A book about the commodification of girlhood from an excellent writer who unfortunately plays fast and loose with information while pushing her conservative agenda.

What is fascinating about GIRLS is that I agree with its underlying premise: social media (and its adjacent technologies) have negatively impacted girls by seeing them as products and pushing them towards consumption as a means to solve their problems. It’s the exact same thing that Sherry Turkle argues (about all of us) in Artificial Intimacy, which was one of my favorite books of the year. However, India often uses this argument as a launch pad for conclusions that are far stretched and she ultimately advocates for individual solutions, rather than regulations on a burgeoning tech industry.

Many other readers, seemed to have stopped at India’s second chapter: Diagnosed, which focuses on the proliferation of medication on social media. I’ll spend some time on this chapter, as it highlights the issues I have with her work more broadly. I agree with India’s assessment that the proliferation of apps that have popped up to profit off of our mental health crises (like Better Help and Hers) while selling data to third party companies, is abhorrent. I even might agree with her assessment that medication is over prescribed (in part because of Khameer Kidia’s brilliant Empire of Madness). However, India makes several unfounded leaps that turned me (and other readers) off. First, she disagrees with the sharing of diagnostic information online. While agree no one should be diagnosed off of TikTok, I do think that mental health professionals could share, for example, what ADHD looks like in women (since it is severely undiagnosed). Second, she targets any sort of care for gender dysphoria. What’s fascinating, is before tackling gender-affirming healthcare, she has tons of statistics to show the breadth of the issue. This obviously must disappear when discussing young transboys because the statistics aren’t there to back it up.

This pattern continues throughout the book. While I agree with some of her points about online dating, community erosion, and the push to work harder these are accompanied by incoherent arguments against adult lego sets, childfree adults, and online tarot. None of these arguments show an awareness of how the tech industry is shaped by patriarchy, racism, and capitalism. In fact, India goes out of her way to shame the “religion of social justice” even as she claims that one of the major issues facing girls today is a lack of moral guidance. This leads India to advocating for a handful of individual changes (like getting off the apps) but few structural ones.

Overall, if you’re looking for books that tackle what India tackles but in a more thoughtful and sound way, I recommend Artificial Intimacy, Empire of Madness, and How We Show Up instead!