How the Internet Turned an Entire Generation of Girls Into Products | Freya India

What are the biggest concerning differences between Gen Z and Millennial girls? If you're just going out with a group of your friends, there is like this nagging feeling in your head, we have to get a good photo. This is the real world to them because most of their waking hours are spent online. People will often say, you know, this is just a social media habit, they need to get off their screens, but I'm trying to get across that it's not just a bad habit that girls have, it's their entire world. It's actually how they value things, how they look, their relationships. Even the memories that they make, if you're first encounter of Christianity, is that it's this really easy, convenient thing that you do on your phone. Christianity is actually pretty demanding. The actual demands that they've then become even more challenging. (upbeat music) - She says girls haven't just been sold products. This generation of girls has become the product. From Instagram feeds to dating apps, my guest today argues an entire generation has been taught to package, brand, and market themselves for public consumption. My guest is writer Freya India. Her new book, Girls Generation Z, in the commodification of everything, explores how social media, technology and modern culture are reshaping identity, relationships, even Christianity, and what it means to grow up as a young woman today. Watch this episode on the Real Alex Clark YouTube channel or culture pot the carry on Spotify. If you've never left a five star of you for us, it takes two seconds to do. Can you please do that before we start on either Spotify or Apple, just say one sentence about this show and why you love it, it really helps us out. Please welcome author of Girls Gen Z in the commodification of everything, Freya India, to culture pot the carry. I think everybody looks the same now. That's a big thing. I look out and everybody looks literally the same. And I think some of that has to do with Instagram filters maybe, or Instagram filters are causing people to get certain work done on their face that causes everyone to look the same. But something else you believe is that nobody has a personality anymore, what do you mean by that? I suppose it's the same mechanism as what you would call Instagramface, which is that when we're getting our information from algorithms, we're getting served pretty much similar stuff based on your demographic. So if you're a young woman, you're probably getting the same trends being served to you as other young women. So something that was interesting to me when I wrote the book is that I spoke to young women in America. I spoke to young women in Canada in all different places. And they had very similar childhood experiences to me, even though I was in the UK, because we were watching the same beauty influencers. We were getting the same ads for makeup. We had the same online childhoods. So that explains some of the Instagram faces that we're seeing the same influencers, we're seeing the same makeup trends, and we're kind of being pushed down this convey about toward the same face. So when I was younger, that was the Kylie Jenner Kardashian face. But I think the same thing happens with personalities. When you're watching the same influencers. So for example, in the UK, a lot of British people pick up American words. Like I say Gen Z, and I can't not say Gen Z. - Wait, in the Gen Z? - In the Gen Z. They don't say Gen Z, we say Z. - What? - Yeah. Why? Because we just say Z instead of Z. - What do you call millennials? - Millennials. - Strange, yeah. But because I've watched so much American commentary, I say Gen Z and I can't not say it. But this happens with all kinds of things, where you see girls picking up mannerisms of influences, wearing the same outfits, having the same hairstyles, having the same opinions. And I do think that's because all the information is coming from algorithms, which are dragging them toward the same places. - Are you also Gen Z? - Yeah. - So you write this book talking about how girls are basically being commodified. We've all become products. And somehow this is like the most controversial book of the year, which is very confusing to me. Because you're talking about things, social media is impacted on mental health, et cetera. Why is your book being categorized as controversial? - The reason it's controversial is because it's not sort of a culture war conservative book. You know, I really wanted to write a book about what's happening to girls. It's the thing that I'm most obsessed with. It's the thing that I feel I can speak with the most authority on. And I really wanted to write it from a place of personal experience and feeling. But I think because, you know, I have conservative opinions, I come to two conservative conclusions. The book is conservative coded. But if you pick up the book, you don't know that. You know, it looks like an anti-capitalist book. So I think some girls are picking it up, thinking it's an anti-capitalist book. Maybe they haven't come across opinions that are more conservative or conclusions that are more conservative. So for example, I talk about the harms of porn. I talk about the harms of divorce. A lot of these things are now controversial, right-wing coded things. Even though when I grew up, the reason I was concerned about these things is purely from emotion. I felt very hurt by these things. But now they've become very politically charged. And so I think the controversy around the book is actually that it's misleading or deceiving people. It's sort of a conservative book that's hiding that and then jump-scaring them when they read it. But I think it's really interesting that we can't have books that are written by conservatives or people who are concerned about right-wing coded things without thinking there's some secret agenda. So people think that I'm trying to smuggle in this right-wing policy or something. And it's really not. These are just the conclusions that I've reached. And the people that are willing to listen to me tend to be conservatives and Christians. They tend to be the ones concerned about the things that I had these instincts about and was worried about. Like how Millennial girls were raised, which is my generation, is born in '93, versus how Gen Z girls were raised? I think it's pretty similar. So if we just had a conversation about how we felt when we were younger, we'd probably agree on a lot of stuff. I think for most women, they remember feeling insecure about their body, insecure about relationships, unsure of themselves in their future. All of these things are still happening. So in the book I talk about, these are the same anxieties that my mother would have felt, for example, or Millennial women. They would have worried about relationships and felt jealousy and paranoia. And all of these feelings that are heightened when you're younger. - Universal girlhood