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How Social Media Created A Lost Generation Of Girls

What today’s young women are going through is quite new and demands new ways to respond.

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Back in the 1980s there was at least one positive cultural message for young women: “Girls just want to have fun!” Sadly, in the decades to follow, girls have mostly had the opposite of fun. By most measurements, girls and women today are sadder, more anxious, and lonelier than they have ever been. Despite the trumpeted achievements of Second and Third wave feminism (namely, boosting birth control and white-collar work), women continue to labor under unceasing social pressures and overwhelming emotional burdens.

This situation has deteriorated further in the last decade during the full bloom of the Internet Age, with women paradoxically reaching new heights in the culture and economy only to feel ever more powerless, unappealing, and unvalidated. They broke so many glass ceilings, but this has only left the ground covered with proverbial shards. Worse still is that the strategy for dealing with those shards relies on doubling down on senseless feminist messaging, ongoing grievances, and attacking masculinity.

Not surprisingly, all this has made the newest generation of women (Gen Z) utterly miserable. As Freya India, a member of the Gen Z cohort herself, shows in her excellent new book GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything, today’s young women have been marinating in a toxic stew of commercialization, objectification, and atomization. Consequently, they have been hollowed out and broken down in order to be reshaped into ideal consumers and products.

Even those of us who knew the internet was bad and observed its corrupting influences up close likely had little idea of just how extensive and profound the damage has been. For the past two decades, “every anxiety [girls] experience has been magnified until it feels unmanageable.” Whether it’s their appearance, their social life, their personality, their mental state, their accomplishments, or their political views, these platforms will always have the final word.

From the outset, India hopes to utterly debunk the complacent attitude that these problems are natural and that every generation of women encounters them: “I want to show how radically different this........

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