“It is so common, so pervasive. There’s not a single school or community where it doesn’t exist. Social media has a culture. You create your own reality.”

Relating one conversation with teens at a Los Angeles mall, Sales said they told her, “Social media is destroying our lives.”

“I asked then ‘Why not stop it?’ They said, ‘Then we would have no life,’” the author told the women and girls gathered for the Real.Strong.Girls. event.

The popularity contest that has been going on in high schools for generations now has graduated to social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, SnapChat and Tinder, Sales said.

“I’m a reporter, not a fixer. You’re women who fix things,” she told the women attending the event, many who are in leadership positions in business, industry and non-profits.

“One thing I believe girls need is feminism, it has to be cool to be a feminist.”

The social media platforms emanating from Silicon Valley “were created by young white men who were in fraternities,” Sales said.

“We will have new and more of the same until we make a change as users and consumers.”