The Red Swimsuit
Jacqueline Knirnschild updated her Facebook status. Come sledding at my house Wednesday after school at 4pm!!! Everyone’s invited!!! Bring a sled (if you can) and a swimsuit to go in the hot tub!!!
Jan 05, 2010 11:47am
When I was thirteen years old, on a visit back home to northeast Ohio for the holidays, I had a hot tub party with a group of girlfriends and afterwards, I uploaded a photo of myself in a sexy red swimsuit that was too big on me. The suit was a one-piece, open in the middle with gold chains holding the left and right sides together over my flat chest and protruding ribcage. In the photo, I lay in my snowy backyard, propping myself up on my elbows. My brace-filled grimace does little to hide the discomfort of the icy grass pricking my body. My long wet dirty-blonde hair falls in dark strings on my shoulders. Of course, before I uploaded the photo to Facebook, I had fixed my red eye. My eyes became beady black dots, like empty holes in my head. I had learned how to edit photos by watching classmates at my all-girls private school in Perth, Western Australia—Presbyterian Ladies’ College. PLC had an eight-acre campus that was tucked away in the swaying peppermint trees and sprawling stucco mansions of the most expensive suburb in Perth. PLC, which our rival schools claimed stood for “penis-licking cunts,” cost about $20,000 per year and was the only school in the area that gave every student a MacBook from Year 6. At PLC, we mastered the art of millisecond switches between two desktops: one open to pool party pics on iPhoto and one to the current assignment. And now that my family and I were back in our suburban Ohio hometown to visit for Christmas and New Year’s, I could apply my editing skills to a new winter wonderland backdrop.
Meticulously editing a collection of photos was like wrapping and decorating presents. The magic wand button was like glitter that enhanced everything in just a few seconds. The warm filter transformed my ghostly pale skin to a sun-kissed tan. The black & white filter eradicated my red eye and made me look classier—almost like a character from my favorite show Gossip Girl. And don’t get me started on the manual adjustments—with a calculated slide of a toggle, I could increase the lighting and exposure so that my skin was clear, and my nose almost disappeared, drawing more attention to my eyes. Tagging friends was like the to and from sticker on a gift, and the captions were the ribbons that tied everything together. I looked forward to polishing the moment more than I looked forward to the actual moment. And as soon as I clicked ‘publish’ on an album, I’d start refreshing the webpage over and over again, impatient for the little red badge to appear in the top right corner. I think I was so obsessed with taking and uploading photos because, as Susan Sontag wrote, photographs help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
Alison Thompson commented on your photo.
that bather is adorable!!! Xx
Jan 06, 2010 6:31pm
Michelle Mullah commented on your photo.
you look so sexy omg! <3
Jan 06, 2010 7:13pm
In March 2008, when I was in fifth grade in Ohio, my dad, who’s a financial analyst, was offered a two-year contracted job in Perth to help implement a new software. My parents accepted and the next thing I knew, in late May, we left the cul-de-sac house my mom had renovated herself and were flying business class around the world. We were the first middlemanagement family that the company had sent to Australia, but they treated us like we were a CEO family. The company hired a relocation specialist to help us transition, set our rent limit so high that we were able to rent a 6-bedroom house with an inground pool near the Swan River, and paid the tuition for my brother and me to attend two of the most expensive schools in the area. When I think back on this part of my life, I imagine it like an Edith Wharton novel: new money being catapulted into the old money neighborhoods of metropolitan Perth during the city’s mining boom of the early 2000s.
On my first day of school at PLC, I was assigned a “buddy” named Samantha who introduced me to her friends at lunch. They all sat on the ground in a corridor overlooking the green campus courtyard. I thought these girls would be prim and proper snobs, like the girls from Lisi Harrison’s The Clique series, but they were all so rambunctious. Most of them had known each other since preschool and leaned on one another, stole food from each other’s lunches and braided one another’s hair with our uniform white ribbon. Maybe, I wondered, they’re so wild because they’re all probably descendants of convicts? Samantha introduced me to Stephanie, who had just returned from a ski trip in the Alps, and to Morgan, who asked if my school in America was like High School Musical. “Ummm, not really,” I said. Stephanie said that her family spent a few years living in Chicago when she was a toddler and she just loved the snow. “Oh, yeah, the snow is nice,” I said. I felt like they expected me to be a bold, funny and trendsetting American girl, like Hannah Montana or Amanda Bynes.
