How Young Girls Are Pressured to Market Themselves Online | Freya India

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Freya India is the author of “Girls: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything.”

In this episode, India unpacks how the rise of social media has radically transformed how young women view themselves and the world. She argues that an increasing number of young women no longer view themselves as human beings, but as products competing in a marketplace of likes and followers.

India describes the pressure she felt growing up in the age of social media.

“I really felt like I had to sell my life to strangers constantly,” she said.

From Snapchat’s public friend rankings to TikTok’s algorithms that flood vulnerable users with more of what destabilizes them, many various social platforms are engineered to exploit the very insecurities almost all young people have, she argues.

In this episode, we dive into many important questions: Why are so many young women today anxious or unhappy? How has the messaging of modern feminism affected young women—and what are the true consequences? How has ubiquitous pornography altered relationships, and how is it especially impacting young men? And what may help shrink the growing rift between young men and women today?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Our sponsor for this episode is Immersed, which is developing the future of AI-powered spacial computing. Invest before the round closes on July 30. Learn more about Immersed here:
https://ept.ms/4yurCls

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Freya India, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Freya India:

Thank you for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:

The commodification of everything is something that’s been on my mind. I think about it in an extreme way—people’s bodies, organs—but you’re talking about something much more all-encompassing.

Ms. India:

Yes, well, I like to think of it as a complete shift in how young women see the world, how they see themselves, and how they treat other people. It is social media. So, I think since the rise of social media, girls have really seen themselves as nothing but objects in a marketplace. And that is the aim of their life: to sell themselves online and to become almost the perfect product.

I think that affects not only young women’s happiness, because it’s a miserable existence to chase likes and followers and these online metrics, but it also affects how they treat men. Often, they see men as just accessories for their online profiles, and I think it affects what they value. So, I think this is why a lot of young women no longer value getting married or having children, because I really think the pull of social media is so strong, and their view of themselves is that they are literally just an object to be sold.

Mr. Jekielek:

How do they view men?

Ms. India:

I think that, unfortunately, one of the consequences of feminism is that a lot of older generations, particularly older women, have warned young women relentlessly about the threat of men. And maybe not explicitly; maybe they’ve just said, you need to chase your own goals and self-actualization and not let someone get in your way. So, I think some of it has been well-intentioned, but unfortunately for young women my age, it’s the only message we’ve ever had—this relentlessly negative message that you have to be really on guard and you have to be defensive and make sure that a man is not going to come and ruin your life in some way.

It affects young women to where they almost build up a defense mechanism and a protective mechanism where they hate men and they have contempt for men, and they tell other young women that they don’t want a relationship or nobody’s good enough. But I think deep down it’s fear; it’s fear of men and thinking that they’re going to get left and abandoned.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, when I think about feminism, I mean, my great-grandmother was a feminist, you know, getting women the vote, the first girls’ schools in Poland. And she helped found one of them. This is a kind of a different brand or an earlier version. And maybe when you say feminism, explain to me what structure you’re exactly talking about here for the benefit of the audience.

Ms. India:

I suppose for me, I’m not really an academic, so I can only speak to what I viewed as feminism as a teenage girl. Most of the time, it was Instagram posts and social media content where women would share sound bites and warnings very often about men. I think sometimes we think there’s a girl boss message that says women should just focus on their careers, and that’s the strong, independent woman. I think that’s a part of it. But I think a bigger thing is it’s a message about how to treat other people.

Young women are taught to be ruthless and just absolutely go after what they want, never apologize, and to be very masculine in a way. So I think that’s how I view feminism. It’s sort of a way of approaching men in the world. But I think it’s really damaging to the women themselves because it makes them feel unsafe that they constantly have to get one up on men, and they can’t relax into a relationship. So I think, unfortunately, a lot of my view of feminism has been shaped by that men vs. women mentality every day.

Mr. Jekielek:

Patriarchy or something.

Ms. India:

Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

Because you hear that a lot.

