Girls in Crisis: Alarmist Narratives Won’t Solve the Problem

Most importantly, she knows these struggles “intimately.” 

The disclaimer accomplishes two things at once. It keeps the author below the traditional threshold of expertise, while the surrounding scaffolding—Haidt’s blurb calling her “the most powerful voice of Gen Z yet to emerge”—frames GIRLS® as the definitive cultural diagnosis for something that many people are noticing, or at least discussing: “the Phones.” It embodies the “I’m just a girl” stance of literary nonfiction.

Whether this approach lands depends on which book you imagine you’re holding. The subtitle promises The Commodification of Everything. But what exactly is it? A history of commodification? an explanation? a polemic? The term and its variants recur dozens of times. Girls have been “remade” into “products on display, things to be sold.” They are “both the consumers and the consumed.” By the closing, “the purpose of our lives is to become better products rather than better people” (a notion that horrifies India). 

India does offer a working hypothesis about what has become of girls. But first, a note on that word, girls. I’ve tended to read India as writing from hindsight about her own childhood and adolescence. Yet the frequent use of “we” in her confessional pieces and in this book complicates that stance. It lulls readers into viewing today’s teenagers and twenty-somethings as one indistinguishable group: girls. In truth, India is not simply a “girl” but a 26-year-old woman. That nuance matters because the book’s central claim to authority—personal experience—depends on it. India’s subjects, the girls living the phenomenon she describes (not interviewed directly, but observed via TikTok and Reels), are about a decade younger than she is.

Returning to the theory. India portrays “an entire commercial ecosystem that treats our emotions as raw material” and “a vast machinery of corporations and advertisers” that mines self-worth and resales it for profit. “Commodification” is used as an umbrella term: monetizing the body (OnlyFans), algorithmic targeting (Instagram ads), self-objectification (filters), personal branding (influencers), and a broader climate in which watching oneself from the outside can harm one’s spirit. 

What’s missing is acknowledgement of the tradition she’s drawing from. This is a work that begs for proper citations—the right ones, not merely links to trend pieces, TikToks, and Reddit threads. Consider a notable example. On India’s Substack, also called Girls, and in interviews, she positions herself as a fan of Christopher Lasch, the mid‑century social critic whose posthumous revival accelerated around 2016. She does cite him—once. Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1979) contains a section titled “The Propaganda of Commodities,” where 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 sole Lasch citation appears in that same chapter—but for a brief note on therapeutic culture, not for the commodification argument that animates the surrounding pages. She cites him where his relevance is narrow, not where it is central to her thesis.

More startling than the lone Lasch reference: the word “capitalism” appears exactly once in the entire text, tucked into a dismissive list (“patriarchy, late capitalism, white supremacy, or some other…”). India uses other terms for the phenomenon—“market,” “industry,” “profit motives,” “commercial interests,” and so forth—and she deploys them repeatedly. Yet there exists a long lineage of writing on this topic, spanning political economy and, more granularly, the specific question India tackles: how mass media (and the internet in particular) commodifies female insecurity. The most accessible antecedent is Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth (1990), though feminists have been exploring this terrain for decades, with many newer works addressing social media in particular. Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs is the canonical study of women participating in their own commodification, and it goes unmentioned here. So too do two recent books by women operating precisely in India’s lane: Sarah Ditum’s Toxic, about the media machinery that reshaped a generation of celebrity women into consumable objects (including the internet’s role), and Sophie Gilbert’s Girl on Girl, about how mass culture taught women to view themselves through the lens of a camera. Ditum and Gilbert are India’s near contemporaries, arriving at overlapping conclusions. One might expect a Gen Z examination of girlhood’s commodification to acknowledge their existence.

There’s an obvious flaw in the room, though. “Feminism” carries baggage, both as a buzzword and as an ideology. India positions herself as a cautious critic with conservative leanings, and has only recently, and with some reluctance, embraced the label. To be fair, openly citing feminists can be taboo in certain conservative or centrist circles. There are certainly right‑wing writers who engage constructively with feminist thought—Mary Harrington, Erika Bachiochi, and Dispatch contributor Leah Libresco Sargeant, to name just a few. Even Emma Waters of the Heritage Foundation, whose Lead Like Jael advocates Christian womanhood, engages with feminist ideas (both approvingly and critically). But walking this line with readers can be challenging, much like acknowledging that there is some truth to Marxist analysis—compatible with conservatism, yet not easy to admit.

What’s notable, though, is that conservative critiques of consumer culture are conspicuously absent from GIRLS®, and there exists a rich tradition to draw from. There is no G.K. Chesterton, no Wendell Berry, no Catholic social thought that India might know from First Things. No mention of Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine, even though India has professed admiration for him. A debut work on the commodification of girlhood lacks a theory of commodification from any tradition, save perhaps in a casual sense.

