GIRLS®: Gen Z and the Commodification of Everything

by Freya India

A bold and timely investigation into how it feels to grow up in a world where every anxiety of girlhood has been commodified

GIRLS: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything is a passionate, provocative, and deeply personal journey into the pressures shaping young lives today. Freya India shows that modern life is amplifying and exploiting age-old anxieties of girlhood like never before. While previous generations of women were relentlessly sold products and procedures, Gen Z girls and women have become the product. They display their lives on Instagram, advertise themselves on dating apps, and package themselves into personal brands, making anxiety feel overwhelming and unmanageable. They have transformed from girls into GIRLS, from people into products.

Each chapter of GIRLS focuses on a common anxiety in adolescent girls’ lives, from insecurities about their looks, to their reputation and social status, to their friendships and romantic relationships. Along the way, India traces how rapidly culture and technology have evolved over the past decade.

For Gen Z women, GIRLS offers a nostalgic, if unsettling, reflection on the world they’ve grown up in and reassurance that they’re not alone in their struggles. For Gen Z girls, it provides context for where these challenges began and warns where they might be headed. And for parents, teachers, and older generations, it serves as a reminder that these issues have never been so intense.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Audiobook, Cultural, Politics, Self Help, Sociology

350 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 26, 2026

Reviews

[Madeleine Sachdev · Rating 1 out of 5]

What starts off as disappointing through its lack of nuance and depth, many contradictory points and statistics that feel cherry picked in order to back up points the author is desperate to make, quickly descends into Conservative pearl clutching before ultimately concluding as a manifesto for getting girls back to ‘family values’ and baby making that could be written by Serena Joy of The Handmaid’s Tale herself. The premise of the book is interesting and important, the reason I picked it up in the first place, yet it somehow manages to miss the mark entirely. Side note: I have never read the term ‘age old’ so many times in my life (does no one edit any more?)!

[louz · Rating 1 out of 5]

if i could give zero stars i would.

as someone who loves books about feminism and pop culture, at first glance this one seemed perfect. it starts by mentioning many interesting aspects, so it's even more disappointing that when you read more than the first paragraph of each chapter, it turns into what feels like insane rage-bait mixed with the archetype of "pick-me" energy. plus it's a textbook example for confirmation bias.

this book puts big complex social issues in neat little sections with quirky subheadings, cherry-picks a few random examples and a statistic to underline the point the author decided to make and completely ignores any complexity or layers that topic has to offer. she also fails to connect any of the points to the bigger issues like patriarchy and capitalism (unless she criticises influencers, who seem to be the root of all evil. no matter whether they do bland advertisements or educational, well-researched content –it's all the same to her). in her world, all of the issues she mentions only affect "girls" and now, at 26, she speaks to these young girls in the most condescending tone imaginable.

intersectionality doesn't exist in this book so i cannot say i am surprised this was written by a white, presumably straight, cis, american woman. non-white, queer or disabled perspectives on any of the topics she mentions don't exist. instead, her takeaway seems to be: "therapy and critical thinking is bad - let's all become puritan girlfriends (or even better: wives) to those poor lonely misunderstood men and live a big happy life with our big happy family and a million children where we don't care if half of of our relatives and neighbours vote for right-wing parties or are abusive, misogynistic or general assholes."

honestly i guess this is what i get for buying a book written by a fucking substack influencer (yes, she also is one of those evil influencers she hates so much) who has zero qualifications other than wrong but loud opinions and the ability to look up a fitting statistic or research – not to get a better understanding of a topic, but solely to underline whatever stupid point she feels like making.

if you really wanted to give the author grace, you could say this was written by a deeply insecure woman. but with the amount of anti-"woke", anti-queer and ableist talking points in this, i don't feel like she deserves any.

(she also called christina hoff summers a "feminist" and criticised the students who - understandably!!! - didn't want her to visit their university. i guess freya india can join right in, i doubt any actual feminist would want her on their university campus either.)

[Emma Bayles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks Libro.fm for the ALC! I devoured this in a day.
I’ve read a a lot of Freya’s articles so I was so pumped to see she has a book coming.
In a world where the problems and online challenges of young girls are often trivialized, Freya outlines them in a compelling way to show that while many of the emotional challenges we face are age-old, the context in which we faced them are entirely new and exacerbating.

