GIRLS®: Gen Z and the Commodification of Everything

by Freya India

GIRLS®: Gen Z and the Commodification of Everything is a passionate, provocative and deeply personal journey into the pressures shaping young lives today. Freya India shows that age-old anxieties of girlhood are now being amplified by modern life and exploited like never before. While previous generations of women were relentlessly sold products and procedures, we have become the product. We display our lives on Instagram, advertise ourselves on dating apps and package ourselves into personal brands, making anxiety feel overwhelming and unmanageable. We have transformed from girls into GIRLS®, from people into products.

Each chapter of GIRLS® focuses on a common anxiety in adolescent girls' lives, from insecurities about our faces and bodies, to our reputation and social status, to our friendships and romantic relationships. Along the way, India traces how rapidly culture and technology have evolved over the past decade.

This isn't just a book for girls. For young women, it offers a nostalgic, if unsettling, reflection on the world they've grown up in and reassurance that they're not alone in their struggles. For younger girls, it provides context for where these challenges began and warns where they might be headed. And, for parents, teachers and older generations, it serves as a reminder that these issues have never been so intense.

GIRLS® concludes with a message of hope, reminding readers how to reclaim their privacy, defend their dignity, and, above all, return to being people instead of products.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Self Help, Cultural

350 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 26, 2026

Reviews

[Mai H.]

Non-fiction November TBR

Women's History Month TBR

📱 Thank you to NetGalley and Henry Holt and Co.

[Emma Bayles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks Libro.fm for the ALC! I devoured this in a day.
I’ve read a a lot of Freya’s articles so I was so pumped to see she has a book coming.
In a world where the problems and online challenges of young girls are often trivialized, Freya outlines them in a compelling way to show that while many of the emotional challenges we face are age-old, the context in which we faced them are entirely new and exacerbating.

[Vanessa Valenzuela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you Net Gallery & Freya India for allowing me an ARC!
It is a surreal thing to read a book that documents internet discourse that I have vivid memories of. ED/SH tumblr pages, the glorification of mental illness, the rise of the word “stigma” and peoples subsequent abuse of it. Bye Sister, the Facetune Epidemic, brands pretending to care about “self care” to push product, and the use of therapy speak to pretend we know how to process our feelings when really we’re explaining them away.
All of this leading young women to commodify themselves like cows to slaughter.

It’s a good read. Nostalgic and painful. We should stop being products. We should invest in communities and get off this damn phone.

[Athena · Rating 1 out of 5]

Can't recommend - absolutely not nuanced in any way.

[Vanessa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every experience of girlhood is intruded upon by the market. Now the solution to every age-old anxiety is a purchase. Girls are being taught that they can buy their way out of bad feelings, buy their way into belonging, and buy their way to empowerment.

This captures the angst of the female Gen Z experience so well, going beyond the usual Instagram beauty standards, cyberbullying, and bad TV. I’ve never really seen anyone speak so clearly about the constant micro-exhaustions of adolescence online: having your every tiny move surveilled by your peers, overanalyzed by your teenage insecurity, and swallowed up by algorithms. There’s a peculiar, particular feeling that comes out of growing up this way (and still kinda living this way for those of us in our 20s) that makes strangers feel both extremely unreal and inaccessible and also too present, too able to pry inside your life.

And yes, I really do think TikTok made everything so much worse. My most Boomer opinion.

Every interest, every diversion online is overtaken somehow by people trying to advertise something (whether explicitly with sponsorships or implicitly with “don’t you want to be like me/be a part of this?”), and people diluting their experiences into that of a trendy, consumable stock character. You act like this if you have this haircut; you think like this if you enjoy this show; you aren’t a true member of X group or Y belief if you don’t read this book/have this piercing/collect this toy. Cottagecore girls do this. Dark academia girls do that. This is everywhere and it isn’t cute.

We aren’t happy with how we look, because billions are made making sure we never will be.

And thank god, honestly, that she also took aim at the mental health discussions on places like TikTok. Mental health is the newest version of fashion, and it’s so naive to think people don’t want to be included in the trend. When I was young, girls used to try to break their own ankles because they wanted crutches; we’d play with each other’s medical stuff because we thought it was quirky and unique. I legitimately recall girls wanting asthma for the cute accessory of an inhaler. Nowadays, being a part of a community that loves and legitimizes everything you do, turning all your symptoms (real or imagined) into cute and #relatable quirks, is easier than ever—just say you’re an autism girlie and you’re in.