views. - Yeah, yeah. And I think for me growing up, the main reaction I got from adults, if I felt insecure or unhappy was, this is nothing new, this is just girlhood. And you're gonna grow out of it. But I was noticing that girls at my school were cutting their wrists or starving themselves and talking in this way, that they were almost like divorces. They were so bitter and demoralized about relationships and they hadn't even really experienced them yet. And I thought this is not normal coming of age. Something else is happening, but I didn't really have the words to express what that was. And I think the main difference between Millennial women's experience and my generation's experience is those sort of age-old anxieties and insecurities are now so intense because we can't escape them. So for example, if you're worried about your body and how you look, a Millennial woman may have seen an anorexic supermodel that's being glamorized in the media, but she can ignore that and look away. And I think for Gen Z women growing up, it was whatever insecurity you have is then recognized by social media platforms, more and more is served to you related to that insecurity because if you hover over something, you'll get more of it. And so they have these social media fears that are literally personalized to their absolute worst fears and insecurities. And so I think the difference between my generation and maybe yours is just the relentlessness of it and that you feel as if you can't escape. And that's what I wanted to get across in the book is that whatever vulnerability a young girl has, whether it's being worried about dating or worried about how she looks, it's very, very hot to escape online. - Not only are they battling against an algorithm, but I would say Gen Z and then especially Gen Alpha, something that they're exposed to at a very young age that my generation was not is the way the media is made. So what I mean by that is like children's television shows even at a young age for me, like Little Bear, Franklin, Kipper, Blues Clues, whatever. It was slow paced. It was gentle music, a lot of muted colors. - It just wasn't like flashy, fast, bright colors. You know, crazy music and dialogue, everything now is, it's like crack cocaine media for children. And I just wonder like, you know, and having a personal screen like with an iPad or whatever, you know, from toddler on up, like what that is doing to your brain as well and your development is so different than a millennial who for our brain developing years, we had televisions and computers, but it was always like in a separate room as well. We didn't have personal devices that we could take into our rooms. It was like, there's a computer room, which doesn't exist anymore. The whole family would have to go and share a computer in a shared space or a television. You'd watch television together. And even just the way it looks on the eyes And when it does the brain on a TV screen versus an iPad or a phone, yeah. That's a huge difference, too, I think, with making media more addictive in that you can't escape not only the algorithm, but you just can't escape the constant need to scroll itself. Yeah. I mean, even for me, when I was a teenager, I would log off, like log off of MSN or Facebook, and there's just no logging off anymore that it's just never ending. It's, I often say, for young women, this is the real world to them, because it's most of their waking hours are spent online. And so the actual real world is like a loading screen. It's just not where everything is happening, where their relationships are happening, and they're flirting for the first time, and figuring themselves out, that's all happening in the real world, which to them is social media. But I do think, yeah, the fact that girls just can't escape it now is the real problem, because I think it's relentless, and the problem is, people will often say, you know, this is just a social media habit, they need to get off their screens, but I'm trying to get across that it's not just a bad habit that girls have, it's their entire world, it's actually how they value things, how they value, how they look, their relationships, even the memories that they make, they value them via how well they do on social media. And so it's completely changed their view of themselves, which is why I argue that young women have become something more like products, because the goal of their life is to sell themselves online, and optimize themselves on a market, rather than actually live their life. Yeah, so what does that look like in everyday life, girls that are being commodified and made to be products instead of people? I think it's mostly that that is their guiding value. So if you think of even just going on holiday, it's become a bit of a cliche, but I think it's so true that for my generation of young women, they literally don't see the point of going somewhere if they cannot document it. And you know, you can think that about holidays, about going to see a concert, about even having a relationship. If you try to explain to them that, you know, they don't need to document this stuff. It's almost as if it wouldn't be happening at all, they can't conceive of a life without presenting it to an audience. And I think this is because this is how they've grown up. So as you said, when your brain is forming, you've had young women in my age spend their entire puberty on Instagram, Facebook, and learn that their self-worth and their existence is validated through posting themselves online. And so they've never experienced life just living it without having to document it. And so I think that makes this generation of women very, very different to previous generations of women, because we're seeing the world through a completely different lens. And I also think a lot of other foundations that previous generations relied on have fallen away. And so we feel like it's less likely that a relationship is going to last, that a family is going to last. But something that's instantly rewarding and something we can all do is obsess over our social media profiles and how we're coming across and turn ourselves into these products. And so I think in a way, that feels safer almost than being a human and doing human things and following our human instincts. We've gotten very used to living on social media and it's become safer and more real for us. One of my listeners sent me a message that absolutely killed me. She said, "Alex, zebra toothpaste tablets are officially the number one product you've ever recommended to my family." I thought, "That's incredible. No, it's not a $5,000 sauna. It's not a fancy supplement. It's toothpaste." Somewhere, there is a six-year-old refusing to leave the house without his little toothpaste tablet like it's his little emotional support animal. And you know what? Same for me. I cannot live without my zebra toothpaste anymore. I travel constantly. I love the new travel-sized version that has been a complete game changer. They've got mint. They've got coconut. And if you are tired of exploding toothpaste tubes in your carry-on, do the toothpaste tablets. You don't have a sticky crap, no toothpaste oozing all over your skin care because TSA decided to treat your suitcase like it was being launched from a rocket launcher or something, right? You just pop one in your mouth, you chew it up, brush, it foams like regular toothpaste. It's clean. It's easy. They intentionally leave out both fluoride and hydroxy appetite at zebra because that's the philosophy behind their formula. Black and white ingredients. Get it? 