GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything
by Freya India
Henry Holt and Co. | 2026 | 384 pages (hardcover) | $29.99
In a recent church small group, in which I was the youngest participant by several decades, I witnessed a surprising display of emotion. Older women—saints in the church who have nurtured and fed me literally and spiritually—tearfully sharing painful memories from their middle school years. Here, in the winter seasons of their life, those memories were still strong enough, formative enough, painful enough to cause them to weep together.
We underestimate the importance of girlhood.
So, as someone involved with the youth in my church and raising daughters of my own, I approached Freya India’s new release Girls® with great interest. India, a 26-year-old with a Substack following of roughly 50,000, neatly documents the commodification of her generation and the impact it has had on young women. She is considered one of the rising voices representing Gen Z women, and her book is quite the manifesto.
Documenting the Destruction
With 85 pages of endnotes, Girls® is nothing if not well-documented. In each of her six chapters, India describes “age old” anxieties girls are facing today that have now been amplified by social media and commodified by corporations. From body image and self-esteem, to friendships and romantic relationships, the Gen Z girls didn’t face new anxieties—they faced a new environment, one in which all their flaws, insecurities, and worst moments could be turned into viral videos or data for marketing companies.
For anyone who is raising girls or who works with them through church ministries, her extremely thorough exposé of how technology, social media, influencers, AI, and online therapy culture posed unique dangers for girls is helpful, especially if you were raised before the rise of such trends and remain largely unaware of them now.
The frustrating theme throughout this book is how consistently India manages to nail down the diagnosis while missing the cure.
Tiptoeing Around Truths
The woes described in Girls® are not just common for young women—they are issues that have plagued the human race since the dawn of time. India describes the loneliness of a generation whose connections are all online—and are more and more about content, performance, and branding than about friendship, connection, and closeness. “Girls and young women have always wanted to feel secure, to know that they belong,” she writes (162), and later observes, “We were not designed to do this alone.” Though couched in the context of AI generated “friends” and the dissolution of real communities, the longing she touches on comes straight from Genesis 2:18. Of course we feel lonely without meaningful relationships. God designed us for community.
Her discourse on the lies behind the female “empowerment” movement echo the burdens of law and gospel. The #girlboss is busy, and the standard is high. “Now success demands even more of us,” India laments (219). “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,” she writes. “Because none of this is real empowerment” (239). The Ecclesiastical vanity of striving is evident in her frustration, but instead of reaching for gospel, she reaches for more law. “Aspire to be different!” (258). “Be someone rare” (259). “Become an example” (261). She replaces one checklist with another, and so leaves the burden of feeling empowered, purposeful, or worthy still on the shoulders of her audience—an age old problem, indeed.
And in the many places that India describes how technology and modern values have reshaped the family and romantic relationships in damaging ways, she is describing the perversion of marriage and sex that have followed mankind through the centuries. She writes quite a large section on how pornography has impacted young girls, many of whom begin watching in middle school (183). Relying on surveys and studies, she documents how a vast majority of the women in her generation grew up watching violent and degrading pornography as a way to learn about sex and the devastating toll that has had on their sexual lives, mental health, and relationships with men. It’s so easy—especially in what’s leftover from the church’s purity culture movement—to assume that boys are the only ones who struggle with the lure of pornography, but sin does not discriminate. It never has.
Marriages, too, are falling apart, as “the institutions, communities, and customs that once bound people together have been falling away” (163). India cites declining religion as well as uprooted communities and the mocking of marriage and family in general as primary culprits. But there’s something beneath all that as well. “Our parents were told to do what made them happy, to walk away if they wanted, forgetting that family structures are not just limits on adult freedom but foundations for children to stand on, to step off from, on which they depend” (163). It is telling that in the more critical reviews of India’s work, many are accusing her of being “anti-feminist.” Madeleine Sachdev wrote in her Goodreads review that India “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.” But India is reflecting on a very biblical truth—God made marriage to be a lasting covenant between two people, from which the families of the earth may grow (Gen. 2:23–24; Mal. 2:14–16; Matt. 19:4–6).
The ruination of the cultural sexual ethic and honor of marriage has had consequences, as all sin does. You don’t have to be a Christian to see that. You don’t need to point to a verse or doctrine. India is identifying the consequences of living sinful lives in a fallen world—the heartbreak in this situation, of course, being that it is our very young girls who are being abandoned by those who should be guiding them and are duped into the world’s traps. “We were lied to,” India explains. “Not only by platforms promising connection but also by a culture insisting that family breakdown was normal, and responsibility optional.”