Why, on Tumblr, do so many people’s bios have their physical and mental illnesses? It’s a social indicator; it makes your opinions more valid, your voice more respected, with the kinds of peers they want. I also appreciate that alongside things like Tourettes, India also discussed the skyrocketing rates of gender dysphoria. To address everything but that would be dishonest, even if that isn’t very #feminist of her.

ADHD is the current trend, and advertisers have noticed. I get ADHD/AuDHD banner ads on Goodreads on the daily; I feel like every memoir I read now has a section about the author’s ADHD. Therapy apps promise everything you’ve ever done wrong isn’t your fault (it’s probably your narcissist mom’s fault!) and medication will save you.

… The founder and clinical president of Done were arrested and accused of running a $100 million scheme to distribute Adderall without proper evaluations. […] It was claimed Cerebral had an internal goal of prescribing medication to 95 percent of patients after their first thirty-minute appointment. At one point, the company was allegedly pushing to raise its stimulant prescription rate for ADHD patients to 100 percent.

So, all that to say…this was definitely cathartic. However. On a few topics, I felt like I was being given countless stats to back up a fact that concerned India, but not anything about why the fact mattered to the health and safety of girls. Take how she referred to declining birth rates as a sign of Gen Z refusing to grow up, when even a cursory look into that topic will tell you that there are countless reasons (including a drop in teen pregnancy, which is, you know, an extremely good thing). The entire section on sexuality took it as a given that everyone would agree with her that porn, OnlyFans, sexualizing oneself online, etc, is awful and destructive (which, like, I do agree!), but the concept of this book counts on Gen Z not believing that’s the case—so are we trying to convince them or no? Her constant referrals to Gen Z’s declining participation in organized religion were kind of annoying; as a subsection of the discussion on lack of community ties, sure, that fits right in, but it kept being brought up to blame things like lack of moral guidance and overreliance on social justice scolding. Do we think there’s perhaps other reasons Gen Z aren’t religious, or…?

Plus the part about how Gen Z are very liberal. I was compelled by the discussion on the locus of control—“conservatives, on average, tend to have a more internal locus of control, while liberals lean more external, and the more external your locus of control, the more likely you are to feel anxious, hopeless, and depressed”—as this tracks with my own understanding of my life and that of my friends’. The more you frame every single bad thing that happened to you as part of some grand structural issue, the less able you feel to fix it. Not to say that people are always wrong, but it does create a sort of kneejerk reaction to escalate small issues into symptoms of enormous, unfixable problems. But this was brought up alongside how girls are being intimidated and tricked into hating themselves, deepfake abusive porn, and how we’re turning our personalities into purchasable fashion trends. It did feel like the answer she was proposing was “you know, stop being liberal, you got tricked into being liberal!”

So this did what a good nonfic does—presented some stuff I’ll take with me into the future, and some stuff I’ll consider and then dump aside. I still commend her for tackling such a huge and sprawling topic in a way I haven’t seen in this form before.

[Samantha A H · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oof. This book started out so promising and quickly devolved into contradictions, carefully selected data points or anecdotal examples that lacked nuance or context, and critiques that sound great on the surface but don't really hold up to even mild scrutiny. I actually really enjoyed Jonathan Haidt's the Anxious Generation (which is referenced many times in this book), focused on the negative impacts that social media and digital evolution have had on our mental health, particularly for young people, but his praise of GIRLS has me questioning his expertise. I think we can all probably agree that there are loads of issues with social media today, likely making anxiety and depression worse for many people; however, this author also basically states that use of mental health resources and psychotropic medications have become wildly overused and are essentially harmful. This is all presented under the guise of criticisms of for-profit online mental health providers, which would be valid, if it didn't then generalize across all mental health services more broadly. As a licensed mental health professional, I can assert that -- YES, even mental health medications can have harmful side effects, similar to many other life-saving medications--but this is not evidence that they are not effective at treating severe mental health disorders when used appropriately. At one point the author laments that the TV show Euphoria is being marketed as appropriate for girls as young as 12, while sharing explicit scenes from the show - - not bothering to mention that this TV show has a rating of TV-MA (that's for mature audiences only). Other things I took away from this book: too many kids are learning about sex from pornography, while not mentioning the rampant removal of age-appropriate sex-education from schools. Things like witchcraft, astrology, crystals, spirituality, or atheism more generally are all portrayed as having a negative impact on our cultural, vs. the more preferred option of traditional religious institutions and beliefs [like we've never seen that be used for malicious purposes!]. If you don't want so many people resorting to Only Fans, maybe advocate for a guaranteed living wage. You don't like algorithms manipulating people, maybe advocate for tougher restrictions on data mining and social media companies. By the end of this book, I felt quite ragey and could not wait for it to be over. I could go on and on, but ultimately, I was definitely not the target audience for this book, hindered by critical thinking skills and higher research standards, and I would not recommend.