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And if you've already wasted money somewhere else and you're sitting on labs that you don't understand, Jevety just launched a free tier. Now this is important. Listen to me. You can upload your results from previous blood work that you've gotten done that you have no idea how to understand without paying anything on gogevety.com and they will tell you what it means. Gogevety.com. This is all free. You can use code Alex. Okay. Gogevety.com. Code Alex. What are some ways that Gen Z thinks they're doing self-expression, but it's actually conformity? A lot of this social media addiction is described as self-expression and really that hides all of the performance that goes into it and it will be conformity because you are packaging everything up for an audience. And so something I tried to get across in the book is I talk a lot about these influences that I grew up with who are posting their families, they're posting their relationships and obviously they're sort of the more extreme end where they're literally their personal life is their income. But I try to show that these were our role models growing up and girls have been emulating that and doing the same things. So I talk for example about ordinary girls, they're not influences, but just normal young women who are then presenting their relationship and performing their relationship and really worrying about how they're going to present it to an audience even if that's just an audience of friends and family members and whoever follows them. So I talk about soft launching a partner versus hard launching a partner where you really think about how you're going to present that to people and I'm not talking about influences, I'm talking about sort of 15, 16 year old women, girls doing this and then having to manage if they break up, do I delete all the pictures of him, do I tell people that we've broken up, people then being able to track all of your relationship history, all the crushes you've had because you've posted it all online. And so I do think it becomes, it looks like self-expression, it looks like sharing moments with people, but really it's just relentless marketing and it's young girls marketing their memories and their lives and I think it's more than anything just a complete waste of time and energy and one other thing I try to get across in the book is that you have to manage this forever. You know, if you put a little bit of your personal life out there, you're going to have to keep updating people and I think that's that's too much unnecessary pressure when you're already a girl going through these heightened emotions and these first things for the first time, first heart breaks, first crushes, you don't need to be presenting it to an audience at the same time. Yeah, when I've talked to like groups of middle school or high school age girls, you know I ask how many people are struggling with anxiety, like almost every hand goes up and I say, how many of you own a smartphone? And by the way, these are anywhere from 11 to like 14 year old girls, yeah, every hand goes up. And I don't think they realize what sort of ambient anxiety that causes because it's a constant pressure. So for example, if you're just going out with a group of your friends, there is like this nagging feeling in your head, we have to get a good photo of this event. Even I feel that. And I used to feel that even though I wasn't really, you know, massively addicted to social media, but I had that everywhere I went and it actually used to cloud over the event because I used to think I haven't got the pitch yet. I haven't got the evidence that this has happened. And I think this is playing in the back of young women's minds all the time. And then they're also judging things that happen in their life based on how well, my audience react to this, even if they have a small following, they're anticipating how it will look on social media. So relationships that they have, people that they meet, they're judging that not by how they feel, but by how followers will react to it. out. Yeah, it is sad. And I think that's what I wanted to get across because I think some older generations presented as, you know, young women are just vain and self-obsessed. And I wanted to get across. That's quite a miserable way to live. It's exhausting. And I don't think they realize that it's their vein, but they're also insecure at the same time. What are some ideas or beliefs that you think a lot of young girls have today that actually are just a product of marketing? One of the main beliefs is that they have to be a better object in order to be loved. When I speak to young women, there's so much anxiety about marriage and having children. And obviously this is a huge discussion at the moment. And sometimes that comes out as a real hatred of men, of marriage. It comes out as, you know, almost a revolt against these things. But I think deep down it's an absolute terror of relationships and commitment. And a belief that in order to be loved, you have to better advertise yourself, market yourself. And once you stop doing that, if there's someone that's better looking than you that's better at getting that attention, the love will just fade away, you know, someone will, you'll be disposed of for someone else. So we see these girls presenting themselves, objectifying themselves online, but I think we don't take that to it's inevitable conclusion, which is that young women are literally thinking of themselves as objects. And it's very hard to then be vulnerable enough to be in a loving relationship, to have children with someone if you think of yourself as a disposable object. And then if you think that pregnancy is going to damage your body and your appearance, that your main value on social media. And so I think beneath what looks like vanity and self-obsession is a lot of fear. And a lot of young women just don't think that anyone will stick around for them, especially if they age or put themselves in a vulnerable position like motherhood. A lot of Gen Z girls don't know how to be vulnerable, which is a requirement for a relationship or falling in love is a certain amount of vulnerability. I think we see that a lot in Dr. Deborah Sowe's work. In her recent book, and I interviewed her, just talking about how you have this rise of situationships, like everybody