Ms. India:

Yes, and I think it’s interesting. Some on the Left, they can’t talk about issues affecting young women unless they blame men. So, for example, they don’t talk about divorce or family breakdown, but they do talk about men leaving women, or they don’t talk about online porn. They don’t see that as an issue, but they do see men in the porn industry as an issue, and they want to have a female-led porn industry. So, all of the issues I care about, they can only communicate about them if it’s targeted toward men. Whereas, I try, as we said, the book’s about, so I try and aim at the industries pulling us apart rather than men as individuals.

Mr. Jekielek:

You seem awfully young, maybe, to some of our audience, to be writing a book about commodification. But obviously, you’ve experienced this, right?

Ms. India:

Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

Give me a picture of where you come from, how you came to be doing this.

Ms. India:

Yes, I’m a bit of an imposter, I think, because I didn’t grow up in an academic setting. I didn’t grow up religious. I didn’t grow up conservative. So, my parents are pretty much apolitical. And I would probably say quite liberal. So they wanted to sort of leave me to find my true self and, you know, follow my own desires. And I ended up being a lot more conservative than they are. And I think that’s because I was just feeling very bad about the state of the world. I was feeling very anxious. So I found social media to be very overwhelming and stressful.

Mr. Jekielek:

So you got caught up in it yourself?

Ms. India:

Yes, I was in that world.

Mr. Jekielek:

What does that look like? So you have to understand, I’m a bit older.

Ms. India:

True.

Mr. Jekielek:

I don’t live there. I’m a pre-internet guy, at least when I was very young.

Ms. India:

For me, Instagram came out when I was 13, so I was just going through puberty. It’s a really formative time, and I was very shy as a young girl, and I instantly felt this pressure not only to be popular at school and everything that girls worry about, but to market that online and to perform it to everybody. And so every experience of coming of age, whether it’s your first crush, whether it’s your developing body, all of these things that are hard anyway, I then felt that I had to perform it and package it up for people online. And if I wasn’t doing that, you’re almost invisible. So I felt pressure to take selfies, to post pictures with people, to show other people that I’m in relationships, that I’m, you know, prove to people I’m constantly doing something exciting.

And I think as a shy young girl who you don’t really know who you are anymore, it’s very hard to be a personal brand at that age and to market yourself. And so that was really the beginning of me thinking about commodification in that I really felt like I had to sell my life to strangers constantly. And I just didn’t want the pressure. And then when I deleted some of these social media apps, that pressure instantly went, and I realized that it’s completely unnecessary. But unfortunately, for young women my age, it’s the only world we’ve ever known. So it’s difficult to realize that we don’t need to be part of it.

Mr. Jekielek:

This digital native reality, it can be hard to imagine. When I was a kid, I don’t know if you ever saw E.T., the Extraterrestrial, the film. The kids ride around on these bikes all the time. The parents, like, where are the parents? No one knows. That was my life. If the parents came in, it was like, don’t bother me, you don’t get it. And it was just such a different life.

I actually had some of the first computers, but there weren’t touch screens. We spent so much time outdoors, so much time unsupervised, whether it’s by the screen, because this is one of those things, right? When you have Instagram or whatever app you’re interfacing through, right, they’re studying absolutely everything you’re doing.

Ms. India:

Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right?

Ms. India:

For my generation, people initially thought that social media would be a supplement, that we would have normal relationships, but we’d also watch online porn, or we’d have normal friendships, but we’d also be on Instagram. And I feel that that wasn’t the case because it’s our first, our first encounter with these things. It’s our first encounter with intimacy or relationships or community. They really became substitutes rather than supplements.

And I think that this is what older generations struggle to understand: that if you talk to someone my age, their only view of community is online. They have no clue what it’s like to know your neighbors. They have no clue what it would be like to have a relationship before watching porn, before they’ve even had a first kiss, or before they’ve even attempted to know.

Mr. Jekielek:

But women as well.