For the first month in Perth, I cried almost every night, and e-mailed my friends back home about their new middle school boyfriends. The only boys I ever came in contact with were my little brother’s annoying friends. And my voice just seemed to sink whenever I tried to talk to my PLC classmates. Once, my Humanities teacher asked me to read a passage aloud to the class, and my embarrassing Ohio voice scratched my throat. I spoke hoarsely and tears threatened to overflow. “It’s okay, Jacqueline,” Mrs. Campbell said. “You can stop now.” All the girls in my class looked around at each other, surely wondering what was wrong with this puny American. These girls were all so posh and colorful, so worldly and free, while I was so tiny and reserved, so buck-toothed and nerdy with my black cat-eye glasses. And I excelled in all my classes, which I imagined probably only made the girls dislike me even more. Once, I remember trying to make small talk with a loud netball player named Jennifer by asking her what she thought of the recent test. “Oh, Jackie, I looked at the first problem and was like, fuck, I don’t know any of this shit!” She laughed. That was another thing—all the girls constantly swore, which was something I had never done in my life. I nodded and agreed with Jen that the test was really hard. Then the teacher handed us back our grades. I had gotten an 8, which was equivalent to an A. I immediately shoved the test in my folder and looked away from Jen. At lunch, I sat alone by the playground escaping into the Bella and Edward’s romance in Twilight.
I only ever really came alive after school, when I was free to be myself and dive into the regimented personal schedule I had perfected over the first few months in Perth. I made highlighted timetables with blocks for each of my many activities, T.V. shows and homework assignments. The first thing I always did when I got home was practice the oboe for an hour because I thought that was the only way I would ever get a scholarship for college. My parents never pressured me to play the oboe, I just chose to play because the oboe had required special approval from the music teacher, and I wanted to be special. After my daily embouchure exercises, scales, trilling, band and solo pieces, my schedule dictated that I do all of my homework in two hours, but I almost always went overtime because I was so neurotic about studying for tests that were still weeks away. I often had to be corralled into gathering my textbooks, MacBook and binders off the table so we could set up for dinner. Sometimes, I even cried or hyperventilated that I wasn’t done yet and would never have enough time to finish all of my assignments, but then my parents would ask me what was actually due the next day and, of course, I had already finished it. My mom would tell me to relax and I’d yell, “I don’t want to fail, Mom!”
I took Japanese at PLC and was determined to become fluent. I made a special Japanese binder with supplemental resources I had printed offline and meticulously made vocab flashcards. And I joined the debate team—furiously researching topics. After a few debates, the faculty-advisor decided I was best at forming rebuttal on-the-spot, so, I became the permanent third speaker. I was thrilled. Rebuttal allowed me to let out the fiery voice I always smothered inside me at school. I still remember glowing when I got the last word against the Scotch College Boys team. We won that debate.
I briefly joined the rowing team and got up at 5am to scull brackish river water in a shell with nine other girls. I joined rock-climbing club and got my open water scuba-diving license. I joined concert band and won first place in a woodwind competition. I learned how to cook niche recipes, like wasabi-burgers. I got a pet bunny named Kerby. I swam laps in my pool and went for long weekend runs to the river with my dad. I read stacks of young adult fiction from the library down the street. My family and I spent a lot of time together—playing Guitar Hero and Call of Duty, watching movies and vacationing. We skydived in New Zealand, swam with dolphins in Monkey Mia, climbed Uluru.
I took an open-water scuba-diving course, even though I was only thirteen and the age requirement was fourteen. I just wrote 1995 instead of 1996 and didn’t tell anyone. I remember squeezing into my wetsuit, wrapping the heavy weight belt around my waist in the ninety-degree sun, then jumping off the dock into the cool water. The salty relief seeped into the thin layer between my skin and the suit, then we descended into the unknown and all language floated away with our bubbly exhales. I focused on my breathing and the peaceful alien world glowing in turquoise. I forgot all about the girls at school and my dorky Ohio accent. Then, after I got my junior license, I took a master class. In the deep-water dives near Rottnest Island, I saw reef sharks who seemed to patrol the corals, flimsy jellyfish, kelp and seaweed waving in the gentle pulse of the current. I saw translucent schools of fish with toothpick-thin bones. Once, I saw a green sea turtle glide through a ring of coral like an Olympian hurdler in slow-motion. I marveled at the expansive underwater galaxy and realized that although my social life at school was as desolate as the remote deserts of the Outback, my interior life was as abundant as the lush reefs of the Indian Ocean.