Missing the Solution
Unfortunately, for how thorough her assessment of the problems are, her proposed solutions are painfully thin. Very early in the book, she identifies the need for a moral framework, though not in so many words. In discussing the social media trend of virtue signaling (e.g. adding political filters to profile pictures, including preferred pronouns in bios, etc.), she observes, “Morality became measurable, judged instantly by what we had or hadn’t shared” (118). But the standard for that morality changed depending on who you were, what the issue was, or how quickly you responded. The contradictions of the modern belief system continue to abound, as made clear by India’s description of the search for one’s “authentic self”—also identified as a primary cause behind divorce rates—which encourages in one’s private life the opposite kind of conduct demanded to be displayed on social media. “Commitments became burdens. Compromises and sacrifices felt like an affront to autonomy” (141). There’s a need for a consistent standard of goodness and morality evident in India’s lament, but she doesn’t say it.
She does talk about new age religion, how girls became “spiritual” but not religious. “Rejecting religion felt like common sense,” she writes. “Girls I grew up with saw it not only as backward and archaic but also cringeworthy, embarrassing, belonging to another world entirely. We thought of Christianity as outdated and oppressive, if we thought of it at all” (206). But as she quotes statistics about declining youth in the church in both the US and the UK (207), she doesn’t connect the dots—why do people need religion? The echoes of it remain, even in a generation raised without it, but India gives no explanation of its significance or the effects true religion might have on the broken pieces of girlhood.
“We mimic religion all the time,” she writes. “We don’t pray at night; we repeat positive affirmations. We don’t confess; we trauma dump. We don’t seek salvation; we go on healing journeys” (210, emphasis original). And companies have figured out how to capitalize on this new religion with meditation apps, online therapists, and any number of products you can buy to help you on your healing path. But, India presses, none of these efforts to address the biggest existential needs gets close to answering the question: “Who is God?” (210). “In this religion, we are the gods,” she writes. But these girl-gods still have to find a meaning to life—or a way to fulfill that innate human desire to worship something and belong somewhere (WSC 1). And so they have filled in that space with social justice causes like the fight against “patriarchy, late capitalism, white supremacy, or some other form of oppression” (212). She writes: “For girls raised without religion, these theories gave us what we had never had before: a feeling of belonging, a sense of purpose. We finally had an authority to follow, a concept of right and wrong.”
But for all India’s efforts in identifying the importance of some kind of moral structure, some kind of religious community—“places where you learn to live alongside other people and adapt to one another’s needs” (249)—she continually falls just short of the real answer. “And finally—along with stepping back, becoming more private, investing in real relationships, and trying to take care of others—I think we need to find faith,” she writes in the final pages of her book. “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” (264, emphasis original).
If there’s any relief in that conclusion, it’s that it makes all the confused striving throughout the earlier pages make sense. All that data was never leading up to a confession in one true God and his revealed word, in which we find the written law that is reflected in his natural laws. It was never leading us toward his plan to redeem sinful humans through the work of his Son, and the benefits that come with union with Christ—belonging to the family of God; the hope of restored selves and relationships through the work of the Holy Spirit; encouragement, accountability and discipleship; and the promise that there is more than this life that is passing away. And if her book was never leading us to that conclusion, then of course all the data and analysis and longing for whatever is missing was going to feel disconnected. Of course her answer to the problem of self-love was going to be an unattainable check-list of loving other people. Of course the solutions were going to mirror the problems.
India does quite competently what many in secular society are able to do: recognize the fallen state of the world and say “something is wrong.” They can feel the need for God and his law, but their sinful hearts are darkened (Rom. 1:19–23). Only those who have been saved by grace and made to believe in the revealed word of God can point to the real solution.
This, then, is what parents, pastors, and church leaders should take away as we consider how to raise girls in this current age.
First, the world will seek to disciple them. We cannot keep our young people bubbled away from the intrusion of media and marketing—it’s literally in our grocery stores. But we can catechise them first. As India describes, the need for that religious grounding is essential for girls who are trying to make sense of the world. We can be diligent in shepherding their minds and hearts while they are in these formative years.
Secondly, this book should be a profound reminder to us that the years of girlhood are important. They’re not to be dismissed just because girls so often present themselves in a flurry of bows and giggles, or as they get older, in a cool swath of detachment and snark. The depression, anxiety, and suicide statistics from Gen Z alone should be a wake up call that the years in which girls struggle to belong, form friendships, and understand themselves are essential ones.
God made girls, too. They are his image bearers, and we need to give them the same care, attention, and discipleship as anyone else in his church. Girls® makes it clear what happens if we don’t.