thinks it's cringe or awkward to be in a legit relationship. So they'll just sleep with somebody and go on vacation with them or whatever, like we can't call it boyfriend and girlfriend. That's weird. You know, like there's some of that. Do you know what I'm talking about? Definitely. And I think that there's, I do think that's a consequence of feminist messaging in a way, because I think that older generations of women have warned younger generations of women so much of the dangers. And I actually think the main message we got my generation was that the nightmare scenario is ending up with someone who takes advantage of you, who is, you know, dominant over you. And the goal of your life is to sort of arm yourself, guard yourself and be as on edge and aware of men and how they can manipulate you as possible. And I think that message is very hard to square with what you said being vulnerable and falling in love and allowing someone to enter your life and taking the risk that they could hurt you, which is, which you have to do in order to be loved. And so I do think, for my generation, that was so drilled into us that you have to be really careful. Not just, you know, you have to build up a career and be a goal boss. That's the kind of caricature that we hear. But a message of actually how to treat other people, you should really keep them at arms length and have one up on them. What sort of impact maybe even damaged, do you think a show like Call Her Daddy had on the upcoming of Gen Z when they were in college? Because I'm just thinking of this messaging, you know, call her daddy in its beginning. It's a different show now. I know. But in the beginning, I mean, their whole messaging in mantra was saying things like cheat on him or be cheated on. You're just a whole, you know, have you looked into that at all? Yeah, it was hard to listen to it. And it was just, even for me, it's really hard to listen to now. So I can't imagine being 15, 16 stumbling across that messaging. I think it was Call Her Daddy combined with so many other forces in the 2010 saying the same messaging. So I also talk about publications like Teen Vogue, some of the TV shows, some of the, you know, other popular influences at the time, celebrities who were all pushing, pushing this message, which is that essentially young women should be as kind of like the most toxic version of men possible, you could imagine. You know, they should also treat people as disposable, the way to protect yourself from risk is to be as promiscuous and as sort of uncaring and unfazed as possible. And I think weirdly, both sexes were getting the same message from very different places. And so I listen to Call Her Daddy. And it's the same messaging as, you know, the kind of worst of the manosphere, which is basically that, you know, love isn't real. You should never be vulnerable with someone, women are out to get you, men are out to get you. It's the mirror image. And so I think both sexes were growing up with the same message, which is never to be vulnerable and to kind of win against the other sex, which is impossible to do because then, you know, you just have men and women pitted against each other. I think there's been so much attention on the manosphere and those male influences, but there's only now starting to be attention on the female influences who were saying the exact same things. You talk obviously a lot about how social media has impacted girls negatively, but you've also said that it's training boys to act like girls, that we are social media has actually feminized men. Can you explain that? Social media encourages traits that are quite typical of teenage girls. So for ages, I argue social media is really bad for teenage girls because it draws out not just their vulnerabilities, but their vices as well. So one thing teenage girls typically do is go after each other's reputation and that's very easy to do online. You can spread rumours very easily. You can gossip about each other. You have these platforms that encourage that. Then you have this obsession with how we look that's indulged by social media obviously because they're very visual platforms and you also have rumination which girls do a lot which is overthinking and endlessly going over the same problems. So adolescent girls tend to do this with each other when they're distressed. They will just ruminate over what's wrong which can bring them closer as friends but is very bad for them and so forth. I think these platforms encourage all three of those but in everybody. So everybody becomes obsessed with how they look. Everybody then ruminates on platforms like Twitter about what's wrong with them or the world or with the opposite sex and also they gossip and spread rumours. So you have grown men sort of spreading rumours about each other online looks maxing. I'm obsessing with how they look and how they're aging and really just behaving like teenage girls. The looks maxing movement is completely feminine. Yeah completely. Yeah I mean it's really bizarre to me how you have this you know the teenage boys and then early 20 something guys that are following this content but I think it's because they've grown up on social media and so they have had to look at themselves through a front facing camera so much which is weird for even young women to do. It's disorientating to see yourself so much and look at all your images on your camera roll and compare how you're aging and changing. It's weird but for young men to do it it's I think it's even more unnatural and this is my argument is that you know there's nothing really wrong with being a teenage girl but I think if you ask older women about that period of time they usually say it was pretty hard it was pretty miserable and so I think we're all getting trapped in a pretty destructive stage of life and not maturing out of it and then you have teenage girls that are really struggling and everyone around them is also behaving like a teenage girl so I think they need adults. You know I think it was Drake he has a lyric about this and he says like trigger fingers turned to Twitter fingers yeah like guys used to like literally shoot each other in gangs and now they're just tweeting at each other right like that's a huge cultural difference I mean is it seriously how men used to get out their differences and problems was usually punching each other in the face yeah and now it's like some stupid mean tweet yeah it is the girlification of men everywhere I think yeah I completely agree. I travel so much I mean TSA and I are basically in a situation ship you know I've got a whole system down window seat my hoodie up folklore by Taylor Swift on repeat and it absolutely never gets old I don't care it's one of the best albums of all time and then I open whatever book I'm reading that week so everybody around me thinks I'm mysterious but one other thing that is permanently in my backpack now is my tech wellness air tube headphones look I spend enough time on airplanes marinating and recycled air somebody clipping their toenails in 22b and a guy named Brent watching tiktoks at full volume I'm trying to to control the things that I actually can. These air tube headphones from Tech Wellness are designed to help reduce EMF exposure while you're talking on the phone, listening to podcasts or playing your folklore by Taylor Swift. So instead of regular earbuds, these are what I travel with and they sound amazing. 