Freya India is a young British writer whose book on the crisis facing liberal young women in the Anglosphere has provoked intense backlash, particularly from progressive women, despite reaching conclusions similar to those in a widely praised New Statesman investigation. Her work argues that young women are being shaped by social media, the mental health industry, and consumer capitalism into seeing themselves as products to be optimized rather than people with unmet needs for belonging, family, and genuine human connection.
The Backlash Against Freya’s Book
Her book received a wave of one-star Goodreads reviews from liberal women who felt misled by its packaging, which resembled an anti-capitalist Marxist text but contained skepticism of the mental health industry, criticism of family breakdown, and commentary on transgender issues.
Many reviewers warned each other not to read past the first chapter, where Freya says something about trans issues that triggers them to stop.
The core accusation is that she is a right-wing operative using the mental health crisis as a funnel to spread fascist or far-right ideas, despite her arguments overlapping significantly with what the New Statesman itself reported.
Freya argues that her white, cis, heterosexual, right-leaning identity means her “female privilege” is dismissed, and she is attacked from multiple incompatible directions simultaneously, with some critics canceling each other out.
Why Young Women Are Struggling
Research shows young women across the Anglosphere are more pessimistic than young men about happiness, ambition, excitement, and fulfillment, and this pessimism is actually more pronounced among more privileged women.
Freya’s central argument is that liberal young women have “everything they want and nothing they need”: the traditional anchors of family, community, neighborhood, and religion have been eroded, leaving them ungrounded.
Conservative and religious young women appear to have a protective mechanism against the mental health crisis, which is what first drew Freya to the topic, despite her not being religious or conservative herself.
Liberal teen girls use social media at significantly higher rates, around 31% using it more than five hours a day, suggesting something specific about liberal upbringing makes them more susceptible.
The Product Model of Womanhood
Freya argues women are being encouraged to see themselves as products to be optimized for the market rather than as people seeking a collection of human experiences.
This explains why young women now show more aversion to having children than young men, a reversal of historical patterns: motherhood is seen as risky, unpredictable, and damaging to the carefully curated self-brand.
She traces this to girls being on Instagram by age 10 or 11, documenting and marketing every experience in anticipation of an audience, making it psychologically very difficult to switch to the quiet, unglamorous satisfactions of parenthood.
Parents are now registering Instagram handles for children before they are born, and nearly a quarter of five-to-seven-year-olds in the UK already have smartphones.
Pressure to Stay Single, Not to Settle Down
Contrary to claims like Emma Watson’s that young women face overwhelming pressure to settle down, Freya argues the real pressure is to stay single, stay available, and achieve perfect self-actualization before committing to anyone.
The “rush” women feel is not to find a partner but to heal themselves, fix their mental health, and become whole and enlightened before taking on responsibility.
This creates a ratchet effect: the independence, assertiveness, and disagreeableness that help women succeed in careers are exactly the traits that make compromise, vulnerability, and dependence in relationships extremely difficult.
Freya notes that the personality traits praised in public are the ones that cause pain in private relationships.
The Sex Paradox
Despite intense hypersexualization in media, from Teen Vogue teaching anal sex to Call Her Daddy promoting hookup culture, young people are actually having less sex than previous generations.
Freya argues the messaging around sex from both the “femosphere” and the “manosphere” is terrifying: women are told men are brutal and insatiable, and both sides say investing in the opposite sex will get you hurt.
She criticizes the progressive defense of pornography, noting that young women are often exposed to porn accidentally on social media as children, and that some speak about themselves in language that sounds straight out of porn sites, viewing themselves as objects.
Porn creates a paradox where sex is treated as both totally meaningless and transactional and as potentially the most traumatic thing in a person’s life.
Social Media, Mental Health, and Radicalization
Freya traces how influencer culture evolved from posting perfect lives to performing vulnerability, starting with figures like Zoella revealing anxiety in dramatic videos that got millions of views, which then incentivized an industry built around sharing trauma for clicks.
She argues this became its own damaging performance, with girls live-streaming panic attacks and showing their messy depression lives, which is harmful both to those watching and to those posting.
Normal feelings are being reframed as disorders, and the mental health industry encourages young women to ruminate, diagnose themselves, and categorize themselves with labels that become permanent, even when they might have grown out of those struggles.
Politically, the New Statesman confirmed that it is young women, not young men, who have lurched most dramatically to the radical left, and Freya attributes this to social media algorithms dragging users toward extreme endpoints, with progressive politics naturally playing into women’s tendencies toward compassion, empathy, indirect aggression, and safety-seeking.
She draws direct parallels between the language of the manosphere and the femosphere, noting that both use identical rhetoric about not needing the other sex.
