Freya India learned the hard way that taking your emotions too seriously makes you feel worse, that the more you “edit” your body image through filtering apps, the more repellant you find your actual body, and the more time you spend uploading images from your life online, the less life you actually live. In her debut book, “Girls®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything” the 27-year-old British writer presents a stinging indictment against those she blames for having turned normal girls into GIRLS®, an ideal target market for the social media, pharmaceutical, beauty and online therapy industries.
India writes about these issues on her Substack GIRLS, as well as on Jon Haidt’s After Babel and The Free Press. “We were the first generation to learn to flirt on Instagram, to try to find teenage love by swiping … the first to have our faces and bodies ranked and reviewed on social media before we had even reached puberty, the first to document our adolescence for an online audience,” she writes in the book. This made typical adolescent insecurities “amplified and commodified,” exploited for profit through “a barrage of products, services, pills, and procedures that promised happiness but delivered dependency and dissatisfaction.”
Under all this pressure, India felt increasingly alienated and even ugly as a teen, suspecting she “wasn’t cut out for the modern world” and assuming everyone else was coping except her. “I needed more guidance and guardrails, more stability and security, something, anything solid to hold on to,” she writes, noting that her parents divorced when she was three and in her social circle, family breakdown was so common it didn’t bear mentioning.
In a chapter titled “Disconnected,” India expands on the cost of divorce on kids: lacking models of a healthy marriage; the need for extra support and validation that often isn’t available; and the fear that true, lasting love doesn’t exist, especially when divorce is often applauded simply because the marriage doesn’t feel right anymore.
She aims her ire at social media algorithms that track users’ activities and interests, as well as TikTok influencers selling cosmetic and skin care products to adolescents, who become fearful of “aging” skin. “Mental health” influencers dangled quizzes meant to convince girls they had anxiety, ADHD and other disorders. From there, online therapy and pharmaceutical platforms (some of which have been shut down) swooped in with offers of therapy sessions and mail order prescriptions. Having panic attacks and other anxieties became normalized, romanticized and overshared. Feelings of disconnection from real life followed.
India argues that this me-first and feelings-obsessed culture only leads to selfishness, such as viewing commitment and acts of kindness as an intrusion on one’s autonomy. She also notes the spiritual hunger among of Gen Z, who generally do not believe in God but in affirmations about their own power and worth, as well as healing journeys, astrology and sometimes, witchcraft.
“GIRLS®” follows in the path of other authors including Louise Perry, Abigail Shrier and Jon Haidt, who have all written on these issues for years. All agree that secular society’s promotion of looser sexual mores, disposable marriages, social media fixation and the “pathologizing of normal human emotions and behaviors” has not delivered the promised benefits of greater empowerment and security. Instead, young adults today may be the most anxious and fearful generation ever.
India is often eloquent and insightful. Unfortunately, the book suffers from repetitive data syndrome, where the bountiful examples of survey results and statistics begin to blur. The book would have benefited from offering more first-hand accounts from Gen Z women discussing what they experienced and how they began to resist and disengage from the warped thinking and habits. It is also simplistic to lay all the blame for Gen Z girls’ problems on corporations and other outside forces. Parents are meant to be the ultimate “influencers,” and someone took these 12-year-olds to Sephora or gave them a credit card to purchase needless or even damaging products and services online.
The insidious manipulation of young social media users has long been known. Why weren’t parents checking in on their daughters, setting limits on their phone use, saying “no” to another online beauty purchase? Why weren’t parents telling their daughters they were beautiful and worthy without any “edits,” helping them find alternatives to the toxic online world? Didn’t anyone go to church or synagogue, to dance or art class or have any diversion from this environment? India portrays a world in which parental guidance was totally AWOL and no one seemed to have healthy hobbies. “We never knew a childhood spent chasing experiences and risks and independence instead of chasing likes on a screen,” she writes. If so, parents are more culpable than Meta.
Secular book reviewers have dismissed “Girls®” as a “conservative” book because India notes the impact of divorce and lack of religion and community among the causes for her generation’s lack of rootedness. The type of surveys she cites, however, have shown consistent results over decades, linking a religious and conservative lifestyle with significantly greater happiness than a secular, liberal lifestyle. “Conservatives, on average, tend to have a more internal locus of control, while liberals lean more external — and the more external your locus of control, the more likely you are to feel anxious, hopeless and depressed,” she writes, adding that “whispering to the universe” is no substitute for the foundational moral guidance of religion.
Despite the book’s weaknesses, India offers an astute and unsettling portrait of a generation shaped by forces it barely understands. India ends on a hopeful note, tracking huge drops in the use of facial filtering apps, dating apps, and online participation. Women are also beginning to speak out about the damaging effects of antidepressants, which many now realize they never needed in the first place. It’s too bad they had to pay such a high price to detach from the unreality of their online lives.
Judy Gruen is an award-winning book reviewer and the author of “Bylines and Blessings” and other books. She is also a book editor and writing coach. www.judygruen.com.