[Morgan Brett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Freya is an undoubtedly a generational talent and a powerful voice for Gen Z! I have never had a book physically make me pull faces of shock / horror reading through statistics like this. Freya has clearly dedicated herself to lifting the veil on the dark reality of growing up the modern world, GIRLS should be a bible for young girls and parents to understand what they are being exposed to and how to push back. Freya practices what she preaches, living a life without personal social media accounts which I have a huge respect for. A young writer with an exciting future! This labor of love needs a place on your bookshelf.

[Athena · Rating 1 out of 5]

Thank you to LibroFM's educator program for the ARC!

Can't recommend - absolutely not nuanced in any way.

This was incredibly challenging to listen to, particularly as discussion often related to the personal challenges of the author and did not explore the topic from a wider lens. Some of the discussions around mental health and the supposed over-diagnosing was dangerous, especially with the fact that female-identifying individuals are often not diagnosed with ADHD and ASD as regularly and as accurately as their male counterparts. I encourage those who are reading this to take what is said with a grain of salt, and to consider other research and books available. Often, research has a bigger story to tell than the one-sentence summary provided.

[Lindsey (endless_tbr_list)]

I am so disappointed that this took a turn towards transphobia and anti-“woke-ness” after a somewhat promising start. This could have been both an incredibly important and interesting discussion, if done correctly. Ultimately, if you’re looking for nuance and consideration of any non-white, non-cishet views, don’t look here.

Thank you to Henry Holt & Co. and Goodreads for the ARC. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

[Kelly · Rating 1 out of 5]

started out inconspicuous enough, made me question its integrity with a nuance-free “actually we’re TOO aware of mental health issues” narrative, then got deeply transphobic. dnf

[Vanessa Valenzuela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you Net Gallery & Freya India for allowing me an ARC!
It is a surreal thing to read a book that documents internet discourse that I have vivid memories of. ED/SH tumblr pages, the glorification of mental illness, the rise of the word “stigma” and peoples subsequent abuse of it. Bye Sister, the Facetune Epidemic, brands pretending to care about “self care” to push product, and the use of therapy speak to pretend we know how to process our feelings when really we’re explaining them away.
All of this leading young women to commodify themselves like cows to slaughter.

It’s a good read. Nostalgic and painful. We should stop being products. We should invest in communities and get off this damn phone.

[Anna]

DNF at 72%

This started out strong and with significant promise, but quickly lost me. The author presents contradictory information and seems to have cherry-picked data that supports her positions.

My hope for an examination of the elements of culture that create challenges for girls and young women did not pan out. Instead, it took an unexpected turn and I could not continue reading.

[Ferenc Holyba · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hard to put down.
India accurately describes the commodification and gaslighting of young women in the last few years. Her message of trusting one’s instincts instead of outsourcing thinking and feeling to “experts” is very important to spread to the up and coming generations of girls.

[Meg · Rating 1 out of 5]

If this wasn't a library copy, I think I would have burned it in my firepit on a nice summer day, made a smore over it & taken a sip of a seltzer while cheersing my childfree existence.

I cannot even fathom having the concept to write a book about how our generation (Gen Z b.1997-2012) went through a particularly unique experience growing up with the introduction and popularization of the internet/social media and online consumerism, only to hard pivot into things like "gender dysphoria and being transgender is a trend, source: i made it tf up" and "the lost of religion (re Christianity because she never once discusses other religious communities) in girls lives is detrimental to community and values, while also contributing to mental health decline" as well as "flaunting childfree life and villainizing motherhood/birth", and don't forget the part where we "demonize SSRIs and say that getting therapy is now a trend we are being pushed into, but also there is no mental health stigma and we be out here pill popping for no reason", and worry not if you felt like we forgot anything we also have "divorce is bad because think of the kids, but kids don't cut out your toxic relatives because family :)"

I cannot think of a more blatant example of cisgendered Christian White Women feminism, we barely acknowledge the perspective of other races or religions, despite the fact that it would realistically bolster the main argument about the detriment to teens health, instead she avoids it in favor of focusing exclusively on white Christian girls and women.

I recommend reading this only if you want to hate read something that had a good concept but dropped the ball so unbelievably hard that it's actually buried 6 feet under the court.

[Reader · Rating 1 out of 5]

A woman in her twenties with no life experience telling women to get back in the kitchen.