Ms. India:

Yes. And also, a lot of it is accidental. So, when I was researching for my book, I didn’t quite realize how many young girls are having porn come up, not only on, they’re not just going onto porn sites, it’s on social media. So, a lot of these young people will say, it came up on Instagram, it came up on Snapchat. And that’s their first view of men and their first view of intimacy. And it’s so warped, and often they can be looking at porn for a decade before they’ve even had a first relationship. And so I think I’m really trying to get older generations to realize that social media is not just a bad habit that young people have. It’s quite literally forming their view of the world before they’ve even entered the world and had proper experiences.

Mr. Jekielek:

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Mr. Jekielek:

I had this experience, right, where I was at an event, and there was actually a woman running for some local office, and she had me put in her website. So I did, and all of a sudden, on my iPad, there’s some really not-safe-for-work stuff happening. I was scrambling to guide it, right? But then it got me thinking, obviously, I wrote the address wrong, and you know how easy it would be for a child or anybody to get into something like this without wanting to, even knowing that they shouldn’t, right?

And just then, I started thinking about this ubiquitous access that’s online. I would have stuff periodically come up on Twitter and things like that, just like shocking stuff you should never see. It’s just unbelievable, right? And I’ve interviewed a few people on this now, but I want to talk to you about this a little more because you seem to put an emphasis on this, and I rarely hear people talk about it. It’s one of these issues that’s a little bit beneath the surface that no one wants to talk about.

Ms. India:

Yes, I think for my generation, we were really gaslit about porn, especially young women. Because when I was growing up, I always felt that if you objected to porn, if you didn’t want to have a partner who was addicted to it, you were the problem. You were controlling and insecure. And I think that’s because…

Mr. Jekielek:

Like it’s supposed to be okay. Like it’s your problem. That’s horrifying.

Ms. India:

Yes. And if you’re not conservative or religious, like me, if you just grew up in the liberal world, you have no language to object to porn because you can’t refer to God and morality. People will just laugh at you. You can’t be judgmental. It’s a morally relative world. And so if you have a partner who’s addicted to porn, you have to accept that that’s his personal taste and preference. And if you start to object to that, you’re then imposing something upon him.

Mr. Jekielek:

Damn right.

Ms. India:

And so, growing up, I felt I just had no language to talk about that. And I think this happens a lot with young women where they have a moral instinct, and they reframe it, and they think it’s an insecurity. And then the world tells them it’s actually a problem that you have that you need to get over. And I think this explains why so many young women think they have anxiety disorders, attachment issues, because they’re having a human reaction to something, and then they’re being told that they can’t possibly object. Because then they would be crazy.

Mr. Jekielek:

And then they’re somehow maybe imagined that they need to replicate this porn stuff, right?

Ms. India:

They then feel that men won’t love them unless they resemble a porn star. And they’re also looking at Instagram, where you have these super sexual Instagram influencers. And on Instagram, you can see what everyone’s liking. So you can see maybe your first crush, your first partner, he’s liking these really sexual, almost porn star influencers. And if you’re a 14 to 15-year-old girl, that all gets internalized in your most vulnerable years where you think, I have to be this perfect sex object, otherwise I won’t be loved.

Mr. Jekielek:

And we haven’t even talked about how addictive these apps are, right? They’re designed to be such.

Ms. India:

And I think, especially for young women, there’s something about them where they really tap into girls’ vulnerabilities. So if you’re insecure, all of these women that make you feel insecure, you’ll just get more and more of them because if you hover over that content, the platform will serve you more. So there’s that, but they also draw out our worst vices. So women are very socially aggressive. If they’re going to go after each other, it’s usually tearing down each other’s reputation or social exclusion. And all of these platforms have so many features that are completely pointless. The only reason they’re there is to encourage this indirect competition and aggression.

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay, give me an example of that.