ARC of this audiobook received courtesy of Macmillan Audio and NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

[Maria Marmanides · Rating 4 out of 5]

GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything is sharp, timely, and often unsettling in the best way. Freya India does an excellent job diagnosing the pressures facing Gen Z girls in a world where selfhood itself has become a product—where anxiety, beauty, relationships, and even authenticity are optimized, branded, and monetized. It’s a book that makes you pause and think, yes, this is exactly what it feels like—and more than that, this is how we got here, to this particular cultural mess we find ourselves in by 2026. The analysis is clear and persuasive, and many chapters land with real emotional force as they trace familiar girlhood insecurities through the accelerant of social media and surveillance capitalism.

That said, while I found her diagnosis compelling, I wasn’t always convinced by the solutions. In particular, the book’s skepticism around SSRIs and medication felt overly broad; this framing doesn’t fully account for how genuinely life-saving these tools can be for many people. There is an interesting point here—about how medication has become a form of identity, akin to a Myers-Briggs type or astrological sign—but that nuance sometimes gets lost. I also wished for more attention to millennial women, who are largely skipped over despite being deeply shaped by the same forces, and for a deeper exploration of Gen Z’s use of irony and self-aware humor—how the joke often collapses inward when the self itself is the brand. Still, these gaps don’t outweigh the book’s strengths. GIRLS diagnoses the problem with clarity and urgency, even if the answers feel less fully formed. Thought-provoking, validating, and well worth reading.

[Critter · Rating 1 out of 5]

I would like to thank Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an audio ARC.

Going into this book I did not know who this author was. I have now learned about her and I just can't recommend her work. This book has a lot of the issues I have with her approach to feminist topics, in which she doesn't engage with them outside of saying here are some issues and adding highly conservative talking points to it instead of trying to find actual solutions. There are valid issues and concerns regarding social media and mental health, but this book goes about discussing them in an exclusionary way that focuese on white cis women. This book introduces and sometimes implies (this book seems like it doesn't want to fully commit or be honest about its arguments at times) transphobic and homophobic talking points. This book does a lot of relying on trying to connect dots between different data points and trying to imply a scary connection between them. This book also excludes other definitions of womanhood and girlhood that is not within her own worldview. The author also argues against seeking help for anxiety and depression. There are numerous issues I've had with this book which includes that this book is very shallow and exclusionary in its views.

[Rose Jeanou · Rating 1 out of 5]

(I read the ARC at my bookstore job) india doesn’t engage with feminist sources who have made all the arguments already for decades, and worst of all just isn’t interesting—just pages and pages of quant data cited to put forth milquetoast arguments we already know— “social media is bad and makes girls anxious.” worst of all is the random homo/transphobia—“girls are getting masectomies and denying their sex” randomly slipped in alongside paragraphs on botox and SSRI’s. it’s like, butch lesbians and proto-trans men existed before The Phone and even got on the ‘mones—one gets the sense that butch dykes don’t factor into the worldview, though. when gay guys are mentioned, it’s James Charles and derogatorily. because makeup tutorials and facetune are shallow (although, caveat—india’s been there, dear reader). just fundamentally unserious work.

tldr: the book rayne fisher quann would write if she actually had that lobotomy.

full review to come on substack maybe.

[Danielle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced listener copy of GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything.

As someone who teaches Gen Z students and is the mom of Gen Alpha girls, this book was so relevant to me.

Having grown up in an era where phones were used but social media hadn’t really taken off, a lot of the trends and things that Generation Z faces are really different from how I grew up. I think that we’ve all dealt with culture and trying to look like supermodels in magazines, but many of us had more experience socializing in person, so hearing the other perspective and what is behind these things was really enlightening.

I definitely recommend this book to anyone who is curious about how to better understand the experiences of girls growing up, and for anyone who is parenting, caring for, or educating girls.

[lottie · Rating 1 out of 5]

went into this blind and then deep dived her substack because basically she is like “commodification bad” and then slips in a billion right wing and transphobic rhetoric points about why we shouldn’t seek therapy or medical intervention or gender affirming care lmao. and i genuinely cannot figure out how so many so-called left wing people women fell for it??? can only assume she’s the best advertised, which makes sense. thank u white blonde straight cis skinny and objectively beautiful woman for explaining how social media is the problem and there is no solution and also those of us who aren’t that way are just tumblr pilled ?