After a year in Perth, my class at PLC got a new student. Pakistani-Honduran Michelle had just moved from Dubai. I pounced on her. Michelle had lived in Texas most of her life, and we bonded over silly Australian assumptions about Americans. We made fun of how uncivilized and immature the other girls acted and imitated their accents and the way they stole cheese and crackers from each other’s lunch boxes. We mocked how they begged for two-dollar gold coins to buy “lollies” from the cafeteria. We lamented about how much better our lives had been in the U.S. and Dubai. I could tell that in any other part of the world, Michelle was cool. I knew she was cool in Dubai and Texas, because she showed me pictures of her and her best friend shopping at the Dubai Mall. Michelle owned clothes and shoes from Kate Spade and Juicy Couture. All I had was an imitation Coach bag. Michelle’s house in Perth had its own tennis court and her bedroom looked like something from a catalog—bright pink and orange pillows lined her queen-sized bedspread. I did have two bedrooms in my house (one to watch TV and one to sleep), but they were both a hodgepodge of furniture shipped from back home and purchased from yard sales. Michelle had two chihuahua puppies and the flat screen in her bedroom was almost always tuned to Keeping Up with the Kardashians on Bravo. One night at my house, Michelle introduced me to Gossip Girl, which became a show I binge-watched and rewatched for years. Gossip Girl is about an anonymous online blogger who receives “tips” from the wealthy, affluent teens of the Upper East Side, and then sends these secrets out in the form of snarky text message “blasts.”
At first, Michelle and I continued to hang out with Tara—a freckled Belgian expat who had recently moved from Muscat, Oman, and the only friend I had really made in the first year—but Michelle quickly deemed her “too childish” and we fazed Tara out and integrated into a group of girls who threw extravagant birthday pool parties. With Michelle by my side, I felt like I could finally be the cool American that all the Australian girls wanted me to be so badly. My mom said the girls at my school “had a love affair with American culture.” One girl, named Allison, whom Michelle and I befriended, would ask my mom about American high school. “Do they really have football games on Friday nights and cheerleaders and a band and lockers and a bell in between classes and do kids sneak out back to smoke??” She clearly watched too much Friday Night Lights.
My mom said many Australians, like Alison, referred to Australia as a ‘mini-America’ that was in the infancy of becoming America. Everything in Perth was still closed on Sundays and superstores like Walmart and Target were only beginning to gain popularity. And despite how many times we told them, my mom said most Australians assumed we were super wealthy and lived in a sprawling 50-acre ranch in Texas that was filled with guns. At the deli, my mom said a woman once stopped and stared at her while she was ordering. “I just love your accent,” the woman said. “So posh, so Hollywood.” The accent that I had been so ashamed of turned out to tickle my new friends, like Alison, who entreated me to say words like ‘damnit’ and ‘shit.’ With these new friends, we also pulled all-nighters to watch American teen movies like It’s a Boy Girl Thing, John Tucker Must Die, She’s the Man. Alison told me, “You’re so lucky that you get to return to this …”
Facebook:
Jacqueline Knirnschild updated her status.
that was officially the funnest party ever!!! :) happy birthday Michelle Mullah!!!
May 22, 2010 11:04am (Age 13)
Hanging out with Michelle meant I spent less time scuba-diving, cooking and reading, and more time primping myself in front of the mirror. Michelle taught me how to rim my lids with eyeliner and she even threw a huge birthday bash at her house. Since we had to wear strict black and “poop” green uniforms during the week—white button-down polos with plaid ties, Vneck sweaters, black blazers, plaid skirts, black tights, laced shoes and berets—and weren’t allowed to wear make-up or have our hair down, the weekend parties were our runways. I put on water-proof mascara to prepare for Michelle’s party. We took photos underwater in the sardine-shaped pool, in the sauna with towels wrapped around our heads, in the guest house, on the back patio and standing on the elevated, fenced-in walls surrounding the tennis court. We listened to Akon’s song “Sexy Bitch” while imitating the pose of Allegra Anderson—a girl in our year who did some part-time modeling—and turned sideways, looking over our shoulders, lips closed in a smirk or open in a pout. We claimed we were mocking her, but I knew that we all wanted to be her.
I edited those party pics with a sense of urgency—everyone needed to see me like this. If the right person stumbled across just the right photo on Facebook, I was sure that they would immediately recruit me to model. I mean look at me, I thought, if I just kept my mouth closed and hid my braces, and had the right make-up, smile, pose, lighting, angle and editing, I was just as beautiful as Allegra Anderson. One time, I even submitted some selfies to the agency she worked for. They never e-mailed me back.