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We have air conditioning, we have a polstered furniture, we have groceries that were already hunted by somebody else. He loves hiking. I believe walking should have a destination, preferably one that has a bookstore or a spa, but, you know, Vance likes to take me on an easy trail. Again, a phrase that should be investigated by the FBI. I don't know, it's easy about it for two hours. We're hiking, I'm dodging bugs, I'm trying not to sweat through my outfit, I'm pretending I'm having this deeply spiritual experience with a tree, and that a branch comes out and nowhere and absolutely rakes my leg. It looked like nature had signed its autograph on me, it's true. I've got it, I wonder if you can kind of see. If you see this, it's very faint now, but that's because I've been using my active skin repair on this bad boy. I slapped it on as soon as we got back. And now it's just one of those things that I always keep around because it works for every single skin Miss Happy Life throws at you. 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But I think what this does is it makes you doubt what you have in your own life and almost become somewhat of a detective in your own life, because you're seeing all of this content about how your mental health should be, how your relationship should be, what dating should be like, how you should look. And then you're obsessively sort of forensically analyzing your own life in comparison to that. And so I often talk about things like mental health content on TikTok, where you'll see influencers say five signs, you have autism, five signs, you have ADHD and tell people that these really vague behavioral traits are symptoms of disorders. And so that encourages young women to then search themselves for symptoms to see what's wrong with them. Everybody's self-diagnosis. Yeah, and then they live out their self-diagnosis. Yeah, I'm autistic. Yeah, everybody says that and it's like, well, how many of you have actually gone to see a professional for the diagnosis? Probably almost, I mean, way less than normal. But you're seeing people say, you know, I struggle to claim my room, I struggle to concentrate. You might also have this disorder. Well, then I'm the most autistic person to ever live. I can tell you that right now. I also had a Hello Kitty obsession, you know, as a kid, so I was obsessed with that, collecting beanie babies, definitely ever clean my room, still struggle to clean my room. So I'm just all over. Oh, and I only would eat chicken nuggets for many years of my life. You know what I'm saying? If TikTok would have been around, I absolutely would have been like, I'm autistic, you know? Yeah, but that also applies to relationships. Like if you read enough of this relationship content, everybody has a toxic relationship. Everybody has a narcissistic ex too. Yeah, and the thing is these things, there's so many signs and symptoms of what's going wrong in your life that they contradict each other. So it's like a partner who, you know, you spend too much time with, that's a red flag. A partner who you don't see is a red flag. You know, this, if you talk too much, that's a sign of autism. If you don't talk enough, that's a sign of what everything can become, a sign that there's something wrong with you. I do think that is comparison is a bad thing that social media encourages, but I think a worse thing is just like searching your life for what is wrong with it, and influence is encouraging you to do that. Why do you think that the iPhone has become this generation's birth control? It's become the most important valued thing in our life is how we're selling online. And so a lot of young women really want to be the best product on the market. So they want to optimize themselves, they don't want to age, they want to look perfect. They even will have, you know, cosmetic surgeries, Botox to look better on their social media profiles. I think that this obsession with being the perfect product really does rub up against something like having relationships, having children. Because, as I said before, pregnancy can ruin your packaging, your body. It is not really as immediately gratifying and marketable as just posting your relationships or you want holiday or your selfie, and the selfies of how you're looking. And so I think that has become sort of the guiding value for young women. A lot of young women is how they're selling on the market. We've been trained to see other people as almost like accessories as well. So they've become products in our lives. And so a lot of the discourse from young women about young men, it's really just about how they can present them online. So whether it's the hard launching and the soft launching or whether it's just how other women perceive their partners, it's really become something more like how is my partner good for my brand. And I think that's a very different mindset to what is required to have children, which is selflessness. Yeah, a death of the ego and sacrifice, compromise things that are quite hard to get across and market to an audience. And so I think we've been raised to value that. And it's very hard to undo that and take on something like motherhood, which is pretty much the opposite of the endless promotion of yourself. Why do you say that most online relationship advices garbage? One, because you are put in that detective role where-- so a lot of the incentives of relationship influences is to make content that's obviously as clickable and relatable as possible to as many people. And so complicated, nuanced relationship advice does not do well on TikTok. Wow, yeah. The advice that does well is advice that gives you an immediate feeling of, I'm in the wrong relationship, be panic or anxiety. Most of the advice is not figure out how to work it out to see together its leave or get a divorce. Yeah, that's very clickable. And they-- obviously, if you're a relationship influencer, one of the worrying incentives is you want people to come back to your channel to keep watching. So you don't really want to solve a relationship issue. You want to plan some form of doubt in the person who's watching your content, diabolical. Yeah, so it has to be very vague. It has to be something that almost everybody could doubt about their relationship. And it has to be a disastrous consequence if you ignore that content. So signs that your partner is a narcissist or signs that your relationship is doomed. And the reason I worry about this is you have a lot of