Slowly became sex thing: First generation of girls to grow up on social media reveals its scarring effects

I was probably about 9 or 10 years old when, on a summer night in a friend’s basement, a pal suggested we log onto a website called Omegle.I’d never heard of it before.But we all crowded around one of our parents’ laptops, our pre-pubescent faces crowding the screen as the website shuffled us through random video chat feeds with complete strangers around the globe.Some people were kind.

Others told us to get off there — something I desperately wanted to do as I cowered out of the frame.One of my friends asked a teen boy with an accent where he was from, and he named a country we’d never heard of before.But we were also served up images of people cutting, adult men in dimly lit rooms telling us we were “cute” (we quickly hung up on them), and — a first for all of us — a guy masturbating.That’s when we closed the laptop for good, unsure of what we had just seen.

And so we were vulgarly inducted into growing up online.As a member of Gen Z, I don’t know a single female friend who hadn’t been on the receiving end of unwanted sexual messages, photos, and/or harassment online before their 18th birthday, both from strangers and/or men and boys they know in some way.That’s because, no matter how many parental controls and blockers you apply, filters are always porous enough to let the dark underbelly of the internet in through a laptop or cellphone screen.While the media often reports on the worst of the worst stories from social media — sex trafficking, blackmailing that ends in suicide, tweens eloping with strangers online — every single normal, well-adjusted young woman I know has confronted the dark side of being a girl online.In fact, my Omegle anecdote isn’t at all unique.Sophia Englesberg, a 23-year-old actress living in New York City, remembers being on the now-defunct website with a group of her 8th-grade friends in Pennsylvania when they came across a veteran and thanked him for his service.“Then he took his c–k out and showe...