[DARREN AGER · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a Gen X father , some of the statistics in the book were frightening. I also learned what I could have done better in bringing up my children .
However, Freya’s book gives hope and I would encourage parents and Gen Z to read this to get a full understanding on what effect social media has had on a generation & focusing on what really matters will lead to a more fulfilling life

[riti aggarwal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some strong points in here and then a bunch of hodge-podge... it feels like she doesn't know her positions and is mixing many things. The atomization of social life she's referring to is something many on the left would agree with, for instance, but again, all her talk of resistance is about individualistic, not systemic change.

Does she hate late-stage capitalism or social media? What is the problem? Choice feminism or patriarchy?

Bullshit, I fear, with some good writing.

[Jocelyn · Rating 1 out of 5]

so bad i went on a 2000 word rant

Full review: https://writethroughthenight.com/2026...

**i received an alc of this audiobook from netgalley**

[Aberdeen · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

I’ve followed Freya India’s writing on substack for a while and always find her insights into the particular experience of girls my age (in their 20s & 30s) to be fascinating and incisive. While I was raised in a bubble resistant to many of the trends she explores here—a conservative Christian bubble where religious faith was central, families were valued, and technology was suspect—I’ve stepped outside that bubble enough and been immersed in social media enough to resonate with her description of the world most women my age find ourselves in. It makes me grateful that I grew up shielded from some of these trends, even as the sheltered nature of my upbringing carries its own downsides. And of course, a more extreme fundamentalism, one I’m just as grateful I was spared, is destructive in other directions.

But while there’s been much dissection of the dangers and evils of religious fundamentalism, which are valid and ought to be brought to the light, I appreciate this exploration of what can happen in a different kind of fundamentalism, where there are no limits on technology, where divorce is more default than 50-year-anniversaries, and where therapy-speak is our primary language of meaning. India grew up in this world, and she doesn’t think it has helped her or her peers.

She breaks down the situation through six “age-old anxiet[ies]” that the modern world preys upon: “Filtered” (body image), “Diagnosed” (emotions), “Documented” (social status), “Disconnected” (friends and families), “Detached” (romance), and “Empowered” (sense of purpose and fulfillment). Her thesis is this:

We are easy to package and easy to sell to. We were told we could be whoever we wanted, but the choice became so overwhelming we defaulted to being datasets, raw material for the market. And girls with more freedom than ever before ended up lost and confused. Girls who were told to be strong and independent ended up childlike and helpless. We are the generation given permission to focus endlessly on ourselves—our dreams, our desires, our identities, our feelings, our freedom—and we are the most miserable on record.

The culprit, for India, is commodification: how historically normal young girl experiences—body image insecurities, social awkwardness, fears about growing up, desires to belong and do something meaningful—have become problems that can only be solved by buying things, whether that’s health products, therapy sessions, or streak freezes on Snapchat. The modern world, she argues, is set up to exploit these hard but normal experiences, to exacerbate them and take advantage of them. And not only are we being constantly sold to, we ourselves are “products on display, things to be sold.” We are taught to sell ourselves through creating personal brands from ridiculously young ages, equating social media posting with activism, and inviting strangers (and advertisers!) into our every private moment. And it’s un-human.

I think she’s right. I think there are also many more factors at play, but the commodification of young girls’ anxieties and insecurities is absolutely a real problem, and I am grateful for India’s prophetic voice in exposing it.

That said, this book is very much a survey of the landscape. It is not a rigorous academic study or philosophical examination of the ideologies behind these trends. And while I’m trying to rate it according to its self-expressed aims (and therefore not hold it to an academic-book standard), it is limited in the power of its argument because of lack of nuance and research.

The great value of India’s writing is her rapid-fire series of examples from social media and earnest descriptions of her own lived experience, both of which hopefully increase understanding and empathy from other generations who grew up in a very different world. The downside is that I can’t fully recommend it to anyone who is looking for more than that because she can veer into over-generalizations about complex issues that don’t contribute to constructive discussions about where to go from here, particularly in the areas of mental health and transgenderism.

For books that offer a more thoughtful, research-based discussion around related issues, see:

Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians by Tara Isabella Burton
The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto by Leah Libresco Sargeant
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt
iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us by Jean M. Twenge
Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up and Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier

Lastly, as a theologian, I was fascinated by the solutions India offers in her conclusion: notice when you are being treated like a product (or when you treat yourself as one); take back your privacy; seek in-person experiences and friendships beyond social media; put others first. All good things. And she ends with these: find values and live according to them, and find faith—“not necessarily religious faith but faith in something more, a conviction that more than this life is possible, something beyond hedonism and consumption and competition.” Amen! To go into more details would exceed the scope of her book.