[Sacha · Rating 1 out of 5]

1 star

I requested this book having no idea who this author was. That's a standard practice in my arc and alc selection. It helps me get exposed to debut authors, new ideas, and genres that are outside of my typical reading choices.

As soon as I started this book, I started to have concerns about the perspective and content. I paused to do a quick search of this author. This author is not for me. I still gave the book more of a shot. That was a mistake.

I cannot and do not recommend this read.

*Special thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for this alc, which I received in exchange for an honest review. The opinions here are my own. Obviously.

[Vicki · Rating 3 out of 5]

The concluding chapter of this book had echoes of Coupland's call to arms for Generation X in Girlfriend In A Coma, a reminder that in some form every generation fights the same battles; however Freya India's detailed analysis of the culture Gen Z have been in raised highlights just how much the landscape has changed. I wish I could share some of the optimism she tries to bring to the conclusion and some of the comparisons between the experiences of Gen Z and former generations, alongside the reflections on mental health, felt a little over simplified, but overall this is a thought provoking, at times horrifying and depressing account of the situation we seem to have sleep-walked into.

[Lottie C · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.75⭐️

Interesting enough and I am the exact target of this book (older AFAB Gen Z who is chronically online) but I felt that there were issues lies with the lack of inclusivity of the term “girls” (it was very white/CIS orientated), and had a bit of #girlboss flavour of feminism, which I’ve never liked. The underlying argument was pretty solid with lots of evidence provided, but no real solutions either. Just describing a problem anyone with a basic level or media or cultural literacy could understand.

[Dhruv · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciate as a man I’m not really the target audience here. Nevertheless, there are some good insights in this book about the pressures that Gen Z women go through, written by someone who has first hand knowledge of going through the same things herself. What drags this book down, however, is that there is a lot of repetition - not just with ideas, but the cadence of writing - that makes this book longer that it needs to be and more difficult to read than it ought to be.

[Sarah Ginsberg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you, Libro.fm for the ALC!

I found the data in this book to be interesting and much of the commentary on the harms of social media and consumerism to ring true. However, I felt the conclusions drawn from the data were simplistic. The idea that the only solution needed is to get offline and believe in something bigger seems like it’s not enough (although this book did make me want to delete instagram).

[abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

thank you to net galley for the ARC of this book

as a 28 yr old woman of gen z, i read this book to better understand how technologies, trends and platforms have impacted and hurt us – shaping who we are and continuing to influence the generation that follows behind

this is a powerful novel that everyone should read

[Christian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well researched book. About 80 pages of the book are just footnotes, which goes to show how much research was put into this book. I read Freya India's (the author) Substack, so I was already familiar with a number of the topics that were covered, but I was positively surprised to see how comprehensive and exhaustive the book was. I'm looking forward to the next one!

[Cheyenne A. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank you to Macmillan Audio and Libro.fm for the ALC!

I felt that this book was well organized and the chapters flowed together very well, but this information, albeit not new information to me, was depressing to listen to for 8 hours. Any positivity this book held for future progress of Gen Z and society was in the conclusion which is so short, it almost doesn’t matter.

[Sigmund Freud, analyse this · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reads normally if you're used to the Jonathan Haidt stuff, but go between the lines/look into the background/see where her arguments fall apart and you'll find the standard RW anxieties about fertility and collapse

She's been miscast as a kind of Greta Thunberg figure which couldn't be further from the truth, a RW manosphere provocateur who pivoted when it was useful

[Julija Solovjova · Rating 2 out of 5]

started off really promising but it just doesn’t seem nuanced at all? the takes on gender dysphoria and detransitioners were bizarre imo, and also talking about the rise in autism diagnoses in women without mentioning the fact that majority of the research on autism historically has focused on young boys and that is why there’s such an increase and not just because of social media is WEIRD. DNF

[Ferenc Holyba · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hard to put down.
India accurately describes the commodification and gaslighting of young women in the last few years. Her message of trusting one’s instincts instead of outsourcing thinking and feeling to “experts” is very important to spread to the up and coming generations of girls.

[Millie · Rating 1 out of 5]

badly written right-wing slop that isn’t nearly as slick and subtle about it as it thinks it is

[Suzanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Raises many good points, but over simplifies the steps needed to make changes.

[shreeya · Rating 4 out of 5]

while there are some more conservative takes in it, this is in general a very well-researched book that prompted a lot of self-reflection

[Lauren Kerr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Audiobook- Some interesting points on how so much of what we get shown is marketing to get money rather than actually helping us at all, highlighted to me that I really don’t need so much stuff

[Hannah · Rating 1 out of 5]

HARD DNF after the rampant transphobia, and the trump endorsement