Ms. India:

Snapchat ranks your friends in order of popularity. So if you are a girl who likes a guy, you can see exactly who he’s talking to. He has a little Snapchat score that goes up if he speaks to someone else. There’s also a Snapchat map, so you can see exactly where he is at all times. You can see where your friends are without you. And none of these features to me serve any purpose other than to create paranoia and anxiety. Girls and young boys, you know, anyone going through puberty, they’re very aware of their reputation and they’re managing that all the time.

And I think that’s what they exploit because they know that’s going to create a feeling of worry and to keep coming back and checking the app and checking where you are in the rankings, and then also wanting to turn yourself into this perfect sexual object online so that you can bring some of that attention back if you’re losing it. If your partner is then liking other people’s posts, you have this pressure to market yourself even more. And it just becomes this endless race to advertise yourself and to keep tracking how you’re selling. And like I said at the beginning, it’s totally unnecessary and it adds to an already difficult, fraught time, which is coming of age.

Mr. Jekielek:

Was there a moment where you were kind of in this world, and then suddenly you—what was this? How is it that you got this self-awareness, or was it always there? And how is it that you—I mean, I’m going to ask you how you use these media in a moment, right? But how did that happen?

Ms. India:

It was during COVID because people stopped having things to post on Instagram.

Mr. Jekielek:

They had to do it at home.

Ms. India:

And I remember having this feeling of dread that it was going to come back again. People were going to start posting again, and I was going to have to start telling them what I was doing. And I had just left university and I was working in a cafe, and I had nothing to really show for myself. It was a slow, hard process. And I thought, I really don’t want people to know where I am or what I’m trying to achieve. So I deleted Instagram, and the relief of that was just immense.

Mr. Jekielek:

I see. So psychologically, this burden was suddenly lifted.

Ms. India:

And I started to notice that a lot of the things I felt insecure about made total sense. So I always hated having pictures taken and having to take selfies and post them online. And I thought, that’s just me being shy. You know, again, it’s a problem with me. But then when you stop doing it, you realize that it’s actually really bizarre that 13-year-old girls post selfies and they wait for their ratings and reviews, and then they internalize that, and that forms their self-worth. And I think once you leave, you realize that. But it’s very hard to get young women to see it because they’ve never known any different.

Mr. Jekielek:

That’s remarkable. You know, one thought that’s coming to mind—I don’t have kids, but if I had girls, especially, I would be like, no screens for you, ever. No, I mean, I’m exaggerating a little bit here, but do you think there’s a point at which it’s okay? I mean, listen, I was on the tube earlier, right? Everybody’s on their screen. You know, these things are addictive, not just for children, right? For young people.

Ms. India:

Yes, I think I don’t want to denigrate all of social media. You know, I’m here because of Substack. I started my blog, and it’s led me to meet people I would never have met—like-minded people.

Mr. Jekielek:

I think there’s no—but we can be constructive and thoughtful about these crazy technologies which are transforming how our society functions, right? Like, this is why we’re here.

Ms. India:

I think there’s a really formative time, and that’s before the age of 16. And so, if you can keep your daughters off social media until that time, because I think during puberty is really when your view of the world and yourself kind of fixes a little bit, and it’s very difficult to change after that. It’s okay for young people to use social media when it’s a supplement, when they know what real community is, they know what real intimacy is. But if it’s their first exposure to it, I think that is really hard to recover from.

And I also think it’s okay to commodify your work online. You know, I write online; I think that’s a huge, that’s an amazing opportunity. But it’s when you’re commodifying your very self, it’s your memories that you’re marketing, it’s your personal life, you’re offering up all of your relationships. And heartbreak and giving it to total strangers. I think that’s what I’m really trying to warn young women about.

Mr. Jekielek:

Because it is, you know, I’m an old guy, so I do Facebook, right? I have a little bit of an Instagram account, it’s mostly for the show and so forth, but it’s curated, right? And I can just imagine, you know, what you’re describing, the level of, I don’t know, I could imagine spending a lot more time on it than I do, let’s just say. And that would be a lot of time.That’s why it takes me so much time even to do it because I’m like, oh, I have to think through the text. I have to think through the photos. What is it going to be? Is it going to be reasonable? It’s like a whole process for every single one of these, right?

