GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything

by Freya India

A bold and timely investigation into how it feels to grow up in a world where every anxiety of girlhood has been commodified

Generation 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

384 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication May 5, 2026

Reviews

[Mai H.]

Non-fiction November TBR

Women's History Month TBR

📱 Thank you to NetGalley and Henry Holt and Co.

[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.

[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.

[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