For some time now we have known what a perilous state so many boys are in here in the West. Experts like Jordan Peterson have sought to champion their cause and provide them with a better way ahead. But in our secular left, woke world, girls are also struggling big time, being sold a pile of lies and deceptions by so many.
Thankfully some are sounding the alarm about them and their state as well. In a recent article examining how women and girls are harmed by porn, I discussed and quoted from the new book by Freya India: GIRLS® (Swift, 2026). Just released, it is an important look at the trials and travails girls are undergoing today. See my earlier piece here: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2026/04/16/females-are-harmed-by-porn-as-well/
Here I want to look further at the book and mention a new article she has just penned. In the book’s Introduction she lays out her case. She says this in part:
What girls and young women are going through today is something new. We see this most clearly in the complete collapse of their mental health. Since the early 2010s, Generation Z—those of us born between roughly 1996 and 2011—has been falling apart, with adolescent girls hit hardest. And the generation after that, Gen Alpha—born between 2012 and 2025—is heading in the same direction.
The symptoms are everywhere. Rates of anxiety disorders, depression, self-harm, and eating disorders among adolescent girls have soared since the early 2010s. Across the Anglosphere, girls’ self-harm and suicide rates have also reached record highs. In the US, nearly one in three teenage girls seriously considered suicide in 2021, up from 19 percent a decade earlier, and double the rate for boys. Suicide rates for girls as young as ten have also risen in recent years, along with emergency room visits for suicide attempts.
There are countless theories for this crisis, but I still don’t believe we have the full story. Yes, the mass adoption of smartphones, the rise of social media platforms, and the advance of algorithms and online advertising had a huge impact in the early 2010s. But these were simply the mechanism, the machinery, for what I believe is the bigger story: the mass commodification of girls. Over the past fifteen years, my generation has not only been broken but reassembled into something consumable, sellable, inanimate. (pp. 7-8)
India continues:
My basic argument is simple. Modern digital technology amplifies the age-old anxieties adolescent girls have always felt. Through-out history, girls and young women have always worried about their appearance, their emotions, their social status, their friendships and families, their romantic relationships, and their futures. But today these anxieties are being magnified to such an extreme that they have become unmanageable.
The problem, though, is more sinister than that. Not only does the modern world magnify these age-old anxieties, it ruthlessly exploits and profits from them. Corporations capitalize on our fears and vulnerabilities to constantly sell us products and services. The worse our mental health gets, the more “solutions” we can be sold: a continuous conveyor belt of apps, products, services, pills, and procedures promising happiness and fulfillment, yet trapping us in a cycle of introspection, consumption, dependency, and dissatisfaction.
Girls have always worried about their appearance, for example. But today they have to handle these insecurities in a world of augmented reality beauty filters, TikTok plastic surgeons pushing lip fillers and rhinoplasties, and an endless stream of edited, surgically enhanced Instagram influencers flooding their feeds….
Of course, there is nothing new about industries profiting from women’s vulnerabilities. Over the past decade, though—with the rise of social media platforms, digital advertising, and artificial intelligence (AI)—corporations have learned how to commodify not only girls’ and young women’s faces and bodies, but every part of our personal lives. (pp. 8-10)
One further quote:
But GIRLS® is not just another book about social media. It is about a vast, interconnected web of industries, each profiting from our experiences and anxieties. It is about these industries influence everything from how we look to how we feel, from how we love to how we treat other people. It is about an entire commercial ecosystem that uses our emotions as raw material: a beauty industry that thrives on our self-loathing; a wellness industry that relies on our stress and anxiety; a pharmaceutical industry that needs our distress and diagnoses; a dating industry that depends on our dissatisfaction and continuous swiping; a porn industry that profits from our objectification; a consumer culture that cashes in on our search for identity and belonging. Our despair and disempowerment are worth billions.
And today we are not merely sold commodities like previous generations were. We are the commodity. We market and sell ourselves all the time. Girls and young women are packaging their personal lives for Instagram, advertising themselves like products on dating apps, and transforming themselves into professional brands to be monitored and managed. Since the rise of social media, girls have grown up seeing themselves as nothing but objects in a marketplace. Our happiness and self-worth now depend on how sellable we are. (pp. 10-11)
GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everythingby India, Freya (Author)
India has just started writing for The Free Press. Her first article there looks further at how girls are in such a bad way, but also notes how we still hear that it is somehow all the fault of boys! The title and subtitle of the piece are these:
“I’m Not a Soldier in the Battle of the Sexes.”
“Young women are miserable for so many reasons. But in certain media outlets, you’re only allowed to acknowledge one: the shortcomings of men.”
The article begins:
Why are young women so unhappy? Rates of anxiety disorders, depression, and self-harm are soaring; in the U.S., almost one in three teenage girls seriously considered suicide in 2021. Read the mainstream press and you will overwhelmingly find the same answer: teenage boys, misogyny, masculinity, Andrew Tate. For years, blaming men has been the accepted explanation for our misery.
Into this climate landed a viral cover story from the flagship magazine of the British left, TheNew Statesman, headlined “Meet the Angry Young Women.” Gen Z women in Britain, they found, feel unhappy, hopeless about the future, and hostile toward men. According to new polling, around 72 percent of young men say they have a positive view of women; only half of young women say the same about men. And while just 7 percent of young men have a negative view of women, 21 percent of young women have a negative view of men.
The piece itself was balanced, finally acknowledging that the “femosphere”—left-wing female influencers—also “reinforces this hostility toward men.” But plenty of commentators still read the report as yet more evidence that men are the problem; even an op-ed offering an economic explanation for the angriness of women couldn’t help but conclude: “a woman can choose to subjugate herself to a man, or to the man.” https://www.thefp.com/p/im-not-a-soldier-in-the-battle-of
The entire piece is worth looking at. It is good to see thinkers and writers reflecting on the reality that BOTH girls and boys are getting a lousy deal in contemporary culture. Many books have already been written on the war against boys, including these titles:
Farrell, Warren and John Gray, The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It. BenBella Books, 2018.
Sax, Leonard, Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men. Basic Books, 2007.
Sommers, Christina Hoff, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men. Simon & Schuster, 2000.
It is great to now have titles like GIRLS® to address the needs of women and girls as well.
