Thinking Out LoudI’ve just finished reading GIRLS® by Freya India, one of the most reviewed books of the year.
The “voice of a generation”, 26-year-old India’s laments about the impact of social media on girls and young women have struck a chord.
Reading GIRLS® feels like an onslaught of statistics and horror stories, meticulously documenting how huge powerful industries – beauty, mental health, tech, dating, p*rn – have ruthlessly exploited girls’ normal adolescent uncertainties for profit:
“The second a girl feels anxious, insecure or alone, corporations rush in … She is made to feel ugly and worthless and sick, before being sold a conveyor belt of solutions that only trap her in a cycle of dissatisfaction and consumption. She is being made to feel broken so she can become a lifelong consumer.”
Filters and beauty routines, self-diagnoses and soft blocks, red flags and not catching feelings, oversharing and underconnecting. The net effect of social media, India argues, has been the opposite of what it promised: hiving off young women from real community, real happiness, and their real selves.
Apart from giving less of ourselves to digital life – and more to one another – the solutions India is feeling her way towards look to traditional sources: family, community, religion. What she really wants is to be, not an optimised self, but a better person. To talk about morality, not just mental health. To reject the “freedom” from roots and foundations – mainly the freedom, it turns out, “to be exposed to billions of ads telling us what to believe” – and find a bigger story to be part of.
India, who has lately expressed interest in Christianity and church, urges other young women to reject cynicism and detachment, and to “find faith”: “Believe that some things in this life are sacred, and that you are one of them.”
This Thinking Out Loud was first published on Facebook.