Decrying the culturally and personally damaging effects of social media has become so common that news fatigue can set in leading one to shrug off the warnings. Often, especially among people over the age of 40, it can be easy to say social media use is a matter of personal responsibility. Yet the harm caused from too much time spent online can range from exacerbating insecurities to cultivating anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, and even suicide. In a landmark case this past March, a jury found the company Meta—owner of Instagram and other apps—responsible for knowingly creating features that were harmful and addictive for the young user who brought the case, a 20-year-old woman. While young men are not immune to the deleterious effects of frequent social media use, the evidence, as laid out in Freya India’s Girls®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything, demonstrates that girls and young women are especially vulnerable to the harms associated with a constant online presence.
Tech leaders are fond of noting the democratizing possibilities of social media and the Internet, though the evidence is dubious. The old saw goes that with an X account and a Substack newsletter, a person can reach readers around the world! It is a thrilling prospect. Yet we have lost a great deal too: privacy, trust in institutions, faith in journalistic integrity. Some readers will recall an era of newspapers, magazines, and free weekly publications where you could read articles that sought to report fairly and reach a broad spectrum of people. With print’s demise, we have witnessed the emergence of cacophonous and self-indulgent squawking that gets put on an even plane with interesting and insightful voices. Democratic, yes, but difficult to sift through and even more difficult to escape the bland algorithms once they’ve put an otherwise free thinker into a box. What appears to be democratizing is ultimately about the money to be made from the voices deemed most entertaining; as in politics and show business, so it goes online.
Here at The Chicago Review of Books, we talk a great deal about publishable nonfiction books. For essayists and nonfiction writers wanting to publish a book, having a well-trafficked platform seems increasingly crucial to catching an agent or publisher’s attention. What happens, then, when a talented author with more than 50,000 Substack followers writes a book expanding on themes from their online posts as Freya India has done? The challenge is to write a book that isn’t just more of the same.
Girls® is both a critique of social media and a product of its purported democratizing effects. As a critique, India provides mountains of data to support her point that social media grossly objectifies and harms girls and young women. Despite being well-researched, Girls® does little to engage in a substantive critical discussion.
As I read depressing statistic after horrifying anecdote, I kept recalling Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking The Feminine Mystique (1963) in which she addresses “the problem that has no name.” In it, Friedan pulled back the curtain on the dissatisfaction that many—albeit, mostly white, middle-class, heterosexual—women felt in the role of housewife and mother. In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan describes the myriad ways mid-century women were marketed to as consumers in constant need of improvement; treated as accessories and caregivers without individuality.
I was reminded of this as I read India’s observations that young women in 2026 are treated as power consumers and cultivators of their own personal “brands.” These personal brands lack depth and tend to focus on homogenized beauty standards. Though India does not say so, these beauty standards are overwhelmingly Eurocentric and heteronormative as fellow Brit and philosopher Heather Widdows demonstrates in Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal (2018). Girls®’s plaints could have registered as an argument had the author engaged with Friedan’s work, its feminist ancestor. Yet there is a socially conservative thread running through Girls®, which leads me to suspect the author would not care to align herself with feminism despite her criticisms of what is problematic about holding women to impossible beauty standards.
In the democratic world of online publishing, it can be easy to write into the void without pausing to consider how one might engage with other perspectives. In this way Girls® is a product of the purported online democracy, which siloes people into virtual communities of sameness. With the publication of Girls®, Freya India, an intelligent cultural observer, has missed an opportunity to interrogate the false sense of agency that “owning a brand” can create.
Curiously, Girls® does not hold tech companies responsible for the harm their apps can cause. Instead, India closes the book by weakly advising girls and young women to “resist becoming what companies want us to be” and to simply say “no.” Useful advice that unfortunately puts the burden squarely back onto the shoulders of young people weaned on Instagram. Yes, we are each responsible for how we use tech tools and hyper-individualism—including assuming responsibility only for one’s own actions—is precisely what the alienating age of social media feeds on. Girls® offers no solutions. With its endless litany of the harm social media causes—without, by the way, fully exploring the commodification of a generation as the subtitle promises—exhaustive research becomes exhausting to read.
NONFICTION
Girls®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything
By Freya India
Henry Holt and Co.
Published on May 5, 2026
