May 21, 2026

With the advent of social media, Gen Z girls were sold a narrative of empowerment. But if you take a look around, we see a generation of young women who are lonelier and more anxious than any before them. Filters promised confidence, dating apps promised freedom, personal brands promised self-expression. Instead, young women learned to package themselves as products and call the exhaustion “self-love.” If you do any kind of cultural apologetics, you need to understand what they’re actually living through.

Keller Center fellow Rebecca McLaughlin recently reviewed Freya India’s Girls®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything. Writing as someone on the “inside,” India traces how filters, dating apps, and sex-positive feminism colluded to sell loneliness as liberation, leaving young women anxious and starved for belonging. It’s the must-read for cultural apologetics so far this year.

“This is a really bad emergency.”

My daughter was 5. My husband had perched her on the branch of a tree for a photo when she made this declaration. But really, she was fine. Ten years later, at the nearly Sound of Music age of 15-going-on-16, she represents the tail end of Gen Z, and she’s still fine. But as British author Freya India documents in Girls^®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything, millions of her peers across the West are not.

In his 2024 book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argued that Gen Z as a cohort has been overprotected in the real world and underprotected online. Instead of climbing trees, playing unsupervised with peers, managing physical risks, and growing independence, they have been sucked down rabbit holes into an online world that has consumed much of their time and deeply shaped their lives.

In Girls^®, India double clicks on how this has affected Gen-Z women in particular. To alert us to the five-alarm fire that has been raging in this demographic, she reports that “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 of boys” (8). This, by any measure, is a really bad emergency. India’s 356-page view from inside offers insightful analysis of what exactly has gone wrong.

India argues persuasively that rather than creating problems ex nihilo, “modern technology amplifies the age-old anxieties adolescent girls have always felt” (9). Young women are particularly prone to insecurity about their looks, romantic relationships, friendships, and social status. But India argues that these vulnerabilities have been ruthlessly exploited by social media companies, beauty influencers, porn sites, and corporations selling mental health–related drugs and services.

This crisis is no accidental conflagration. It is arson.

READ MORE ABOUT GEN Z’S GIRL CRISIS