young girls, young women, consuming this, who haven't had much relationship experience. So adults can laugh at that and put it into context. But I think for young women, if you haven't really had serious relationships, if your parents are divorced, if you have a very negative view of men and marriage anyway, and you're being bombarded with this content of these signs that you're going to get cheated on, that you're going to get abandoned, that you have to be constantly on the lookout for, again, being taken advantage of. I think that's so damaging to young women who are already fearful of relationships. And I worry that this is the first place they're learning about them from influences who have very perverse incentives. So many Gen Zers who are single, say they're single, because they're just bad at dating. I think I'm bad at dating. What is the truth? It is harder now in a way because we've been pulled apart. Both sexes have this very defensive posture toward one another. So the young men I speak to who are single will always tell me the young women don't want to settle down and commit. It's young women. Something's changed with the young women. But the young women I speak to say it's the men, the men. Young men don't want to commit. I think what happens now is that a lot dating is happening on dating apps and online. And I do think these apps recommend so I looked in the book into some of the incentives of the social media apps and they do seem pretty much like a scam or that they're ricked to show you, for example, the same profiles over and over the top profiles and to hide other profiles. And so a lot of young men say they just get in this trap on on dating apps where they're just seeing these same women over and over, they're getting ghosted, they're not actually seeing women who are looking for relationships and want to settle down. And young women have said the same to me and so I'm suspicious about what's actually happening there. But I think these apps even social media itself, they really recommend and sort of give a voice to people who are very extroverted, who are very good at marketing and advertising themselves. And maybe the women and the men who do want to settle down and have relationships are just not seeing each other on these platforms. They're only seeing the people who are loving casual dating, are loving presenting themselves are really good at doing that. So I think something's happening where good men and good women who just want to love each other and settle down are just not coming across each other online and feel as if there's nowhere in real life where they can meet either. And so it's almost as if they don't know that each other exists and that they're looking for each other. What is the main difference between having followers and having friends? Friends, the definition of friendship has changed completely for my generation where it is something more like followers. So for example, I got off social media, Instagram and Facebook in like 2020 during the pandemic. Wow, that was brave. During the pandemic when you started to delete your social media. Well, I thought, you know, I thought I'm just dreading the world opening up again and having to see what everyone's doing and having to tell people what I'm doing. And so I thought I'm just going to get rid of it before everything goes back to normal. But one thing I noticed was one, a lot of people forget about you very quickly. So when it's your birthday, like nobody remembers because they're not getting a notification from Facebook to tell you it's their birthday. And so you lose a lot of superficial friendships. But one thing that does happen is when you meet your real friends, you have so much to talk about and catch up on because they have no idea what you've been doing. And I realized that I've never really had that in my life, meeting a friend and having so much to tell them about the relationship that I'm in or where I'm living or what I'm doing. Because people have always seen what I'm doing on Instagram and Snapchat. And I think that's really damaged friendship because you can constantly sort of skip through your friends stories, scroll through their profile, know everything they're doing. And there's not really an incentive to go and meet up with them. I think about this a lot because I've been to one of them and I don't plan on going and I'm a millennial. But I don't see why Gen Z especially would go to high school reunions. Yeah, you know everything. I know everything that everybody's doing. And I know I definitely know everybody knows what I'm doing because of the type of job that I have or whatever. So I'm like, why would I go to this? So I've never been to any of those. And I just don't see Gen Z doing that. Yeah. And I think there's a similar thing with dating where there's just no mystery anymore. There's no real getting to know someone because let's say you match with someone on a dating app, you immediately look up their Instagram, their Facebook. You can scroll through and see how many siblings do they have? Where do they live? Where have they been on holiday? You can scroll through their whole life. And so there's not really that process of someone as a mystery that you're finding out about over time. And I think that's that's happened to friendship as well. You don't have that burning desire to go meet your friends because you have this constant illusion that you're staying in touch, but staying in touch is just scrolling through their life. One of your newest essays that was super interesting was whether or not Christianity itself has become commodified. Do you think Jesus has just become another lifestyle brand for social media in a bad way? Yeah, I think I just noticed with, so I'm very curious about Christianity. I didn't grow up with it. And so I'm right at the beginning of finding out more about it and also just spending time with Christians because like I said at the beginning, Christians just tend to be very concerned about the things that I'm also concerned about. Well, there's not a lot of Christians in the UK, right? No, yeah, not at all. Right. It's very different. And what is it they're just agnostic or it's people just don't talk about it. Probably now it's mostly Muslim. No, but I mean before. Yeah. No, it's it's just not really something that's spoken about. It's kind of weird if someone if someone brings up that they're Christian in a conversation that's not about that, it's almost feels rude and jarring. And so to start at the beginning of that, having not grown up with Christianity, not really spoken to Christians at all, it's very overwhelming. And I started to notice that because it's overwhelming, it's so tempting for me to basically do Christianity on my phone. So I have these prayer apps. I have every church I've been to has a live stream, which I'm sure is very helpful to people, you know, older people who can't get to church. But one thing it does do is it's so tempting for a