If you look at our list of contributing writers, you’ll find some unexpected bedfellows. That’s the glory of The Free Press: Nobody who works here thinks quite alike, but one thing unites us, and that’s an allergy to groupthink. With that in mind, it’s our absolute pleasure to welcome Freya India to our ranks.
Earlier this year, in an essay for Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel that we knew we had to reprint as soon as we read it, Freya wrote about what she aims to do as a writer:
“I want to say things that bother people and move people and confuse people; I want to start sentences that can’t be auto-completed because even I don’t know where they’re going. I want to learn and offend and regret and grow. I want to be interesting, irritating, irreplaceable. . . . I want to try and be seen trying, to be a person you can’t perfectly map out and make sense of. What good am I otherwise? What am I otherwise?”
In her first essay for us as a contributing writer, Freya writes about the reception to her debut book, GIRLS®, which dives deep into the misery of Gen Z women, exploring how they’ve been commodified by Instagram, corrupted by pornography, destabilized by the decline of religion, and isolated by the internet.
The book is out next week in the U.S.—and we highly recommend you preorder it!—but it came out a couple months ago in the UK, and Freya was struck all over again by how her work is interpreted by a corner of the media that insists there’s only one explanation for women’s misery, and it’s this: Dudes suck.
Read on to find out what Freya makes of this, and please join us in welcoming her on board. —The Editors
Why are young women so unhappy? Rates of anxiety disorders, depression, and self-harm are soaring; in the U.S., almost one in three teenage girls seriously considered suicide in 2021. Read the mainstream press and you will overwhelmingly find the same answer: teenage boys, misogyny, masculinity, Andrew Tate. For years, blaming men has been the accepted explanation for our misery.
Into this climate landed a viral cover story from the flagship magazine of the British left, The New Statesman, headlined “Meet the Angry Young Women.” Gen Z women in Britain, they found, feel unhappy, hopeless about the future, and hostile toward men. According to new polling, around 72 percent of young men say they have a positive view of women; only half of young women say the same about men. And while just 7 percent of young men have a negative view of women, 21 percent of young women have a negative view of men.
The piece itself was balanced, finally acknowledging that the “femosphere”—left-wing female influencers—also “reinforces this hostility toward men.” But plenty of commentators still read the report as yet more evidence that men are the problem; even an op-ed offering an economic explanation for the angriness of women couldn’t help but conclude: “a woman can choose to subjugate herself to a man, or to the man.”