Ms. India:

It’s a full-time job.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes.

Ms. India:

And if you look at the screen time of young women, some of them are spending seven to eight hours on screens a day. It’s all-consuming. And that’s why I emphasize how unnecessary it is because I feel it’s just so hard to be a young woman. It’s hard to just be young. And they’re adding on top of that this pressure to look perfect, to feel perfect, to have the perfect relationships, and to wrap all this up and sell it perfectly to everyone all the time. And I just think that is causing so much of the misery among young women because, as I said, all their self-worth is tied up in those changing numbers on social media. And if it starts to drop, that’s their entire existence called into question. And I think it’s just so cruel to raise young women on this.

Mr. Jekielek:

Do people ever tell you, oh, this might, this is just your own neuroses, you know, this is, you’re just overblowing this. This is your own problem.

Ms. India:

Yes. Something I get a lot is that I appeal to conservative older men because, you know, I have a bit of a more old-fashioned view of things than other young women. But it’s just not true. I mean, I’ve been here at the conference, and the number of young women who say to me they feel the same way, but they have really struggled to talk about it for that reason I said earlier, that they almost feel they don’t have permission to talk about it. And I think a lot of that is because these issues have been framed as conservative and Right-wing. With my book, a lot of it has been criticized as reactionary and backward.

And I think that really imposes a cost on young women because then they’re terrified to talk about these things because they don’t want to be seen as conservative. And so they can’t talk about the betrayal of their partner watching porn; they can’t talk about the pain of their parents’ divorce because these are Right-wing issues. More young women need to come forward and say, actually, these things have hurt me way more than I was letting on. And then they can actually talk about it without feeling that they’re being offensive or outdated.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, both things could be true. It could be a huge problem for young women, and it could be an appealing topic to hear about for older conservative men. And also, there’s like this inherent assumption here, like that’s a problem. Like, I just feel like there’s a weird way in which, you know, if certain people like this, it must be bad. That’s ridiculous, right?

Ms. India:

Yes. And I think that for me, it’s quite heartening because I think, you know, it’s really nice today to be here and to have conservative older men, academics, talking about Instagram and TikTok and taking it seriously and taking the threat of it seriously. And I think all the other issues we talk about at Alliance for Responsible Citizenship [ARC], whether it’s relationships or the declining birth rate, I think a lot of it is driven by young women and their unhappiness. And so I’m glad to see that it’s becoming more of interest here.

Mr. Jekielek:

You were on a panel last night at this dinner. I really enjoyed that. One of the things you talked about is this unusual focus on self-actualization as something that maybe is attractive to women, but also it’s kind of a very self-focused thing.

Ms. India:

Life is to become their authentic selves and figure out who they are. And ironically, I think it puts so much—

Mr. Jekielek:

But there is some truth to it.

Ms. India:

There is some truth, yes, but I think what’s missing is you can find yourself in other people. You can self-actualize within a relationship or through having a family. But I think the lie that women are told now is that you have to do all of this alone before you meet someone. So, you have to heal yourself completely. You have to solve all of your issues.Industry tells them that they have to feel absolutely perfect all the time. Then they have to meet all their career goals. Then they have to look the way they want, and they have to be financially secure. Sometimes progressives will tell me that there’s so much pressure for women to settle down and to have children, and this is really cruel to impose this rush on them.

But I think part of the rush is that they’re told to cram in all their self-actualization before they meet someone and before they have a baby. They feel as if they extend their adolescence, and they feel as if they’re getting older very fast, and they have to keep pushing away commitment because they don’t know who they are yet, and they feel like they’re not ready to take on these things. But I think we can lift some of that pressure and say you don’t have to be perfect before you find someone. You can actually find out who you are through a relationship.

Mr. Jekielek:

You presumably have a number of young women writing to you as you write your Substack. What would be like the top thing that they write to you about?

