Gen Z Women's New "Anti-Woke Voice"

Summary

Diabolical Lies — Episode Summary

Podcast: Diabolical Lies
Hosts: Katie Gatti Tassin & Caro Claire Burke
Episode: Gen Z Women’s New "Anti-Woke Voice"
Date: May 3, 2026
Episode Description: Smart. Sane. Unbearable.

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Overview

This episode is a deep-dive critique of British writer Freya India and her newly released book, Girls: Gen Z and the Commodification of Everything. The hosts, Katie and Caro, dissect India’s rise as an “anti-woke” Gen Z voice and analyze the broader cultural and ideological forces that have elevated her platform. They question the reactions (and endorsements) of male mainstream pundits and examine the core ideology beneath India’s “social media and commodification” thesis—which, they argue, camouflages highly regressive views on gender and women’s roles.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Who Is Freya India?

• Background:

  • 26 years old, originally from the UK; moved to Washington, D.C.
  • Studied politics at King’s College, London.
  • Runs the Substack "Girls", markets herself as a Gen Z anti-woke voice.
  • Staff writer for Jonathan Haidt’s newsletter, frequent contributor to right-leaning publications such as Quillette and Evie.
  • Endorsed by prominent establishment men: Jonathan Haidt, Scott Galloway, Derek Thompson.

• Initial Framing:

  • Hosts emphasize their critique targets Freya’s role and function in the current right-wing cultural discourse, not her as a person.
  • Concern over how her messaging—marketed as a concern for young women—is institutionally propped up and laundered into mainstream credibility.
  • “She serves a very valuable role in cloaking right wing ideas within a critique that is more superficially palatable to women…” — Katie (129:34)

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2. Blurb Analysis — Who’s Endorsing Freya India? (06:22 - 13:07)

a. Jonathan Haidt (07:30)

“India is the most powerful voice of Gen Z yet to emerge.”
— Jonathan Haidt [07:28]

• Jonathan Haidt, NYU social psychologist best known for “The Anxious Generation,” heavily amplifies Freya.
• Haidt’s main thesis: Social media is destroying young people’s mental health (“the kids are not alright”).
• “He did have a substantial, substantial hand in legitmating her in these more mainstream spaces.” — Katie [08:12]

b. Scott Galloway (09:25)

“Freya India is an essential voice on Gen Z. This is her first book, comma, of many.”
— Scott Galloway [09:25]

• Galloway: Business pundit, famous for “Notes on Being a Man.”
• Critique: Galloway’s fixations (e.g., “be a breadwinner and knock up your wife”) align with Freya’s regressive messaging.

c. Derek Thompson (11:02)

“…India argues we have to understand the economics behind [America’s] psychological crisis. She’s absolutely right.”
— Derek Thompson [11:02]

• Thompson’s blurb is singled out as especially odd, as his liberal reputation does not match the anti-feminist undertones of India’s book.

• Hosts’ Take: The diversity of Freya’s institutional endorsements masks the regressive ideology within the book. This platforming is what the hosts argue is most telling about the currents in mainstream discourse.

• “These are not fringe right wing ideologues. These are men with New York Times best selling books.” — Katie [12:07]

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3. The “Commodification” Thesis – Superficial or Reactionary? (14:08 - 36:54)

• Book’s claim: Gen Z women are “broken, reassembled into something consumable, sellable, inanimate” due to social media, therapy culture, progressive norms, and the loss of “anchors” like marriage and religion. [27:53]
• Use of “commodification” as an intellectual veneer for positions that ultimately advocate for a return to tradition and stricter gender roles.
• “In the 19-page introduction, the words commodity, commodification or commodify are used nine times. And that’s basically where the analysis starts and ends.” — Katie [26:34]
• Katie and Caro point out that rather than real economic or sociopolitical analysis, Freya’s book is built on anecdote, generalization, and generational panic—bolstered by endless references to dated internet trends and superficial “data.”