But of course it raises the questions, what is a legitimate thing to put your faith in? What holds up philosophically, logically? What can handle the weight of a life’s purpose, of a human soul banking their life on it? What can truly empower us to resist the hedonism and consumption and competition that we’re so prone to, despite our best intentions? Why should we resist those things, actually? Why are these things so anti-human, so corrosive to us? And if her argument is that we need to become more human, well, what defines being a human? What gives one worth? Why do we hurt ourselves and others? Why are we capable of such love and resilience and such exploitation and fragility? Is there anything that can save us from ourselves? And that’s why theology is just about the most practical thing to study. ;)

Of course we don't want children; many of us still feel like children ourselves. But we are also confused. While young women like me are often infantilized, we were also pressured to grow too fast, and this is only worsened for girls today. The beauty industry makes girls worry about wrinkles before they have hit puberty. The mental health industry pathologizes normal adolescent feelings, framing exams stress and heartbreak as symptoms of serious disorders. Girls are exposed to hardcore porn, and pressured to objectify themselves, years before their first date. They're expected to have fully formed political opinions, and present them publicly, before they have even left the home. Adults are sold children's toys; children's shows are sexual. Helicopter parenting delays independence; extended adolescence encourages us to be young and free, to make clumsy mistakes; social media never forgets them. Girls today face the pressures of adult life earlier than ever before, but without the maturity, resilience, or life experience previous generations had to handle them.

[Trevor Hoffman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I listened to this book on Spotify.

Holy cow. Bleak but brilliantly written. The argument is that market forces unleashed by the Internet and social media have commodified people—especially young women—and have incentivized and profited from our misery. Social media and beauty apps and wellness apps and therapy apps and tiktok and on and on. They uproot us from our communities to exploit us as items, atoms, commodities. The result is we are living something less than human lives. But there is hope. Return to the real world, serve other people, be human. A brilliant and urgent book.

[Mai H.]

Non-fiction November TBR

Women's History Month TBR

📱 Thank you to NetGalley and Henry Holt and Co.

[Cecilia Young · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty depressing presentation of the reality of the culture today, specifically for girls. She does a good reporting stats before weaving things together to make her point. Though not a religious book by any means, it deepened my zeal for souls to think about the college students I serve and the culture they’re immersed in. I feel pretty convicted that most people would be happier if they didn’t have social media. Would recommend.

[Hannah Hughes · Rating 4 out of 5]

A scary honest (and desperately needed) look at how Gen Z girls are being impacted, influenced, and commodified from every angle — media, medications, AI, filters, and pretty much everything in between. Very eye-opening.

[The Reading Raccoon · Rating 4 out of 5]

GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything is a non-fiction look at the rapidly changed world that the young women now in their teens and twenties grew up in. They are considered the first generation to never know a world without social media and smartphones, and it’s beginning to show in impacts on their self-confidence, mental health, social skills, and interpersonal relationships. Freya India examines the toll that existing in a world that emphasizes likes and clicks over connection and authenticity has led to young women that are frequently anxious, lonely, and driven to consume. As a parent and someone that works with tweens, this was very eye-opening and addressed many of the concerns I’ve had myself. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in taking a closer look at issues around modern girlhood.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Narrator notes: Girls is read by the author herself, who does an excellent job with the material.

Disclosure: An advanced listening copy was provided by Macmillan Audio for review purposes. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

[Sarah Greene · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The girl boss didn’t die- she became an influencer,
Now success demands even more of us, it means selling ourselves and competing in the market for clicks. Every moment of our lives can be monetized; every ambition commodified. Our ambition today is simply to have an audience.”

[Leah Finn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Girls® is a sobering read. It put words to many of the cultural influences I've felt and experienced myself, as well as others I've noticed shaping the lives of young women around me. Compared with The Anxious Generation, however, I found it offered fewer practical solutions. Freya's writing is excellent for exposing the challenges young women face. But I would like more ideas for what we as a society, family, friends or church can do to help girls and young adult women face those challenges.