Of course, I should be fair. This would matter less if India weren’t so quick to cast herself as a lone voice in the wilderness—a Zoomer Cassandra accused by some critics of being “alt-right” (and sometimes “hard right”). And indeed the “alt-right” label is unfair and, if anything, a smear. Yet even she, in other contexts, has admitted to conservative leanings. India’s conclusions cluster around familiar terrain: religion as a social stabilizer, two-parent households as the standard good, single careerist womanhood as a misstep, porn as a civilizational threat. These are positions people can hold in good faith, and I share some of them myself. They are also, plainly, the views held by portions of the contemporary American and British right. Her project is not apolitical.

In a recent Free Press essay, India characterizes the reception of GIRLS® as belated and ideological. For instance, she notes that critics treated a recent New Statesman cover story about outspoken young women as revelatory—new information—when she and others have been making the same case for years. But “for years,” in her use, means what—three years on Substack? Levy has been on this beat for 30 years. Ditum’s Toxic appeared two years before GIRLS®; Gilbert’s Girl on Girl appeared a year prior. And that’s not even accounting for the rich traditions already cited on both the left and the right. The grievance that other writers are “catching up” to you—and, worse, unfairly portraying you as a bigot while doing so—reads differently against that backdrop.

There is a modest defense to be found. Perhaps this is a memoir after all. It is true that India writes from within, drawing on her own experiences. But the book isn’t marketed as a memoir. The notes section spans nearly 90 pages. The introduction’s endnotes are peer‑reviewed psychology—JAMA, Psychological Bulletin, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—and they give the impression of a rigorously prepared work about to begin. Then the chapters start, and the notes shift almost entirely to social media URLs and trend pieces: YouTube tutorials, Facebook posts, tweets, Dazed, Vice, The Sun, Business Insider. There are occasional psychology papers, though they’re not given serious weight. Fewer than ten books appear in the notes section; the references cluster around pop psychology. There’s Haidt, the lone Lasch mention, and then Abigail Shrier and a small handful of others.

And there’s a noticeable absence of diverse reporting. When other voices appear in GIRLS®, they’re cited from secondary sources, usually trend pieces or Substacks. When India describes a girl using a particular filter, she’s likely paraphrasing a TikTok. Observing a few videos—or even one—and drawing conclusions is not digital ethnography, which at minimum requires sustained observation and some record of how subjects were chosen. For a book, that standard isn’t high, but what India offers for long stretches reads like an annotated scroll through her own For You page.

In the sixth chapter, the political frame emerges most openly, and arguably most intriguingly. Drawing on Haidt, India notes that “liberal teenagers, especially liberal girls” have shifted toward an external locus of control, and that the more external the locus, the more anxious and depressed the individual becomes. The chapter closes with the claim that true empowerment lies away from algorithms, away from corporations, away from the market. In context, that also means stepping away from corporate feminism, away from the child-free adulthood the book treats as evidence of spiritual decay, and away from the careerist single life portrayed as a wrong turn.

The claim that a liberal worldview itself breeds unhappiness among liberal women is a line long defended by right-wing cultural critics. It might be true. Or it could be that real structural disadvantages are being perceived accurately, or that depression fosters a diminished sense of agency rather than the other way around. India hints at needing faith but retreats, “not necessarily religious faith,” and I wish she had explored that more. In interviews, she has spoken of a conversion to Christianity, though she’s cautious about discussing something so new—a reasonable hedge, and one that helps explain it. But why does she suppose that these more established traditions can perform what liberal society (or merely its consumer technology) cannot, will not, and never will? These questions are genuinely provocative, with potentially meaningful answers that could aid young people even if they disagree with her conclusions. 

The conclusion does offer prescriptions. After hundreds of pages arguing that girls are caught in systems “almost impossible to resist during girls’ most formative and vulnerable years,” India urges them to delete the apps, cultivate greater privacy, and “conduct yourself as if true love exists.” (An intriguing hedge there—“as if.”) A study of structural problems ends up offering only individual remedies, and those remedies are rather tentative.

Kingsnorth, for what it’s worth, wrote the book India believed she wrote. His exploration of what he calls the Machine—the technological-commercial framework that turns every corner of human life into a surface for extraction—embodies the broader, more ambitious perspective GIRLS® keeps reaching for and not quite delivering. Readers seeking a unifying theory that coherently ties the phenomena together would find more traction there.

The most persistent question GIRLS® leaves unanswered is what India knows about the internet that any thoughtful person with a smartphone does not. Parents seeking an explanation for their daughters’ depression will not find a robust roadmap here. Conservative young women seeking practical guidance might gravitate toward writers like Louise Perry or Emma Waters. Fans of Freya India will, however, welcome the six new essays that closely resemble material already found on her Substack. As for everyone else, the disclaimer on page 18 remains—the work is not presented as expert analysis. The rest of the book stays in line with that stance.