Ms. India:

I think family breakdown is a big one. And I think it’s because divorce has become so politically charged. Again, it’s a conservative issue.

Mr. Jekielek:

So there’s that element where they feel like it should be okay, but.

Ms. India:

Yes, if you react to your parents’ divorce, it’s a “you” problem, again, because divorce is good for adults; it’s healthy. And so I feel a lot of young women are very hurt by family breakdown.

Mr. Jekielek:

It didn’t even occur to me what you just said. So, please, just fascinating, please continue, yes.

Ms. India:

Well, it interests me because young women are obsessed with therapeutic terms. So, they always talk about attachment style. They talk about their wounded inner child. They go to therapy, but they never talk about what is driving those feelings of abandonment and hurt. And I think it’s having divorced parents, coming from unstable family backgrounds, and they can’t talk about it because, one, they feel it’s a conservative issue.

But two is that it’s so common, it’s really hard to talk about because you’re going to offend or upset one of your parents. And even for me, writing about divorce is difficult because my parents are divorced, and I stayed away from it for a while. But I really felt it was driving so much of my own angst that I started to bring it into my writing. I wrote a piece about this suspicion I have that we have a chronic, almost generational fear of abandonment because we’ve had such high rates of unsafe families and divorce.

And the response I had to that was incredible, where so many young women said they have this fear of abandonment. And again, it drives that defense mechanism of, I’m not going to take the risk. I’m not going to even try to love someone or have a family because I’ve seen my own family implode. And I think it’s really important to me to talk about it so that other young women feel that they can say, actually, my parents’ divorce really harmed me. And maybe divorce is a bad thing in general. To be able to talk about it.

Mr. Jekielek:

And if this is correct, this is something that Nick Freitas, I think, talked about last night, that, you know, for many women, having that stability and knowledge that the man in your life, your husband, will help you, will be there to support you in thick or thin.

Ms. India:

Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right? That is very, very high value. And the scenario you’re describing, that’s not even in people’s imagination.

Ms. India:

Yes. I think young women’s view of men is so shaped by not only their parents’ divorce, but then the view of men that spreads on social media, which is often a very angry, pessimistic view of men. Because if you get hurt by a man and you share your story online, that can go viral and then everybody generalizes it. And again, you can have 13-year-old girls reading that before they’ve even had a relationship.

And then you add to that online porn, and just every influence is telling them that young men are something to be afraid of. It’s safer to just obsess over your social media profile, your own career, these things that can’t leave you like a partner could and are less emotionally intense. And so I think a lot of the behaviors we see from young women are actually an almost safety response where they think, I’m not going to get abandoned if I go this route vs. another route.

Mr. Jekielek:

I, you know, going back to when I was a kid, right? Transparently, we had a VHS [Video Home System], it was like a VHS player, right? Like you could, you rented videos. This was the time, Blockbuster and so forth. And so there was a video store where we could, as kids, they would let us rent stuff like this. And of course we did from time to time. And because it was transgressive, right?

So I imagine if you have this ubiquitous access, there’s something kind of exciting because you kind of know that this isn’t something you should be watching. How do you recommend people, younger people, deal with that, right? And it’s also like weird and interesting, quite frankly.

Ms. India:

Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

Unless you realize what the implications are. And then you’re like, ah, no. But you see what I mean?

Ms. India:

Yes, I don’t blame. A lot of people blame young men for being addicted to porn. And I don’t do that because I think it’s.

Mr. Jekielek:

Like a little bit of blame, maybe.

Ms. India:

Well, a little bit of blame, a judgment. But I think it makes sense. There’s context to it. So if we think of women, porn is perfectly designed to trap men. So I understand it. I think something that works is trying to explain that everyone in their generation is addicted to this, and everyone is going to be stunted in some way by it. There’s no way, you know, people say to me, you can grow up with online porn, but you can almost file that away and know how to love someone and take care of them and be intimate with them, and your porn addiction that’s every day is not going to affect that. I just don’t believe that.

Mr. Jekielek:

That’s ridiculous, right?