generation that likes to do things from home. And I could compare the thought of going to church, which is quite overwhelming if you've never done it before, to then seeing a home watching the live stream, listening to my prayer app, basically consuming Christianity and ticking it off as another task that I've kind of done from home. And why is that a problem? Because if you if your first encounter of Christianity is it's is that it's this really easy, convenient thing that you do on your phone, Christianity is actually pretty demanding. And you're then developing a very shallow faith where your faith becomes something again superficial that you're marketing to people that you do on a screen and the actual demands of the faith then become even more challenging. And I also think that Christianity is community, you know, a huge part of it is being surrounded by other people. And any young person who's interested in Christianity now, I think it has to be because it's different from their life, you know, the constant, cheap, commodified life that they used to doing alone on their phones. And I think if you make it so easy to do, just like you do dating apps or just like you learn about mental health from TikTok and relationships from TikTok, if you also make Christianity another thing you can do on TikTok or on an app, I think that's way too tempting. Yeah, I think that makes sense to me. It makes sense to me why, you know, your exact description, I fully agree with it. And I think that's probably why to a lot of Gen Zers Catholicism is very appealing. Yeah. Because of the tradition, you know, in all of those things, people aren't live streaming mass, at least not that I know of, or they do it very little. Yeah. So I think that's that tradition, you know, these liturgical type of services, I think Gen Z really gravitates towards. And it makes sense because they never get a break from everything as a product. And I am a product. Yeah, I don't think they want the church to necessarily meet them where they are on TikTok. I think that they want to escape. Yeah. And that's why I have a huge problem with churches that are doing things like at the movies. And then, you know, you're going to church and then that's what they're doing. It's just like, first of all, it's not church. And if you're church is doing that, I think it's a huge problem. That's super controversial to say apparently. I got a huge thing on Twitter on that. But yeah, but like that's definitely a Protestant problem. And I'm saying that as a Protestant. But I think what you're bringing up is really important. And I think it's something that a lot of pastors and churches need to keep in mind. You know, this is the might be one of the first generations that could experience Christianity for the first time through social media. Yeah. And that's that's very different. And I think that we have to be careful that it doesn't become something else to consume something the same as everything else. And I think people are worried now. They see Christianity almost becoming a personal brand for young people and sort of like a weapon in the culture war. Oh, sure. The crisis king crowd. Yeah. I could do a whole episode on that. Yeah. But I think maybe some of that is because, well, that's where they learn about Christianity. Online, I know, which is very terrifying and sad. If that's that's what you know about it. If you had a 13-year-old daughter tomorrow, what app would she absolutely not be allowed to download? I mean, she probably doesn't have a phone. Yeah. But definitely, if they do have to have a phone for whatever reason, I don't think anyone has to at that age, but some characters in my child have to. So what app should they not have? TikTok. Because TikTok's algorithm is so fast. And if you if you have, you know, some people say, oh, you know, people need to have more agency and be more discerning in the content that they consume. But I think the really scary thing about TikTok is you can have you can have 20 minutes where you just feel really down and insecure and you start looking at content that's really bad for you. So you know, when you're a teenage girl and you just look at things that make you feel worse for some reason. And so you can have 20 minutes where you feel extremely insecure and you start looking at, say, eating disorder content. or self-harm content. And the TikTok algorithm is so fast that within that time your entire feet could change to that. And so I think when especially when you're an adolescent girl who doesn't have that level of self-control and discipline, the app essentially just serves you the worst content for you because it would just be anything that you look at, slightly longer, or have an emotional reaction to. And so I think that one is definitely the worst. Imagine taking a little girl who's blind into a field full of wildflowers. Now she can't see the colors that everybody is talking about, but she can feel the sunshine, she can smell the flower, she can hear the bees, and somehow experience the whole place in a completely different way. I love that reminder because beauty isn't just about appearances, it's about how something makes you feel comfortable, confident, like yourself. That's why I use Adele Natural Cosmetics. They're a Christian family-owned company in Texas that believes beauty should enhance what God has already created instead of covering it up. It is such a refreshing approach in a world that's constantly telling women that they need to become someone else. Their bronzing cream has the prettiest natural warmth without looking overdone. I've got it on now. Their lip tint is perfect for summer. I've also got that on. Just lightweight, easy color that looks very effortless. If you're ordering foundation online, don't stress. Their color matching service pairs you with someone who's going to help you find the right shade of foundation, so you're not just guessing. Simple products, thoughtful ingredients, real people helping real people go to AdeleNaturalCosmetics.com. Use code Alex for 25% off your first order of non-toxic makeup. AdeleNaturalCosmetics.com code Alex. Where do you think is Gen Z women get older? Where do you think they're going to end up politically? As they're starting to get married and having their own kids? I think there'll probably be a split because you look at young women, young women are very left wing. Much more so than previous generations of women. Much more so than men. So there's obviously that is happening, but the young women I speak to and they're not raised conservative, raised Christian. They're pretty much like me. They have just come to conclusions from a lot of pain, so they've had really bad experiences with dating. They've had hurt from their parents getting divorced. They have a lot of feelings of betrayal and paranoia from online porn. They have all of these feelings that for a long time they felt they haven't had permission to talk about because they're right wing. They're