Girls Are in Crisis. Alarmism Won’t Help. – Katherine Dee

Most importantly, she knows these struggles “intimately.” 

The disclaimer does two things at once. It puts the writer below the bar of expertise, while the surrounding scaffolding—Haidt’s blurb calling her “the most powerful voice of Gen Z yet to emerge”—positions GIRLS® as the definitive cultural diagnosis for something everyone is noticing, or at least talking about: “the Phones.” It is the “I’m just a girl” posture of literary nonfiction.

Whether it works depends on which book you think you’re reading. The subtitle promises The Commodification of Everything. But what, exactly, is it? A history of commodification? An explanation? A polemic against? The word and its variants appear dozens of times. Girls have been “remade” into “products on display, things to be sold.” They are “both the consumers and the consumed.” Per the conclusion, “the purpose of our lives is to become better products rather than better people” (something that horrifies India). 

India does have a working theory of what has happened to girls. But first, a note on that word, girls. I’ve always read India as writing retrospectively, of her own childhood and adolescence. But the “we” she often reaches for—in her confessional essays and in this book—complicates that. It lulls the readers into seeing current teenagers and twentysomething women as one undifferentiated mass: girls. India is not, in fact, a “girl,” though: She is a 26-year-old woman. The slippage matters because the book’s chief claim to authority—personal experience—depends on it. India’s subjects, the girls living the phenomenon she’s describing (and notably not interviewed, but observed through TikTok and Reels), are roughly a decade younger than she is.

But back to the theory. India describes “an entire commercial ecosystem that uses our emotions as raw material” and “a vast machinery of corporations and advertisers” that mines self-worth and sells it back at a profit. “Commodification” gets invoked as a catch-all: monetization of the body (OnlyFans), algorithmic targeting (Instagram ads), self-objectification (filters), personal branding (influencers), and a general atmosphere in which viewing oneself from the outside may be deleterious to one’s spirit. 

What’s missing is acknowledgment of the tradition she’s drawing from. This is a book crying out for citations—the right ones, not just URLs to trend pieces, TikToks, and Reddit threads. Here is an interesting example. On India’s Substack, also titled Girls, and in interviews, she describes herself as a fan of Christopher Lasch, the mid-century social critic whose posthumous revival took off around 2016. She does cite him—once. Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1979) contains a section called “The Propaganda of Commodities,” in which advertising is described as manufacturing “a product of its own: the consumer, perpetually unsatisfied, restless, anxious, and bored.” Advertising, Lasch writes, “encourages the pseudo-emancipation of women, flattering them with its insinuating reminder, ‘You’ve come a long way, baby,’ and disguising the freedom to consume as genuine autonomy.” That is essentially the argument of India’s sixth chapter, “Empowered.” India’s one Lasch citation is in that same chapter—but for a brief observation on therapeutic culture, not for the commodification argument that animates the surrounding pages. She cites him where his relevance is narrowest, not where it is essentially her thesis.

More striking than the singular Lasch citation: The word “capitalism” appears exactly once in the entire text, buried in a dismissive list (“patriarchy, late capitalism, white supremacy, or some other…”). India has other vocabulary for the thing—“market,” “industry,” “profit motives,” “commercial interests” and so on—and she uses it constantly. But there is a rich tradition of writing on this topic, both at the level of political economy and, more granularly, on the specific question India is addressing: how mass media (even more specifically: the internet) commodifies female insecurity. The most accessible predecessor is probably Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth (1990), though feminists have been working this ground for decades, and there are plenty of more recent additions that talk about social media in particular. Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs is the canonical book on women’s participation in their own commodification and it goes unmentioned. So do two recent books by women working precisely India’s terrain: Sarah Ditum’s Toxic, about the media machinery that shaped a generation of celebrity women into consumable objects (including the role the internet has played in this), and Sophie Gilbert’s Girl on Girl, about how mass culture taught women to see themselves through the camera. Ditum and Gilbert are India’s near-contemporaries, arriving at overlapping conclusions. One might expect a Gen Z book on the commodification of girlhood to know they exist.

There’s an elephant in the room here, though. “Feminism” carries baggage, both as a buzzword and as an ideology. India is a conservative critic, though she has only recently, and tepidly, begun embracing the label. To be fair to her, openly citing feminists is something of a taboo in some conservative or even centrist circles. There are certainly right-wing writers productively in dialogue with feminism—Mary Harrington, Erika Bachiochi, and Dispatch contributing writer Leah Libresco Sargeant, to name just three. Even Emma Waters of the Heritage Foundation, whose recent book Lead Like Jael is a contemporary exhortation on the importance of Christian womanhood, engages with feminist thought (both approvingly and disapprovingly). But it can be a tough line to walk with your readership, just like granting that there’s some truth to Marxist analysis—definitely compatible with being right-wing, certainly not easy.

What’s interesting, though, is that conservative critics of commercial culture are also missing from GIRLS®, and there is an extremely rich tradition to pull from. There is no G.K. Chesterton, no Wendell Berry, no Catholic social thought that India might know from her publications in First Things. No mention of English writer Paul Kingsnorth’s work Against the Machine, though India has professed admiration for the writer. A debut book on the commodification of girlhood has no theory of commodification from any tradition, except maybe colloquially.

