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Chapter 1: What does Freya India mean by girls becoming products?
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And that is why I think when the social media platforms came in, they really destroyed young women because they offered substitutes and simulations of these things that we didn't have in the first place.
That was author Freya India discussing her new book, Girls, Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything. India argues that the deeper story is how technology, social media, and modern consumer culture have transformed girls from people into products and turned nearly every aspect of adolescence into something to be bought, sold, measured, and monetized.
Freya joins the podcast today to discuss her new book and the broader issues facing girls today. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley, and this is a weekend episode of Morning Wire.
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Chapter 2: How has social media changed the experience of girlhood?
I felt that so much of my anxiety was to do with marketing myself online, marketing my relationships, basically figuring out all of the stress of growing up, but doing it publicly on Instagram.
Now, you make an important distinction in the book that girls have always struggled with insecurity and fitting in. Of course, every female listener and probably most male listeners will agree with that. Just the challenge of finding your place in the world as you grow up. What do you think makes the experience of growing up today fundamentally different than what previous generations dealt with?
I think mostly we're performing everything for other people. So we're performing our first relationships, our first crushes. Even if we have a heartbreak and a breakup, we're having to post that online and kind of manage our reputation and our image. And we're doing this from a very young age, from puberty. And so sometimes people say to me, oh, why do young women make these certain decisions?
Why do girls behave this way? And I think a lot of the time it really makes sense if you think about where we've grown up. We've grown up on these platforms where we're being rated and reviewed by other people all of the time. And that influences how we view ourselves and what we value. And it influences our future as well, what decisions we make, the relationships we have.
It's all to do with performing for other people. And I think that it might look vain to older generations and to men, but I think for women, it really is insecurity and it's an exhausting way to live.
Now, a lot of people are going to point to smartphones and social media and say, well, there you go. There's the cause. It's not rocket science. But you argue that those technologies are only part of the larger story. What aspects do you think people are missing?
So I think really two things happened to my generation. So decades before the smartphone, we were having so many of our sort of foundations and our grounding being taken away. And so our families were falling apart. We had collapsing communities. We were less religious than previous generations. And so I think we had so little to sort of hold on to.
And then when social media platforms came along, they provided these perfect simulations of things that we'd never experienced in the first place. And so our first experience of community was on Instagram or our first experience of relationships was from online porn. And so I think we had this vacuum that companies were ready to fill and exploit.
Now, one theme throughout the book is that industries increasingly are profiting from girls' insecurities, whether it's beauty or wellness or therapy or just social media apps in general. When did you start to suspect that some of these institutions that were actually claiming to help young women were also benefiting from their distress?
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