[Sophia Bird · Rating 1 out of 5]

As someone roughly the same age as the author, and who teaches adolescent girls in school, I was looking forward to reading this book and hoping to glean insight into how being a girl and young woman in the past decades has shifted so dramatically. Unfortunately any potentially valuable insight is wildly overshadowed by India’s bigotry and deliberate use of incorrect statistics that have largely been disproven to misrepresent the topics at hand. What stood out as most egregious to me were twofold. Firstly, her beliefs that the internet is the reason teens identify as trans, citing debunked “social contagion” theory as her proof. Teens feeling safe and recognized by their peers is a good thing, and most people who are not trans don’t transition. And no, it’s not common for 12 year olds to get top surgery. Secondly, she seems to believe that no fault divorce laws are the reason for family breakdown. As a child of parents who divorced when I was 16, I can say that while it was a difficult experience, why family on the whole is much more functional and happy than it would have been had my parents stayed together.

India advocates for a return to religion and women having more babies as a way to ease the anxieties and sufferings of girls in this new world and clearly thinks feminiusm is the root of all evil. Part of me wants to know if she thinks women were better off before being given the right to vote. I think the answer here is clear.

[Kuu · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ALC.

This rating is generous. The author is obnoxious as hell and acts like she just invented the wheel when she's just regurgitating other people's findings and then using it to basically shame "the left" and progress by saying it's not actual progress and instead is the reason everyone is miserable. She fails to make any meaningful analysis. The author also very clearly lives in a wholly different reality than I do, because some of the claims she makes are WILD. Absolutely wild. And yet, this is a published book?? Baffling.

One of those wild claims is that there is no stigma against mental health medication, and instead everyone and their mum takes some pill, for issues that don't need to be medicated, because taking pills is cool or something. Like, I don't know your social circles, but if this is your life, that's definitely an issue of your social circles because in MY world people will literally ghost/block you while dating if it turns out you take mental health medication/have a diagnosis/whatever. Wanna switch maybe, Ms India?

Then she also makes some statements, very brief, just thrown in there, that imply things I'm very unhappy with, such as her mention of some psychiatrists questioning if DID even exists, like, at all, as a mental health condition. She doesn't address this further, but clearly has a reason to throw this in, which is to further delegitimise people with DID (whom she claims just have it for TikTok clout, basically).

Then there's the whole anti-liberal thing, where liberal women have higher rates of (diagnosed!!!!!!) mental illness because uhhh eat hot chip, scroll phone and lie or whatever, young girls are trans now because all the young girls on their FYP are trans, divorce now being seen as aspirational and a #girlboss win, being very against cutting off people in your life because obviously you are not doing this because these people genuinely are harmful but because social media tells you to, the weirdly Christian undertones without ever really discussing Christianity (though she does mention how being religious is found to lead to better mental health outcomes - girl these studies are about any spirituality and not just about Christianity but I know you think they are), etc. etc.

There's potential here for real discussion, but Ms India just completely fails to do any of that. She's just very anti-psychiatry but like, in a regressive "mental health is fixed by just focusing less on mental health" way, and obviously sees the whole problem with commodification of everyday life but fails to connect it to capitalism. Like, there was potential!!! We could have had real anti-psychiatry discourse here! We could have discussed how psychiatry is used as a tool against marginalised people and how institutionalisation is weaponised and used as an excuse to strip people of their most basic human rights, but somehow I don't feel like she actually takes issue with psychiatry as long as it's about the forced institutionalisation and medicalisation of those with "scary" disorders. Same with the "cutting off" thing - she COULD discuss the negative consequences of assigning everyone the label of "narcissist" and how this further stigmatises an already vulnerable population but instead she's like "don't cut off your parents, think of what YOU did wrong instead", which is Not It.

This book was a disappointment and now I am angry.

[Dhruv · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciate as a man I’m not really the target audience here. Nevertheless, there are some good insights in this book about the pressures that Gen Z women go through, written by someone who has first hand knowledge of going through the same things herself. What drags this book down, however, is that there is a lot of repetition - not just with ideas, but the cadence of writing - that makes this book longer that it needs to be and more difficult to read than it ought to be.

[Noah Senthil · Rating 3 out of 5]

(Rating: 3.5)

I love Freya India. I regularly read her Substack, and I’ve been looking forward to this book for a while. India’s audience is young women and girls, so I’m not the target audience, but I, too, care about what’s happening to young women, and she is one of the best Gen Z writers out there, so I was obviously going to read this.