Of course, I have to be fair here. This would matter less if India weren’t so quick to position herself as a voice struggling in the wilderness—a Zoomer Cassandra accused of being “alt-right” (and elsewhere, “hard right”) by critics, and indeed the “alt-right” label is unfair and if anything, a smear. But even she, in other contexts, has admitted to being conservative. India’s conclusions cluster predictably: religion as social stabilizer, two-parent households as default good, careerist single womanhood as a wrong turn, porn as civilizational corrosive. These are positions a person can hold in good faith, and many do; I agree with a few of them myself. They are also, recognizably, the positions of the contemporary American and British right. Her project is not an apolitical one. 

In a recent Free Press essay, India frames the reception to GIRLS® as belated and ideological. For example, she writes, critics have treated a recent New Statesman cover story about angry young women as revelation—new information—when she and others have been saying the same thing for years. But “for years,” in India’s usage, means, what, three years on Substack? Levy has been on this beat for 30 years. Ditum’s Toxic came out two years before GIRLS®; Gilbert’s Girl on Girl came out one year before. And again, this is to say nothing of the rich traditions already mentioned that exist on both the left and the right. The grievance that other writers are “catching up” to you—and worse, wrong-headedly smearing you as a bigot while doing so—reads differently with that backdrop.

There’s a small defense here. Maybe this is a memoir, one might argue. It’s true that India is writing from the inside about her own experiences. But the book is not marketed as a memoir. The notes section runs close to 90 pages. The introduction’s endnotes are peer-reviewed psychology—JAMA, Psychological Bulletin, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—and give the impression of a rigorous book about to begin. Then the chapters start, and the notes flip almost entirely to social media URLs and trend pieces: YouTube tutorials, Facebook posts, tweets, Dazed, Vice, The Sun, Business Insider. There is the odd psychology paper, though never seriously reckoned with. Fewer than 10 books appear across the entire notes section; the ones that do cluster around pop psychology. There’s Haidt, the single Lasch reference, and then Abigail Shrier and a handful of others.

And then there is the missing reporting. When other voices appear in GIRLS® they are quoted from secondary sources, usually trend pieces or Substacks. When India describes a girl using a particular filter, she is, as far as I can tell, paraphrasing a TikTok. Watching a handful of videos—or just one—and drawing conclusions is not digital ethnography, which at minimum requires sustained observation and some accounting of how subjects were selected. For a book, this is not a high bar. What India offers instead, for long stretches, reads like an annotated scroll through her own For You page.

In the sixth chapter, the political frame surfaces most honestly, and arguably, most interestingly. Drawing on Haidt, India reports that “liberal teenagers, particularly liberal girls” have shifted toward an external locus of control, and that the more external the locus, the more anxious and depressed the subject. The chapter closes on: “True empowerment can only be found away from algorithms, away from companies, away from the market.” In context, that also means away from corporate feminism, away from the child-free adulthood the book treats as evidence of spiritual collapse, away from the careerist single life presented throughout as a wrong turn.

The claim that a liberal worldview is itself a source of liberal women’s unhappiness is one right-wingers have been making for as long as they’ve been publishing cultural criticism. It might be true. Or it might be that girls facing real structural disadvantages are accurately perceiving them, or that depression produces a sense of diminished agency rather than the other way around. India alludes to the need for faith but pulls back, “not necessarily religious faith,” and I wished she’d opened up more. In interviews, she’s mentioned a conversion to Christianity, though is hesitant to speak about something so new—fair enough, and that explains the hedge. But why does she theorize that these more established traditions can do the work that liberal society (or just its consumer technology) could not, cannot, and will not? These are genuinely interesting questions with potentially interesting answers; ones that would help young people even if they disagreed with her conclusions. 

The conclusion offers its prescriptions. After hundreds of pages arguing that girls are trapped in systems “almost impossible to resist during girls’ most formative and vulnerable years,” India tells them to delete the apps, become more private, “conduct yourself as if real love exists.” (An interesting hedge there—“as if.”) A book about structural problems offers only individual solutions, and very tentatively at that. 

Kingsnorth, for what it’s worth, wrote the book India thought she wrote. His writing on what he calls the Machine, the technological-commercial apparatus that converts every corner of human life into a surface for extraction, is the kind of bigger-picture account GIRLS® keeps reaching for and not quite delivering. Readers looking for a theory that holds the phenomenon together would do better there.

The biggest question GIRLS® never answers is what India knows about the internet that any thoughtful person with a smartphone does not. Parents looking for an explanation of why their daughters are depressed won’t find much. Conservative young women looking for self-help might be better suited to a writer like Louise Perry or Emma Waters. Fans of Freya India will, however, be delighted by the six new essays that are very similar to what’s already on her Substack. As for everyone else, the disclaimer on page 18 says this is not an expert analysis. The rest of the book is consistent with that.