Ms. India:

Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s a ridiculous idea that these are completely separate things. Yes. Of course, it’s going to shape you.

Ms. India:

But I think young men, young women, at least for my generation, we weren’t told that at all. We were constantly told this is harmless. This is even a healthy habit. You know, it’s part of sex education.

Mr. Jekielek:

Who told you this?

Ms. India:

If you listen to some of the sex-positive feminist voices, Teen Vogue, you listen to some of the really influential female podcasters.

Mr. Jekielek:

So influential people amongst you.

Ms. India:

And I remember when I was younger, other young women would almost make it a way of competing with each other where they would say, that doesn’t bother me. I’m so secure and confident that my partner watching porn doesn’t matter. And that would almost be aspirational. How do I get to that level where I can numb myself to the point where that doesn’t bother me? That’s been so drilled into my generation.

But I think for the next generation, we really have to drill it into them that this is not a harmless habit. This is not something you can file away. It’s going to bleed into everything. And if you want to have a stable relationship, a family, if you even want to have a strong sense of self-worth, then you need higher standards for yourself.

Mr. Jekielek:

I just have to say this. I thought my childhood and all these interpersonal issues were challenging. For me, right, what you’re describing would have been, I don’t even know how I would have dealt with it, quite frankly. I was pretty good at dealing with stuff, you know?

Ms. India:

Yes. I think for my generation, because, you know, I think older generations had it harder in a lot of ways, especially materially. You know, I talked to my grandparents, and they were growing up during the war, and they describe material conditions that are awful compared to my childhood. But I think what’s different with my generation is it’s so psychologically demanding because these challenges are so unique. And like I tried and said, well, it’s a new, evolving world.

Mr. Jekielek:

We’re just catching up to understanding. It took us years to figure out the screens, yes. Even in Silicon Valley, you know, people were like, my kids are not touching a screen, yes, right. It was still encouraged in some ways, right? Now we’re kind of caught up. Jonathan Haidt has, you know, popular—thank goodness for his incredibly popular work, right? It’s popularized the idea we should be getting off of screens, yes.

Ms. India:

And I think that was the issue for my generation, is that it was so new. We didn’t even have the words to describe. If you’d have asked me at 16 what’s bothering you, I would just say, I feel anxious all the time. And I couldn’t pinpoint what was causing it. And so part of the motivation to write my book is to lay it all out so I could step back and see, oh, this is all so new and so demanding. And it’s quite a relief, even to read, you know, it’s a very bleak, depressing book. It’s because I thought, oh, it’s not just me that has a problem. This world is very difficult to deal with, and I think that takes away some of the anxiety.

Mr. Jekielek:

As you were researching girls, what would be the most surprising thing that you found?

Ms. India:

I mean, I’m talking about it again, but the porn chapter was hard to write because of this…

Mr. Jekielek:

No, this is, I have this sense that this is one of these issues because it’s so, you used the word ubiquitous. I mean, because it’s so available and so tantalizing and attractive, and all this, I just imagine there’s a whole lot of people that are not admitting to being on this stuff that are. And I was shocked to learn the statistics of women.

Ms. India:

Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right? Like that, I didn’t even imagine somehow.

Ms. India:

It was interesting to me that even conservative Christians don’t want to talk about it. And so I did an interview recently where I spoke about this being a big concern of mine. And I had such a backlash from Christian men, saying, you’re blaming men. It’s another thing that men are getting blamed for. And I never blame men. Even in my book, I don’t ever frame it that way.

But I think that really strikes me as this is a huge issue, if even conservative Christians, who are usually the ones that I go to when I feel concerned about something—Christians are always on top of it. They’re always worried about it. They’re always thinking about it in their parenting. And of course, there are loads of Christians who are worried about it, but they’re still in conservative circles.

But there are people who are so defensive about this topic and so insistent that these porn sites are natural and healthy and there’s nothing wrong with it. And so I think we have such a long way to go to really explain that. I think a lot of the issues we talk about here—again, the birth rates, declining marriage rates—a lot of that can be put down to porn where we aren’t being intimate with each other because we’re busy watching strangers.