Jacqueline Knirnschild updated her status.
okay really mad right now
Mar 30, 2010 7:00pm
A few months after I uploaded the photo of myself in the revealing red swimsuit, I discovered for the first time that the jewels I presented to Facebook could also receive backlash. Two of my aunt’s religious, conservative friends had left comments on my home-schooled cousin Mackenzie’s profile, praising her modest dress and condemning my swimsuit:
I just can’t help but say this (although I’ll probably be in big trouble for it.) You are an absolutely lovely young lady. After viewing the pics below of your cousin, I couldn’t help but comment. I’m trying to choose my words very carefully here. She is a nice young lady herself, I’m sure, but that bathing suit? I’m not sure what’s worse, the fact that she’s wearing it or the fact that people are commenting on how great it is. I’ll leave it at that.
Amen. We are innocent children for such a short time. I’m sure she will look back on that “bather” in horror as an adult and wonder why no one told her she couldn’t wear it. At least I hope she will.
Like many young girls today, I wanted attention and fame. I wanted to be the beautiful and sultry woman on the billboards and in the fashion magazines—she looked so much happier than I felt. So, I wore a provocative red swimsuit. But now here I am, at age 22, wondering if those women were right. Part of me is looking back in horror and wishing I had enjoyed my innocence for longer. Were these women slut-shaming me or trying to remove me from something that was toxic?
“Hey, Mom, you remember that red swimsuit debacle?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Why’d you let me wear such a provocative swimsuit when I was thirteen?”
“It was inappropriate, but I decided to pick my battles, and that wasn’t one of them—if I would’ve fought you on it, you would’ve just wanted to wear it even more, plus I figured you wouldn’t be wearing a swimsuit like that when you were in your twenties …”
My mom said that she did worry the swimsuit showed off too much skin, and that I only wore it to try and impress boys, but at the time, I didn’t even know any boys. I went to an all-girls school. I was just trying to be sexy for myself and my friends. I thought that was just what girls did. Ultimately, my mom said she bought me the red swimsuit because she “trusted me to make my own decisions,” which was something I had been grateful for as a girl. In fifth grade, I was already reading People and Marie Claire. I was learning about boob-jobs, tanning, hot tips & tricks in bed, and how to get the perfect beach bod. When I was eleven, I visited my mom’s sister, my Aunt Sandy, and touted my magazines and Mean Girls DVD along with me for the sleepover. Aunt Sandy and I watched the movie together in her apartment living room. My eyes glazed over as I entered the world of the Plastics—wondering which table I would eventually sit at in the high school cafeteria.
“How can you let her read and watch stuff like that?” my aunt asked my mom in a hushed whisper when she picked me up the next day.
“She’s mature and smart enough to handle it,” my mom said, almost smugly.
Maybe, though, the question isn’t whether or not young girls can handle it, rather whether or not they should have to handle such pressures. Then again, my mom never dealt with social media as a girl, so she didn’t exactly understand what I was experiencing. She didn’t know what it was like to have strangers commenting on a photo of you, disparaging your decision to wear a certain swimsuit. As Nancy Jo Sales concludes in her 2016 book, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers, in which she interviewed over 200 girls aged thirteen to nineteen, “There were no rules for how to behave in this new social media landscape, no guide for girls to know how to respond to the way others were behaving and treating them.”
After seeing those ladies’ disparaging comments, I immediately updated my status and messaged my other cousin, Rachel, who’s four years older than Mackenzie and me. At that time, compared to home-schooled Mackenzie, Rachel and I had more similar lifestyles.
Message to Rachel Battocletti: I mean what the heck are wrong with these people?!?!? first of all, what are they doing looking at pictures of me??? i dont even know who the heck they are!!!!!!!!! second of all, that swimsuit is CUTE!!! it’s a lot better than wearing a bikini this one at least covers part of your stomach!!! third they don’t even know me so how can they say that i shouldn’t be wearing that swimsuit?!??! i’m just really pissed off :(
lylas,
your inappropriate swimsuit wearing cousin
Jacqueline
Mar 30, 2010 7:17pm
Ironically, I felt like my privacy had been violated, even though I was the one who had made the photo public. Rachel assured me that these women were just jealous of me because I was young and pretty, and they were old and wrinkly. She also left a comment on their remarks that included Matthew 7:1-5, “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged…” The whole thing turned into a huge fight and eventually, Mackenzie deleted all the comments and I deleted the photo. But part of me wonders if this little scandal was exactly what I had in mind when I decided to upload the photo. As Edith Wharton wrote in The House of Mirth in 1905, “It is less mortifying to believe one’s self unpopular than insignificant.”