GIRLS offers many of the same insights that she’s written about before, as she wonders, “What’s wrong? And how did we get here?” The book is almost like a cultural history of the West, but focused only on the past 15 years. Her main argument is that modern technology amplifies the age-old anxieties adolescent girls have always felt, and billion dollar corporations have commodified and profited off their exploitation and confusion.

The central argument is definitely correct, and she provides ample evidence to support that claim, writing about social media filters, mental health therapy, the documentation of everything online, loneliness and isolation, dating apps and porn, girlboss culture, etc. The messages that girls are constantly receiving are heartbreaking. And I think this would be a helpful book for young girls, especially teenagers, to read and evaluate whether these major corporations really have their best interest in mind, what’s been lost, and what they’re looking for in life. But, I must say, I was disappointed in the book for a few reasons.

First, I think Freya is a great writer, but it often felt formulaic and repetitive.

Second, she relies too heavily on “data” and surveys and stats. It’s excessive, sometimes contradictory, and doesn’t always help substantiate the point she’s making. I think she should’ve leaned more into personal and anecdotal experiences, giving the book a more narrative structure, with data interspersed when necessary.

Third, the whole book is about the commodification of everything, but she never addresses any larger, systemic questions. Are the corporations just all bad? Is it the capitalist system itself? Are the consumers or the companies responsible for the degradation? This matters because her solution, which comes only in the conclusion, focuses entirely on the individual. Girls, she argues, should focus on the things that really matter in life: family, friendship, faith (in something, even if not religion), and choose not to believe the cultural lies being told and sold.

But this leads to my final critique: the solution is too thin. She speaks of “morals” (e.g. love, loyalty, integrity), but there’s nothing really undergirding this language. Who defines what these mean? Or why we need them? Why should you focus on becoming a “better person”? There’s no clear, broader moral framework. Don’t get me wrong, some morality is better than none, and faith in “something” is better than blind allegiance to Instagram, Kylie Jenner, and Call Her Daddy, but if Freya is right—and companies are pouring billions into stealing your attention, affections, and allegiance—then you’re going to need a stronger moral framework, a thick community, and a really clear way of life, even just to have a chance of resisting the commodification of everything.

But, like I said, this is Freya’s first book, and I think she’s on a journey of her own, trying to figure out what life is all about. I’ll be along for the ride.

[Jake DeCarli · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Right now, we stand at a crossroads. We can keep going down this path, allowing billion-dollar industries to dictate not only how we look but how we feel…or we can remember what has been taken from us, and turn back. We can remind our daughters…and future generations of girls what real beauty, real love, real community, real confidence, real life is, and help them remember what it means to be human.”

So many thoughts on this piece. Incredibly relatable as someone who grew up in the era of hyper-consumption and social media usage by teens and young adults. I was not fully convinced by some of the critiques of the commoditization of the female empowerment “era” 10 years ago. Additionally, I think she tried to be nuanced when discussing how people have diagnosed themselves with different intellectual disabilities through social media, but it came across as only blaming influencers that are persuading people that they have different disabilities (instead of looking at figures on how testing has changed for things like autism and ADHD). I would have liked to see a better discussion of the current conservative movement among young women. It felt like she skipped over that and only briefly touched on the trad wife “aesthetic” on social media. However, overall I think all people should read this to understand how we’ve failed young women in this country and how we can prevent future generations from mass exploitation by corporations.

[CCB · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a big fan of her Substack "Girls" and this book is a quietly subversive intervention into a culture that insists on mistaking liberation for autonomy while leaving young women more atomized than ever. What distinguishes Freya’s voice is not merely her willingness to question the orthodoxies of contemporary feminism, but her sensitivity to the emotional texture of modern girlhood. There is an unmistakable moral seriousness here, but tempered by an understanding that young women are not simply dupes of a system, nor heroines resisting it, but something more complicated and more interesting.

Freya India writes with a restraint that feels increasingly alien in a media environment driven by outrage and branding, and in doing so, she captures the peculiar flatness of a generation raised online, where identity is both hyper-visible and strangely hollow.

[emma jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5
Super fascinating insights into this generation, and how the technology and culture of our current age partial impacts young women. There’s a little bit of the “no but our generation REALLY has it the worst” that maybe comes from the author being still in her mid twenties. But she made a lot of good points and I think the first steps toward generation-wide change is simply recognizing the deeper issues, and she hit the nail on the head in many ways.