Notable Quote:

“We’re basically being set up to believe that we are about to get a deeply reported and researched analysis of the economic forces shaping an entire generation... and we are not.”
— Katie [14:09]

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4. Freya’s Real Audience: Older Men (20:10)

• Despite being marketed as Gen Z’s “voice,” her Substack/commentariat mostly consists of older men.
• Evidence: Overly basic explanations of Snapchat and Instagram suggest Freya is not writing for digital natives.
• “It appears to be mostly middle aged men, not young women.” — Katie [20:10]

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5. Ideological Journey: From Right-Wing Self-Help to “Social Media Moral Panic” (41:09 - 54:06)

• Freya’s earliest work: overtly reactionary, anti-feminist pieces (e.g., blaming mothers for men’s misbehavior, why women should listen to Jordan Peterson, marriage panic).
  • “If a man turns out bad, we should look at his mother because it’s her fault.” — Katie re: Freya’s 2020 article [47:25]
• Her later work: increasingly masks regressive ideas under a veneer of social critique about social media and therapy culture.
• Pattern: She uses viral Substack/social media essays as her breakout, gradually shifting into the “screen time moral panic” lane.

Example from Freya (Spectator article [23:33]):

“A society convinced that life should be fun and easy all the time, to the point where we are beginning to show contempt for even the most natural of human instincts.”

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6. The “Social Media Ruined the Girls” Grievance — Data or Dogma? (54:06 - 62:19)

• Freya frequently repeats: “liberal teen girls are by far the most likely to say they spend five or more hours on social media every day.”
• Hosts trace her source to Jonathan Haidt’s Free Press article—there is no real, non-paywalled data to support this claim, and the methodology is flawed or self-reported by parents, not by teens.
• “They are minor children. They cannot reasonably be said to have a politics.” — Katie [58:43]

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7. The “Family Breakdown” Canard – Divorce Stats and Historical Revisionism (117:35)

• Freya’s key claim: Societal decline and women’s misery are due to “family breakdown” (aspirational marriage rates and higher divorce blamed on women’s selfishness).
• The hosts:
  • Divorce rates in the U.S. and U.K. have been falling since the 1980s, especially among young people [121:34].
  • Most increases in divorce are among people 50+, i.e., from the supposed “golden age” of the family.
  • Family breakdown, if it means fewer families, is largely about people waiting longer (or not able) to marry due to finances and structure—not moral failing.
• Choosing partnership or opting out of traditional family is more natural, now that women have agency.

Notable Quote:

“Your father would have traded you for three cows a hundred years ago.”
— Katie [120:14]

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8. The Real Message: Return to Gendered Tradition (“We Must Go Back”) (130:36)

• Throughout the podcast and critique of the book, the hosts distill Freya India’s actual solution to modern malaise: opt out of social media, become more private, “touch grass,” form a heterosexual, monogamous family, and obtain faith or religiosity.
• Final chapter urges:
  • “Find someone and commit fully. Be the partner who shows loyalty is not too much to ask for.”
  • “I don’t want to model for her (daughter) a strong, independent woman who doesn’t need anybody. I want to model a strong woman who shows it’s okay to depend on someone, to give up some of yourself…” [131:44]

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Memorable Moments & Quotes

• On the Motive for Mainstream Endorsements:

“Why do three prominent men, at least two of whom at least theoretically support left wing politics, believe that Freya is the voice of her fucked up gentleman generation? Because believing young women are annoying, insecure, feckless little sluts who low key kind of need spiritual and masculine authority and boundaries ... is neoliberalism a mostly bipartisan view? Unfortunately, yeah.”
— Katie [134:00]

• On Superficial Feminism-Coded Language:

“I couldn’t find an instance where the example of selflessness related to like working at a soup kitchen … it was always tied back to the romantic partner. Her concern that women do not give enough of themselves to relationships and family…”
— Katie [90:07]

• On the Core Contradiction:

“She wrote a book titled Girls that is ostensibly about the plight of young women and only men blurbed her book.”
— Caroline [65:38]

• On False Historical Claims:

“Marriage vows came to feel like business contracts. ... If you think marriage vows are now more like business contracts than they were for all of history…what in the are you talking about, Freya?”
— Caroline [120:08]

• On Who Critiques Women’s Issues:

“There is no conclusion that doesn’t implicate [Haidt, Galloway, Thompson]. Either they don’t care about what this woman wrote, or they don’t care about women’s issues, or they genuinely believe that this garbage is representative of women’s issues.”
— Caroline [135:28]

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• 00:48 – 04:58: Intro, episode context, and merch banter
• 05:39 – 14:09: Positioning the critique — not “punching down”; importance of examining India’s platform
• 06:22 – 13:07: Blurb game — the three men cosigning Freya India
• 13:07 – 19:41: Setting expectations for the book’s content; Katie’s research prep
• 19:41 – 22:44: Dissecting Freya’s audience and persona
• 26:34 – 36:54: “Commodification” as aesthetic, not analysis
• 41:09 – 54:06: Early writings — “toxic femininity creates dangerous men,” Jordan Peterson as a feminist voice
• 54:06 – 62:19: “Liberal girls” and suspect statistics; critique of Haidt’s research and media laundering
• 77:00 – 91:12: Deep-dive into the therapy culture, locus of control, and the role of religion as “solution”
• 99:59 – 101:37: Outright arguments for restoring male authority (“We killed good authority”)
• 117:35 – 124:32: “Family breakdown,” no-fault divorce, and actual divorce/marriage statistics
• 130:36 – 133:46: Conclusion: the actual roadmap — return to hard traditionalism in modern packaging

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Tone & Approach

• Sarcastic, sharp, at times profane; hosts embrace an irreverent, lived-experience tone (“Girl, wash your face”), repeatedly emphasizing their refusal to treat unsourced or circular claims seriously.
• Keen on citing sources, critiquing methodology, and challenging facile generational narratives.
• Explicitly feminist and pro-economic analysis; insistent on structural (not personal) explanations for women’s changing choices.

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Conclusion

Freya India’s ascendance is less about Gen Z women or the evils of social media and more about how establishment interests anoint certain “dissident” young women to launder old anti-feminist tropes in new, plausible-sounding packaging. Girls is more a symptom of modern reactionary currents than a diagnosis of Gen Z’s malaise.

“Girls takes the new right’s theory of civilizational collapse and repackages it into pseudo feminist concern. It is a work of pure entry-ism … designed to compensate for a historical lack of right wing influence on middle brow women’s culture.”
— Ella Dorn, quoted by Katie [133:29]

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For listeners, the hosts recommend skepticism toward purported “liberal” or “economic” critiques that conclude with “we must go back”—especially when unwaveringly endorsed by men with little genuine engagement in women’s lives.

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For detailed references, studies, and the full takedown, see show notes and www.diabolicalliespod.com.

Transcript

[Caroline]

Dude, I'm so excited.

[Katie]

I hope so, considering it's what, 9:34pm where you are?

[Caroline]

I'm wide awake. If it makes you feel better, I'm like, good to fucking go.

[Katie]

Okay. Amen. Okay. Well, in that case, today's episode of Diabolical Lies was brought to you by Jonathan Haidt's talent scout. The teenage girls causing the collapse of Western civilization because they refused to get knocked up. The universally reviled shittiness of big tech therapy Culture. TV magazine's early work being annoying on the Internet. The latitude we extend to British people to say dumb stuff because it sounds fancy. Extremely stale references to the Kardashian family and Jordan Peterson's covert self help empire.

[Caroline]

Oh, that's a tongue twister, Caroline.