2020 as a Turning Point
The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 marked a moment when morality became measurable and instantly judged by one’s Instagram profile, with young women pressuring and attacking each other for not posting the right things.
The “silence is consent” messaging from figures like Cara Delevingne added to the pressure, making political performance a requirement for being seen as a good person.
Filters, Appearance, and Self-Image
The proliferation of editing apps like Facetune, used by girls throughout their formative years, has created widespread body dysmorphia and an inability to accept unedited images of themselves.
Girls in Freya’s friendship group would fight over whose phone was used for photos so they could edit the images, and developed an aversion to being photographed naturally.
The self-love movement coexists with record body dissatisfaction because it is itself a marketing strategy, with influencers teaching self-love while simultaneously reshaping their jaws on Facetune.
Social media has created an arms race in beauty content, from simple makeup tutorials to casual vlogs showing Brazilian butt lifts and 50-step anti-aging routines for teenagers.
Everyone Is Becoming a Teenage Girl Online
Freya argues social media has feminized everyone, not just women, because the platforms tap into behaviors more typical of teenage girls: rumination, insecurity, indirect aggression, reputation destruction, and performing emotions for an audience.
She sees grown men online acting like teenage girls, engaging in catty behavior, obsessively analyzing their appearance through front-facing cameras, and competing over diagnoses.
The internet forecloses physical aggression, so everyone resorts to gossip, reputation damage, and posting unflattering content, and ideologically opposed men and women are converging behaviorally by regressing to the mean of a high school dinner table.
Influencers as Simulated Friends
Influencers present themselves as friends to young girls, using tactics like “let’s get ready like we’re on FaceTime” to simulate intimacy, which stops girls from getting lonely enough to go out and make real friends.
This parasocial relationship means girls’ needs for belonging, advice, and emotional understanding are being met by algorithms and paid content rather than genuine human connection.
The Empathy Problem
Freya is skeptical of performative empathy toward distant global conflicts when it does not translate into empathy for people closer to home, such as partners or local issues like UK grooming gangs.
She notes that the New Statesman article found young women deeply concerned about October 7th but not about domestic issues directly affecting women, and that some of these same women spoke about their boyfriends with zero empathy.
The concern is that empathy on social media becomes a form of virtue signaling and status-seeking rather than genuine moral engagement.
Divorce, Family, and Conservative-Coded Concerns
Freya’s criticism of the normalization and glamorization of divorce, including divorce parties, is coded as conservative and provokes accusations that she wants women to stay with abusive husbands.
She argues that the erosion of stable family structures is a root cause of the attachment issues and abandonment feelings that young women now bring to therapy, but progressives only look backward at these issues, never forward at what is causing them.
She supports attachment-informed child rearing but notes the contradiction of celebrating divorce while also diagnosing attachment disorders caused by family breakdown.
The Paradoxes of Progressive Politics
Freya identifies numerous contradictions: young women are hypersexualized but having less sex; the world is more connected but people feel more isolated; independence is the highest calling but maternity leave needs to increase; billionaires are bad but working for companies provides meaning; empathy is elevated but only for designated in-groups.
She argues these paradoxes suggest the ideology is not fully thought through and that many progressive positions are driven by signaling and clout-seeking rather than coherent principle.
The refusal to delete Instagram or TikTok while criticizing tech companies is seen as evidence that the criticism is performative, since these platforms are where young progressive women gain status.
The Response to Freya’s Work
Her book has been called a grift, dangerous, and compared to The Handmaid’s Tale, with reviewers accusing her of wanting to eliminate women’s rights, trans rights, therapy, and social media all at once.
Freya notes that her mother found the book loving toward girls, while online critics call her a misogynist who hates women.
She argues that the intensity of the backlash comes from her being an unreliable ally who operates in the middle, reaching some conservative conclusions while genuinely trying to figure things out, which is more threatening than being an outright right-wing influencer.
She evaluates content creators by whether their community is bound by mutual love of an in-group or mutual hatred of an out-group, whether they ever admit being wrong, whether they surprise you, and whether they engage with people they disagree with genuinely.
Tax Incentives for Motherhood and Historical Amnesia
Proposals to give mothers tax benefits, as in Hungary, are framed by progressives as penalizing child-free women or even as forcing women to have babies, which Freya finds absurd since it is simply adding an incentive rather than removing anything.
She attributes this overreaction to a historical knowledge deficit where the only reference point is Nazi Germany, causing any exclusionary or limiting policy to be seen as a slippery slope to fascism.
Women’s Preferences: Changed or Channeled?
Freya believes women’s fundamental preferences have not changed but are being funneled toward fake simulations of genuine needs: belonging through YouTube, parental guidance through therapy apps, friendship through influencers.
The challenge for her generation is not new needs but the unprecedented number of simulations that prevent people from seeking out the real things.
