Do generations of women get the feminist writer they need – or the one they deserve? There is one book I’ve been returning to ever since it was given to me on my 15th birthday, in 2015. I snuck in pages of Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth between dance classes, during GCSE revision, on the train to my first full-time job, and between seminars the year after that.
I hoped that understanding the world I lived in would help me get to the bottom of my feelings. But the women’s reality described in The Beauty Myth – which was published in 1991 – felt crucially different to the one I was reading it in three decades later. Wolf compared society’s demands for female conformity to the Iron Maiden, a coffin-like torture device lined with nails. It felt to me like the nails had selfie-mode smartphone cameras at their tips. Wolf blamed “liberated women of the First World…not feel[ing] as free as they want to” on the limitations set by the patriarchy. Marketing, art and products continued to exploit female insecurities, but Wolf offered no advice for classmates spreading intimate photos of you, the pro-anorexic #thinspo content on Tumblr or porn that can be made using your face through AI.
Had I been a teenager in 2026 instead, I might well have been reading Freya India. The 26-year-old writer is lauded in the media as the ascendant voice of women’s issues for Gen Z. Her Substack “GIRLS” has over 50,000 subscribers. Her debut book Girls®, released this month, arrives with a spread in the Mail on Sunday and a photoshoot with the Times. It is striking, and perhaps even alarming, how dramatically the vogues in feminist writing have shifted in the last ten years.
Wolf advocated for a third-wave feminism that would demand respect and representation with more defiance and less apology than ever before. It is hard to imagine her writing any of India’s most popular articles. Her blockbuster headlines include “You Don’t Need To Document Everything” (16,056 likes on Substack), “Nobody Has A Personality Anymore” (10,411 likes), and “The Age of Abandonment” (3,175 likes). But maybe she would have, had she been born at the same time as India. It has been widely observed that Gen Z (seemingly India’s intended audience) has shifted into a new “puriteen” version of social conservatism: we drink less, have less sex and are more risk-averse. And of all that has been written about this young generation, little will be read more than Girls®.
We need a new voice for women. Fierce issues have arisen since 1991, and Wolf has been much discredited. Sadly, Girls® has no answer for our problems – old or new.
India rightly observes that the problems confronting young women today are at once “painfully familiar and yet agonisingly different”. And to greater and lesser degrees, most her diagnoses contain some degree of update. Wolf wrote that “advertising aimed at women works by lowering our self-esteem”. (I could not help but think of the viral tweet stating that women buy shampoos that insult them the most: mine calls my hair “flat and dull”.) India knows that now, under social media, as she wrote in the New Statesman in 2022, “Companies don’t just rely on making girls feel insecure; they simply hand us the tools to make each other feel insecure.” When the original readers of The Beauty Myth were growing up, the dominant pornography was Playboy. “In 2023 it was reported that a quarter of 16- to 21-year-olds had first seen porn while in primary school, and over half had seen it by the age of 13,” India writes, needing little beyond plain-stated facts to illustrate the dark new world where anyone can access porn at any time.
No solution is proposed however, and the clear description of young women’s peril only makes that absence more disappointing. India’s contribution mostly consists of attacks on the new approaches that have emerged since Wolf’s day. Both writers discuss eating disorders and mental health conditions, diagnoses of which have risen steeply throughout this century. As India notes, one in three teenage girls considered suicide in the 2020s. She suggests that the commodification of mental health – services sold through influencers or through the marketing strategies of medication companies – has made people more likely to misinterpret nervousness for an anxiety disorder, sadness for depression. She opposes both anti-depressants and therapy. It is hard to feel that popular pieces like “Stop Opening Up About Your Mental Health Online” will do much to help destigmatise mental health.
In fact, India readily and broadly criticises the popular solutions to contemporary ills, such as open conversations about mental health, sexual liberation, choosing to remain independent from partners. So it is a little strange that the suggestions she does make – though proffered with an individualist inflection – have more than a slight echo of the Insta-ready psychobabble India made her brand and money opposing. She optimistically promotes embracing being different, being more private and practicing self-love as a solution. Ironically, those are the lines that the influencers that India has called out in her book push in their content. We live in a world where even ideas can become micro-trends. She critiques mental health influencers raising awareness as “becoming a powerful marketing strategy.” Yet Girls® also uses raising awareness of women’s issues to sell books. “So aspire to be different! Aspire to be someone who gets so caught up in the moment she forgets to share it,” India intones enthusiastically, borrowing the script from the aforementioned influencers she dedicated a part of the “Diagnosed” chapter to.
I think of myself and my peers as a “guinea pig” generation, the first to have access to the internet and social media at a formative age, the first to battle with AI for employment, and the first to use dating apps as the go-to for meeting potential partners. The main issue that we should be addressing is why, in the words of India, “The messaging my generation grew up with was far more focused on selling us solutions than genuinely helping.” Martha C Nussbaum once pointed out the alarming slide from action-based arguments which had real-life legislative implications on women to what she terms as “symbolic verbal politics”. Both Wolf and India fall into the latter category. In line with Nussbaum’s argument, India has been led to “adopt a stance that looks very much like quietism and retreat”. To escape the nasty spiral of capital, technology and apathy, Gen Z needs real solutions. India fell victim to what she has criticised. Her book has been sucked into the commodification vortex through massive PR campaigns. Without social media, it’s unlikely that she would have blown up in the same way as Naomi Wolf had over three decades ago. She observes, in another context, the mechanic in which “liberation was the marketing pitch, and we were the products”. It is a shame that Girls® falls to this irony.
[Further reading: Olivia Nuzzi’s bad romance]
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