[Katie]

Today we are checking in with a writer named Freya India. But before we do that, in case you missed the email that went out, we just did another mini merch drop. So we are releasing our small government tea, which for the unanointed is the Reagan Bush 1984 campaign logo, but it says Diabolical Lies instead in a new color. So check that out. We also released a tote bag, some cool limited edition Yesteryear is Diabolical posters, and then two new hats, one of which is exclusive for paid subscribers only. So if you are a paid sub on Apple, the password to access the paid merch is the same as last time. You should have seen a bonus up in your feed back in like December when we released the first round that has the the password in it. It's like a minute long recording. I'm pretty sure everything sold out in like 30 minutes after the email went out. So we are just collecting orders right now to do a rapid reprint of everything. So we will put the link for that in the show notes if you want a new conversation piece for your next dinner with your parents. Okay, so we last covered Freya back in 2024 in our Liberal to brave independent thinker pipeline episode. So those OG liars among you may remember her from that episode. But she just published her first book, so it's finally time that we take a deeper dive. Caro, do you want to tell me what you know about Freya India?

[Caroline]

Yes, I know that she runs a popular substack and from what I recall, she's a little bit of a free press darling. I don't want to say that she's reactionary, but I think that I remember her kind of co opting like a. A very Bari Weiss coded view of the world which is like this is why my generation sucks. And I also remember that she like came up with a sweeping generalization for Gen Z. Gen Zed as. As my people, the Brits say for. For what Gen Z talks about by referencing an autistic woman's TikTok online. And I remember that was really noticeable.

[Katie]

Yes. So today we are doing a quasi if Books Could Kill st of her book, which comes out in the US this week. And that is Girls, Gen Z and the Commodification of everything. The book.

[Caroline]

Can I just say really quickly on this, the year of our Lord and savior Lena Dunham's memoir, Famesick to take her title Girls and then co opt it is just. It's ambitious is all I have to say.

[Katie]

I know I. I had that thought while I was working on this outline because I've been rewatching Girls and I was like, w all day long Girls. Then after work Girls. And what whiplash.

[Caroline]

I've been thinking about Girls.

[Katie]

The book urges us to, quote, look past what you're being told and see what you're being sold. Dun dun dun. So I was dying to get my hands on it.

[Caroline]

I mean, that kind of sounds diabolical lies coded.

[Katie]

Thank you. That's what I was gonna say is that this is like diabolical lies catnip. I'm very interested in critiques that use language like commodification things that gesture vaguely Marxist ideas, but then reach these insanely reactionary conclusions with them. So Freya India is not a household name yet, like, for example, a Bari Weiss. I think it's safe to say that when we critique Bari Weiss, we are decidedly punching up. Because even before the Free Press sold for $150 million and she became the editor in chief of CBS, she was running a multimillion dollar media business with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of readers. That is not the case with Freya India. She has roughly 50,000 subscribers on Substack. This is her first book. So I want to examine her work today carefully and less as a commentary on her as a person and more about the function that she is serving in the broader right wing ecosystem right now. And I say all that to say I think there's a version of this conversation that could really feel like punching down. And I don't want to Jackie Eubanks.

[Caroline]

Her we we woman Jackie Eubanks. The fact that paid subscribers are always like, how do you feel about how you talk about Taylor Swift? I'm like, I'm thinking about how I talked about Jackie Eubanks. That's my real concern.

[Katie]

So I'm coming into this one and I'm like, I don't want to, like, make this as much about her as it is the role that she serves in this ideological project, because I think that is totally fair game.

[Caroline]

Yeah.

[Katie]

Because what she does have and has in spades is endorsement and backing for from men who are very prominent in our media landscape. And because of that, I think Freya is someone whose voice and messaging approach, her tack will continue to gain steam.

[Caroline]

She's very institutionally supported, and I think

[Katie]

understanding what is happening here serves as a bit of a blueprint for recognizing how regressive ideas about girls and women get laundered into the discourse inside less obviously objectionable vehicles. So to begin our discussion of Freya India's new book, Girls Today, I want to review who blurbed this book so we can get a sense for the figures who are essentially co signing the worldview inside it that we're about to spend two and a half hours talking about. So, Caro, I'm going to have you read the blurbs one by one, and then you have to guess who gave each quote.

[Caroline]

All right.

[Katie]

Behind door number one. Here you go.