conservative coded topics. I do think that we're going to see a swing toward a more socially conservative young women purely from a position of I've lived in the liberal secular world and I've been so hurt and there has to be another way. I think you'll have the radically left young women, but you'll also have a lot of young women who are so determined to make marriage work because their parents marriage fell apart or they're so determined to raise their children differently because they grew up on screens and so I think that there'll be a significant portion of Gen Z that has a backlash. What do you think conservatives are getting right with young women and what do you think conservatives are getting wrong? Conservatives are more worried about they tend to be more worried about social media in my experience and they tend to be stricter parents. Conservatives are very receptive to keeping girls off of social media and seeing how young women have been sucked into this superficial shallow world a lot faster than men, a lot differently to men. I think conservatives can talk about the sort of vices of young women a bit easier than progressive's can. I think progressives find that really difficult to talk to. They feel like they're blaming young women or as I think conservatives, Christians as well can see that as a moral rot that's harming young women. So they tend to talk about that a little bit more, but I do think the messaging that some conservatives have toward young women, I think it's been tainted by feminism. So feminism has hurt a lot of young men and they have, they flinch when they hear, I'm really worried about young women, what are we going to do about young women because the relentless messaging from feminism that men are the problem. And so I think for a while it's been difficult for me to talk about, you know, we really need to worry about young women and that they don't want to have children, they don't want to get married, they're really unhappy. They're scared of men, they're scared of relationships, sometimes they hate men and have contempt for men. It's been difficult for me to get that across to some conservatives because their reaction is, we've heard so much about young women, it's time to focus on young men, but my argument is, you know, if young women are suffering, young men are also suffering, you know, we need each other. I do think that's changing now, but it was difficult first to get conservatives to take seriously again the needs of young women and that, you know, we may have had all of this help to get into the workforce and to have professional opportunities, but if we're too anxious to function, if we don't have any form of belonging and we're not happy, then we need to revisit the conversation because clearly it's gone wrong. Where can people find your book, what's it called, goes a generation C in the commodification of everything and most of my work is on Substack, which is just Fran, dear, don't go to UK. Yeah, Vance is a huge fan of Fran, by the way, he's the one that brought her here. So he was like, does she is doing amazing things? You got to, you got to read her book. So he really set this up. So if you guys love this interview, you can thank him. I ask every guest to end each episode. If you could offer one remedy to heal a sick culture, physically, emotionally or spiritually, could be any of those categories, what would your remedy be? It would probably be vulnerable because I think we're under this impression that our culture is very vulnerable, that everybody opens up about their mental health and we're also concerned about everybody's feelings and emotions. And I don't think that's actually true. I think that there's a lot of talk about mental health problems and diagnosis and disorders. But if you're a young woman who has been affected by some of the things we've spoken about, you know, if you try to talk about your parents' divorce, for example, you try to talk about situationships and how they've harmed you, there seems to be two conflicting narratives where young women are told, open up about your mental health, be vulnerable, but also a strong, independent woman never cares. She never gets jealous. She never gets insecure. You know, she's not bothered by these things. And so I think there are a lot of young women pretending that they're okay with things and trying to be this inanimate object that doesn't have any feelings. And I think actually even young men would respect, good young men will respect you if you just say what is harming you, how you're feeling, that you do want to be loved and respected and you won't put up with some of these things. I think that millennials, it was really drilled into them to never have feelings to, you know, just pretend that they don't care. It was absolutely mandated to millennial girls is that we need to be as much like men as possible. Yeah, we need to work like men, we need to have sex like men, like everything about our life in order to find equality and fulfillment. Yeah, our life should mimic that of men. Yeah, biologically. I mean, just from a physical health standpoint, it's literally impossible and also emotionally. Yeah, we are different men and women are different. And so when you start telling an entire generation to live and act like men and they try their hardest to do that, they're never going, they're always going to come short of that. They're never going to be able to achieve that. And then they're going to start becoming miserable and burned out and feeling like a huge failure and like, why aren't I finding all this happiness because you're trying to live like the opposite sex and not how God designed you. Yeah, and then you have a load of young women thinking they have a disorder. So I have an attachment issue because I'm upset about my situation or I have anxiety or something. And then that is the message of girls throughout the book is, you know, there really is nothing wrong with you. You're just a human in this world. It's a girl. Yeah, and it's a world that's trying to turn you into this product that has no feelings. And I think hopefully part of the backlash of my generation is actually to say no, I do have emotions and that's okay. It doesn't make me weak. It just makes me a person. You're doing such groundbreaking, incredible generation changing work. Thank you. Really, really proud of you, really great job. So excited and honored to have you on the show. Thanks for coming on Culture Poth the Carey. So much for having me. A great question to ask after this interview is, are you living your life or are you just performing it? New episodes come out every Monday and Thursday at 6 p.m. Pacific 9 p.m. Eastern wherever you listen to podcasts. Please leave us a five star of you on Apple or Spotify to support the show and help us keep it free. Find more discussions about the show and our episodes in the Keatservatives Facebook group. I'm Alex Clark and this is Culture Poth the Carey. (gentle music)