In 1921, Jewish philosopher Edith Stein scurried around her friend’s house in search of reading material. Having settled on St Teresa of Avila’s The Interior Castle, she devoured the mystical text until dawn, afterwards declaring: “This is the Truth.” She was henceforth so transformed that she became a Catholic, a Discalced Carmelite and would eventually be canonised as St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.
Many young Catholics will similarly relish blogging star Freya India’s debut GIRLS®: Gen Z and the Commodification of Everything, but it is more likely to affirm their instincts than refurbish their worldview.
India enters the venerable genre of popular handbooks detailing how current trends are ill serving the fairer sex. This epoch was inaugurated by Wendy Shalit’s self-explanatory Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue (1999), and has lately been resurrected by both Louise Perry’s bestselling The Case Against the Sexual Revolution (2022) and Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress (2023). This time around, we are told that the internet ought to be the culprit for our ire.
As with so many modern malaises, a poverty of spirit, rather than a lack of material resources, is at play. India is obviously correct that being warm, well fed and in possession of the latest iPhone does not a happy girl (or woman) make. In St Edith’s words, “something more is asked of us”.
She wrote that a woman’s soul is “fashioned to be a shelter in which other souls may unfold. Both spiritual companionship and motherliness are not limited to the physical spouse and mother relationships, but they extend to all people with whom woman comes into contact.” Perhaps it is these caring instincts that lead women into dubious cyber realms?
This book’s surveying of base e-celebrity drama may befuddle the uninitiated, but it highlights how powerful and profitable this new influencer class has become. One does wonder how much of this is simply a continuation of the nastiness inherent to mankind; certainly the sans-smartphone noughties slammed in Sarah Ditum’s Toxic (2023) was no paradise.
India makes clear her distaste for filters and YouTuber spats, and also tackles the – more uncomfortable – issue of pornography. Even if women are overwhelmingly not interested in porn, India makes clear that their boyfriends and husbands probably are, and relationships are compromised as a result. She cites a disturbing anecdote in which a 12-year-old girl was “strangled” during her first kiss as the boy in question thought it was “normal” due to his porn use.
Smartphones have made this once peripheral vice mainstream, and often the first sexual “education” children receive. As Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism notes: “if the service is free”, as the majority of online activities are, “you are the product being sold”. But are our souls really more imperilled while surfing the web? Or are its temptations simply more novel? Moreover, is the question of children being glued to screens largely an issue of parenting rather than technology?
Whether it be TikTok clips or Instagram stories, the deluge of sterile and machine-generated images is dulling our senses and making it harder to appreciate the real and profound, including human bodies. India links social media use and the uptick in extreme plastic surgery trends, remarking that it is: “Odd the rise of ‘self-love’ & liberal feminism has accompanied the unprecedented normalisation of self-mutilating oneself to fit beauty trends.” Indeed, I am trying not to take personally the barrage of nose-job adverts I find myself bombarded with.
India is right to probe the woes of performative online activism à la “Black Lives Matter”, but it could have been made clearer that these phenomena have received backlash, of which she is a part. She also struggles to significantly grapple with the intellectual traditions that wrought these behemoths beyond her sensible dismissals of “progressive politics”.
With family breakdown now commonplace, India explains how young women are lured in by the internet’s substitute counsel – often being digitally handed dubious diagnoses in return. The “loss of religion” and other in-person communities have generated a vacuum for online spaces to fill, she stresses.
Interestingly, when interviewed by The Times upon the book’s release, India declined to tell the reporter “her views on abortion, same-sex marriage or abstinence before marriage” when asked. That India’s departure from her generation’s assumptions may have just begun is perhaps why her debut poses more questions than it does answers. It is vital that someone asks them all the same.
Her suggestion that attending church may be more valuable than scrolling on one’s phone is not a convincing case for any particular theology, but it is certainly true. Christianity, unlike the cynicism with which countless algorithmic corners brim, is a fundamentally hopeful creed. In W H Auden’s words, “Whether the world has improved is doubtful, but we believe it could,” and certainly the Christian must do so.
We must resist the urge to retreat inward when faced with the world’s shortcomings. The internet is a method of communication and can be just as useful in conveying beauty and truth as ugliness and lies. India wisely ends the book optimistically, reminding young women that there is “more to life than this”. Most Christians would say that on this Earth, real life has barely even begun.