If I was truly embarrassed about the comments, I wouldn’t have wanted anyone to know about them. I wouldn’t have drawn more attention to the situation by messaging Rachel and posting about being really mad. I posted that I was mad because I knew my friends would then ask me what was wrong, giving me the perfect opportunity to share the juicy story and get more attention. And my decision to message Rachel before any of my other friends was also probably deliberate—I knew she loved drama and would take action right away to defend me, causing more commotion.
Stirring up commotion was the easiest way to get attention. That’s what Gossip Girl had taught me. On our flight from Perth to Cleveland for the holidays, we had a few days layover in London. Despite touring Windsor Castle, looking at Big Ben while on the London Eye, and seeing Grease: The Musical at Piccadilly Theatre, my most vivid memories from that trip were the Gossip Girl episode I was watching. Nice guy Dan Humphrey, who’s a student at St. Jude’s School for Boys, sleeps with an English teacher at the Constance Billard School for Girls. My parents had to tear me away from the web of tantalizing rumors to eat breakfast at our swanky hotel. I wanted to identify with the girls of Constance Billard. I thought it was remarkable how Serena and Blair, who were just sixteen-year-old private school girls, could attract so much online attention. I envied how strangers gasped in awe and shock when the two girls’ photos, scandals and triumphs were posted on the Gossip Girl blog. I mean, I was a thirteen-year-old private school girl who vacationed in London. Hypothetically, in a few years, I could be just like Serena. The backlash at my red swimsuit was only minor compared to the buzz that S&B generated, but it was a start.
By the time I was a junior in high school in Ohio, I had become the girl who sent weekly nudes to a slew of over twenty guys. My friend and I even came up with our own “themes” for the nudes, like “Thong Thursday” and “Titty Tuesday.” We pushed our bodies together in front of my wall mirror, pouted and watched in glee as Snapchats from boys flooded my screen: So hot, take it off, let’s hang. I remember feeling a rush of pride when a guy once told me I reminded him of a “super chill” porn star. But I also remember sinking when I didn’t receive at least one like per minute on an Instagram selfie. I remember hating myself for not getting asked to homecoming when I saw photos of cheerleaders being asked with roses and chocolates. I remember being embarrassed when my friends took a video of me making out with a guy in my hot tub and showed everyone.
This is the new normal for American girls and it’s only getting worse as children gain access to social media at younger ages. My red swimsuit fiasco was minor compared to what many thirteen-year-old girls deal with today. Nancy Jo Sales writes of thirteen-year-olds who send boys nudes that wind up on online “slut pages” available for boys to rate and judge. “Being a teenager has never been easy,” Jo Sales writes. “Faces and bodies are changing, hormones raging, emotions all over the place. Imagine adding to that a constant pressure to take pictures of yourself and look ‘hot’ in those pictures and have people like them. Imagine getting a dick pic from a boy, maybe before you’ve ever held a boy’s hand. Or being asked for nudes at a time when you’re just trying to feel comfortable in your changing body, and not always succeeding.”
And psychologist and Gen Z expert Jean M. Twenge writes that smartphones are ruining a generation. Twenge points out that teens’ feelings of loneliness spiked in 2013 and have remained high since, especially among girls. 48 percent more girls said they often felt left out in 2015 than in 2010, compared with 27 percent more boys. For teen girls, social media is psychologically taxing, Twenge writes, because girls wait anxiously for the affirmation of comments and likes.
I was only able to eventually quit this self-demeaning behavior in college because I finally rediscovered that rich interior world I had created in Australia. I was lucky to have been initially an outcast at PLC because I was able to experience that interior world of curiosity, wonder, learning, adventure and ambition. But as soon as I dove into the world of social media— the constant comparisons, anxiety and self-objectification—I lost that lush interiority. Everything became about getting that perfect picture to upload—I had to buy new clothes that no one had seen on my Instagram profiles, I had to go to new places to promote myself as interesting, I had to meet more people so I could gain followers, I had to come up with wittier captions. Everything I did revolved around my social media presence until I eventually realized I needed to let it go. I learned to pick up a book when I was bored, instead of picking up my phone. I learned that the real world is already full of so much texture and excitement, and that the hypersexualized virtual world I had occupied for years would never fulfill me. But every time I see my younger cousin, or my friend’s little sister, or the girl I used to babysit, I wonder what they’re up to on their phones. I wonder if they have a rich interior world, if they daydream, get lost in a book, play an instrument, enjoy cooking or even just bask in solitude for a moment. Or, are they stuffing their push-up bras with socks and using FaceTune apps to whiten their teeth?