Systemic Problems Can Have Individual Solutions

Alexandra Davis Reviews Freya India’s GIRLS®

Systemic Problems Can Have Individual Solutions: A Review of Freya India’s GIRLS®

Alexandra Macey Davis

I was about halfway through Freya India’s GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything when I read internet ethnographer and Fairer Disputations’ Featured Author Katherine Dee’s Dispatch review calling it “vapid hand-wringing.” There is indeed a good amount of hand-wringing in the book, but it’s anything but vapid. Rather, it’s a well-documented and spirited account of the more unknown, insidiously damaging effects of rampant social media use among teens and young women.

Explosively popular Substack writer India’s debut book is all about what happens when girls become GIRLS®: that is, when social media turns adolescent women into products, flattening their personalities, preferences, ambitions, and mental states into a homogenized, exploitable mass. Her thesis is incredibly simple:

Modern digital technology amplifies the age-old anxieties girls have always felt. Throughout history, girls and young women have always worried about their appearance, their emotions, their social status, their friendships and families, their romantic relationships, and their futures. But today these anxieties are being magnified to such an extreme that they have become unmanageable.

India teases this out across six chapters—Filtered, Diagnosed, Documented, Disconnected, Detached, and Empowered—which each address one of the “age-old” anxieties that most women and girls will inevitably face in the areas of relationships, physical appearance, and mental health. Throughout, she shares a good deal about her own experience as an adolescent woman in the early 2010s, getting sucked into social media and laboring under its deleterious effects on her self-confidence, relationships, and attention.

The book thus far has received mixed reviews, the most negative of which is Dee’s. But Dee’s review doesn’t engage directly with the book’s arguments and content. She focuses instead on its methodology and India’s fitness to write it. For instance, Dee claims that India didn’t reference the right cultural critics, that there were too many or perhaps the wrong endnotes, that the book’s genre was unclear (memoir? research tome?), and that it offered only tenuous individual solutions to what is undeniably a systemic problem. She also insinuates that India’s “I’m just a girl” framing is disingenuous when set against the backdrop of Jonathan Haidt’s glowing endorsement, and that she offers nothing that Paul Kingsnorth hasn’t already covered.

GIRLS® is certainly not a perfect book. For one thing, there’s a good deal of repetition. By Chapter Six I felt as though I was reading many of the same points for the sixth time. Nevertheless, there’s tremendous value in what India offers: a firsthand look into the extremely subtle dangers of technologized, commodified culture for women and girls for a popular audience unlikely to read Kingsnorth or the endnotes. She’s done the research, she’s experienced the bad effects, and she’s packaged it all into a neat compendium of the many reasons why we really ought to be more concerned about the time our daughters, sisters, nieces, and students are spending online. Some readers probably need the repetition to really get it.

The book has two primary audiences: older readers (India doesn’t specify exactly how old, but it seems reasonable to conclude any woman old enough to be a parent or grandparent to a girl would fit the bill) and younger readers, the GIRLS® themselves who are immersed in this commodification culture. In her review, Dee points out that what India offers is nothing that any thoughtful person with a phone couldn’t see. But I disagree.

Most older readers are unaware of many of the subtleties that make social media platforms such a dangerous environment for developing minds. India spells out, for instance, the social dynamics involved in common online practices like direct messaging on Instagram and Snapchat. These include the insidiously mean practice of leaving people “on read” while deliberately posting online so the recipient can see that they’re being ghosted, or not responding to “selfies” and commenting on other people’s posts instead. It sounds silly and petty, but it’s anything but to a thirteen-year-old who’s already hanging by a thread socially. Or consider the “ranking” systems for girls’ bodies and faces. Just imagine your worst moments in puberty being magnified to thousands of strangers online and imagine what that would do to an already fragile and developing psyche. It was bad enough in the days when our awkward adolescent faces were framed and displayed proudly on grandma’s family photo wall. Multiply that mortification by about nine orders of magnitude, and that’s what girls are dealing with now.

