Remembering what it means to be human
Sometimes a book appears which changes the course of our nation’s history and culture.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” gave a face to slavery and helped bring on the Civil War. Now rarely read, Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel “The Jungle” exposed the unsanitary conditions of the meatpacking industry and so repulsed the American people that it brought about federal reforms regarding food safety.
Rachel Carlson’s “Silent Spring” pointed out the ruinous effects of certain chemicals on the environment and sparked the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.
In March 2024, Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness” appeared and shot to the top of the best-seller lists. Here Haidt argues that a rising tide of mental and emotional illnesses among young people, particularly anxiety and depression, is directly linked to their attraction — in many cases, seen as addictive — to screens and cell phones. He called the attention of millions to his thesis that childhood had become “phone-based” rather than “play-based.”
Though some experts have attempted to discredit or minimize Haidt’s conclusions, many parents and teachers found his study a match with their own observations of their children and students. Since the book’s release, countless parents have begun delaying their children’s ownership and access to phones, many schools throughout the country have banned phones, and educators have called into question the rampant usage of technology in the classroom.
That brings us to Freya India and her just-released book, “Girls®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything.”
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India is a brilliant 26-year-old British writer whose work has appeared online these last few years at various publications and on her Substack, “GIRLS.” She writes most often about the negative effects of phones and social media on Gen Z women, speaking both from her own experience and from the data she’s collected. Recently she has joined forces with Haidt, working on his Substack “After Babel” and promoting his ideas online.
With “Girls®,” India aims a battery of her own heavy artillery at the negative effects of social media and its covert algorithmic manipulations of its users, especially young females. She reveals the damage done by screens over the last 15 years: the damaging comparisons made by girls to online images, the influencers who attract and then exploit girls and young women in all aspects of life from fashion and style to their mental health and the “friends,” both human and electronic, who do the same.
As she writes in the very first sentences of her book, “This is not the story of a generation falling apart. This is the story of a generation being remade, from people into products, from girls into GIRLS®.”
Yet “Girls®” is not some political or cultural diatribe. In addition to personal anecdotes, India brings to nearly every page the firepower of statistics and studies, so much so that sometimes readers may feel as if they themselves are being bombarded. At the end of the book are 87 pages of footnotes, a remarkable achievement of organization and use of online sources.
In her introduction, India writes that she has “three main audiences in mind for this book.” The first is those women her own age who went through a journey similar to her own. The second is younger girls, “those who have never known a world than this one.” Here she hopes to show them “how drastically life has changed in the last fifteen years and that things weren’t always this way.”
Then she writes, “Lastly, this book is for older readers: parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, caregivers, teachers, anybody who has a girl or young woman in their life.” Here she strives to show an older audience how different the world for girls has become, how the desires and dreams of girls became drawn to an online world, how the traditional anxieties of girlhood are being refashioned and commodified.
As a father, a grandfather and a man interested in culture, I second India’s hopes that this last group will take this book to heart as both an education and as a warning. I would even go a step further and recommend it to all adult readers who want to understand more deeply what our near-obsessive attraction to screens is doing to us. Millions of Americans, male and female, middle-aged and elderly, are caught up just like these girls in social media, shaped into products and performers.
At the end of “Girls,®” Freya India writes, “Right now, we stand at a crossroads. We can keep going down this path, allowing billion-dollar industries to dictate not only how we look but how we feel, how we live and how we see ourselves, or we can remember what has been taken from us, and turn back. We can remind our daughters, granddaughters, and future generations of girls what real beauty, real friendship, real lives, real community, real confidence, real life is, and help them remember what it means to be human.”
Check out India’s essays online. Read the book. This “girl” has something important to tell us.
(Jeff Minick reviews books and has written four of his own: two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