Mr. Jekielek:

And just kind of this, I forget the terminology now, off the top of my head, but it’s kind of like as you get desensitized to those libido and everything else, it’s not surprising, right? It’s a horrifying reality.

Ms. India:

I think that’s the issue; it’s so horrifying, we don’t want to go near it. And even in my book, I had a moment where I thought maybe I could just leave the porn section out because even researching it is so depressing. But then I thought, well, no, this is the reason to research it. And I think some parents, they don’t even want to think about the thought of their children watching it, being addicted to it. But to me, that’s a reason why we need to talk about it more.

Mr. Jekielek:

Thank you for doing this.

Ms. India:

Thank you. I’ve had a lot of backlash for it, and it’s really nice to sit and be able to explain it in depth without being packaged up as a conservative, or as a feminist. You know, I’m always getting put in a box, and so to talk openly has been great.

Mr. Jekielek:

Because it comes off—see, I’m understanding what you’re saying right now—as you somehow attacking men. That’s why they call you a feminist. That’s so crazy.

Ms. India:

I think they see another book written by a woman, and they think a lot of the time, if you’re focusing now on women, I think as a reaction to feminism, some conservatives think that you immediately are framing everything as it’s only women suffering, men aren’t suffering. And that’s not true. I think both are suffering. And a lot of the time, men are suffering because women are suffering, and it’s all feeding off of each other.

And so I’m trying to get across that we should all have higher standards for ourselves. Women shouldn’t be spending six hours a day on social media. They shouldn’t be treating their partners like props for Instagram, telling them to take 100 pictures of them. But at the same time, men shouldn’t be watching porn behind their partners’ backs. It’s both of us having to raise each other up.

Mr. Jekielek:

And all of this really fundamentally creates this wedge in being able to have that good, you know, decent, I don’t know, an intimate, loving relationship, really, right? That’s what we’re talking about here.

Ms. India:

Yes, I think both sexes really have their guard up, and they go on social media, and there are influencers on both sides for young men and for young women telling them to keep those walls up and to never be vulnerable. And unfortunately, I think the only way through it is to take that terrifying risk and be vulnerable, women to tell men what hurts them and what they want, and vice versa. But I think we’re just getting so much encouragement to shove it all down and to be perfect and to not have these human reactions. But I think it’s making us miserable.

Mr. Jekielek:

Wow. Well, I mean, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. Thank you for the work that you do. I’ll be following you closely. You know, this is, I hadn’t, until coming to ARC, I hadn’t been familiar with your work. But it’s something I’ve been covering a little bit on American Thought Leaders, the porn issue specifically, because there are a few people doing very interesting, I think valuable work in that space. And maybe we can kind of help blow it open.

And so I think there are some of these sort of issues that are just kind of beneath the surface that people don’t want to deal with that are, maybe if we can sort of tackle them, it will just solve a lot of other things, if you will, make it simpler. Because it’s just like, how can ubiquitous available porn not have this radical effect on relationships in a very negative way? Obviously, I mean, this is common sense, right? It’s not, you don’t need the studies to figure this out, right? You have to sell it to yourself that this is somehow fine, right? And it’s all cool, and it’s going to help your relationship.

Ms. India:

And that it’s always been this way. That’s what I always get told.

Mr. Jekielek:

No, of course it wasn’t always this way.

Ms. India:

Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes. Well, you’ve made me feel more sane, so thank you.

Ms. India:

I’m just so pleased to be talking about young women and to be taken seriously. And yes, for people to notice that all of these issues, we all have to feel confident about the future and about ourselves in order to have families and in order to get married. And so I think we really have to focus on how young people are feeling about themselves. And I just feel very grateful to be able to talk about it properly with you.

Mr. Jekielek:

Freya India , it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

Ms. India:

Thank you.

 

This interview was partially edited for clarity and brevity.