These are more subtle dangers that older women who are busy raising girls wouldn’t necessarily pick up on—assuming that they’re not spending hours a day sending their friends selfies on Snapchat. The realities of cyberbullying are often barely perceptible, walking a fine line between normal online conduct and emotional manipulation. And this is just one example of the many dangers India has researched, packaged, and presented to us. So, no, not anyone with a phone can see this—not without subjecting themselves to the same level of excessive and unhealthy social media usage from which they seek to protect their daughters. Most parents just don’t understand the extent to which commodification culture is warping girls’ minds and souls, destroying their friendships, and making them anxious and miserable.

For readers of any age, though, some caution is in order: India does tend to serve up the most extreme examples of the bad effects of social media, the absolute rock bottom that most people will never reach—women having surgery to remove ribs so they can shrink their waistlines, OnlyFans models having sex with more than 100 men in a day, and the like. The vast majority of girls aren’t going to go from FaceTuning their photos to mutilating their bodies, or from posting pouty selfies to setting up an OnlyFans profile. Is there value in showing the end of the road for an unhealthy habit, the bottom of the spiral if it is left to fully unfurl? Maybe. But it does smack of fearmongering at times, as some of her critics have noted. I wish India had spent more time delving into the proposed solutions, to which she dedicates just one short chapter at the very end.

India herself certainly seems to have figured out a way out of commodification culture online. She appears to be very private and posts little about herself, even though she’s made a living writing on the internet. That said, given how she opened up about her personal experiences in other parts of the book, I wish she’d done the same at the end when she’s offering her potential solutions. How did she, personally, hack this?

Instead, she speaks in generalities, saying things like “By understanding what has happened and where things went wrong, we can start to see through the lies. We can see past what we are being told and see what we are being sold.” Speaking to young readers directly, she urges: Notice. Notice when you are treating yourself like a product. Notice when you’re feeling insecure and embarrassed. Notice if you feel alone and isolated the more you swipe and scroll. This is all well and good, but how did she, a woman who found a way to harness the internet to build a career while presumably getting past all of the toxic material along the way, figure this out? In the book she lets us into her interior world, but only to a point. Had she pushed just a bit further past that point, younger readers probably would’ve found her own path illuminating and possibly replicable.

Nevertheless, I disagree with Dee’s assessment of the adequacy of India’s proposed cures to the systemic problem of commodification culture. I do think that systemic problems can have individual solutions, and social media is definitely a context in which that’s true. This is a case in which the dangers affect the individual on spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and relational levels. Accordingly, the cure must also directly address the individual’s spirituality, emotions, intellect, and relationships. Policy is ill-suited to address such deeply and intensely felt needs.

So what are the solutions? India gives a few admonitions: Get offline. Delete the apps. Relish a private life. Resist the urge to document, optimize, promote, and perfect. “The best love is quiet,” she writes. “The best confidence is quiet. And so are the lives with the most meaning.” All that time chasing what looks good, she says, “leaves little energy for attempting to be good.” These are thoughts that suggest wisdom beyond her twenty-six years.

While I agree that India’s proposed solutions are less robust than one would hope, I still see value in the book for both older and younger readers. No, it’s not Kingsnorth; it’s not Putnam. But it doesn’t claim to be. Those authors would be good follow-up reading to India’s book, as would Dee’s own extensive writing on internet culture—for those who want to go deeper. But simplicity in such crucial matters is important too. Not many mothers who are just trying to figure out what’s going on with their teens will find their guidance in Kingsnorth. But they might well find it in India.

For adults who don’t realize just how poisonous the internet has become, India’s extensive documentation makes the experiences of girls legible, even to those who don’t want to subject themselves to social media addiction under the guise of research. And for teens struggling to escape the relentless pressures of online culture, a thriving woman in her twenties may be just the inspiration she needs to persevere. Not scholars, not raw data, not massive tomes detailing the deleterious effects of technology on the human psyche—just a person who’s lived it, who’s escaped it, and who’s trying to pull other girls off the conveyor belt leading them gently and quietly to destruction.