nothing the school could do. The principal said it was a private matter.
    “People would come up to me in school, people I didn’t even know,” Sophia said, “and if Riley missed school they’d be like, Oh my God, did Riley kill herself? Did Riley commit suicide? Did she give Danny a BJ?”
    The girls walked along.
    Riley looked pensive.
    “Riley’s gonna send the boys who asked for nudes a picture of a naked mole rat,” Sophia said after a moment.
    The girls giggled and started running down Valley Road toward the Dunkin’ Donuts.
    Rochester, New York, and Princeton, New Jersey
    In 1845, a photographer made a daguerreotype of a nude. It’s housed in the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, the world’s oldest museum of photography, located in the former home of the founder of the Eastman Kodak Company. The woman in the picture is lying, naked, on her side with her back to the camera, on a chaise longue draped with lace. The focus of the frame is her round behind. She looks a bit like Kim Kardashian, with her long dark hair and dark eyes, staring off to the right.
    The Eastman Museum’s title for the daguerreotype is
Odalisque;
the woman has been styled to suggest a harem girl or prostitute from some “exotic” land, with a serpent bracelet and a headdress adorned with coins. In the past, the photograph had also been called
Académie,
a reference to the “academy figures,” or nude photographs, used by painters in French art schools in the nineteenth century, ostensibly for the purpose of study.
    The photographing of nudes began almost as soon as there were cameras; the justification was the needs of artists. In “Nude Photography, 1840–1920,” Peter