[Caroline]

Wow, this is a long blurb. Okay. My blurbs are like, good. Interesting. Okay. Quite Suddenly, in the early 2010s, the mental health of girls collapsed. Researchers scour data sets and argue over what caused it. But Freya India has given us an explanation from the inside. One that is far more compelling and compassionate than a thousand studies. Okay, I love when we dismiss the stud. Anyone who cares about the girls and young women in their lives should read Girls. Oh. Oh, they trademarked it. Okay. I would like to reach out to Lena Dunham. The book is disturbing.

[Katie]

It's girls registration mark.

[Caroline]

Nice. The book is disturbing, but the writing is gorgeous. India is the most powerful voice of Gen Z yet to emerge.

[Katie]

All right, who do you think gave that blurb?

[Caroline]

Ooh, scouring data sets. To me, it's giving one of the Jonathans or a Richard Reeves.

[Katie]

Go with your first introduction.

[Caroline]

Jonathan Haidt. Jonathan Haidt. Jonathan Haidt.

[Katie]

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

[Caroline]

Fuck yeah. Fuck yeah.

[Katie]

Okay, this blurb is from Jonathan Haidt, the author of the mega, mega, mega bestseller the Anxious Generation. Garo, do you want to give us just like a quick background on height for those who are not aware and then I can fill in the gaps?

[Caroline]

Not really. He is one of the talking heads who has given an unbelievably outsized amount of attention capture on cnn, on the Atlantic, like His opinions are everywhere. And he is perceived and has positioned himself as an objective thinker, as someone who, like, thinks beyond politics. And his whole shtick is that we're fucking kids with social media. Which, to be fair, is an incredibly compelling message in its like from the outset.

[Katie]

Mm. So Haidt is a social psychologist at the NYU Stern School of Business.

[Caroline]

Oh, like Scott Galloway, NYU Stern Boys.

[Katie]

And each book is quite different from the last. But to your point, he's now best known for his book the Anxious Generation, which if books Could Kill, actually did a solid review of. And the tldr on this book is that it essentially makes its argument based on correlation between the supposed rise of what Haidt perceives as social ills and the introduction of social media to society, particularly for children. So his main beat now, I would say is this sort of the kids are not all right ethos. I don't think it is totally fair to say that Haidt completely astroturfed Freya India into existence, but he did have a substantial, substantial hand in legitimating her in these more mainstream spaces and introducing her to much larger audiences than she had previously. Okay, blurb number two. This one is much shorter and I'm going to have you read this.

[Caroline]

Okay. Freya India is an essential voice on Gen Z. This is her first book, comma, of many.

[Katie]

Is that a threat?

[Caroline]

I. I don't know. This one doesn't really give anything away.

[Katie]

Okay. That is friend of the pod, Scott Galloway. Ugh.

[Caroline]

Of course he would phone in a blurb. Of course he would phone in a blurb.

[Katie]

So we have covered Scott Galloway's notes on being a man ad nauseam. So listen to that episode if you haven't yet. Caro knocked that one out of the fucking park.

[Caroline]

It's my Nobel Prize.

[Katie]

But Galloway is essentially a business guy who wrote a book about what's wrong with young men. And the formula, as he sees it, for fixing them, which includes included such revolutionary gender bending advice such as be a breadwinner and knock up your wife.

[Caroline]

And also we need more world wars,

[Katie]

which, hey, we're about to test that hypothesis.

[Caroline]

Got em, baby?

[Katie]

Imminently. I saw a headline the other day that was like, they're changing the technology for how they draft young men. I'm like, all right, well, the war that they need, it's on its way. If they needed a purpose.

[Caroline]

Oh, don't go.

[Katie]

So, yes, according to Galloway, Freya is an essential voice. And finally, the one that I find most personally insulting and instructive behind door

[Caroline]

number three, did Bari Weiss. Blurb her.

[Katie]

You know, she didn't.

[Caroline]

Okay, she's busy. She's busy architecting the downfall of our democracy. So, I mean, blurbs are a little bit below her at this point. Okay. Freya India has written the definitive analysis of a generation of young women with terrific reporting, sharp analysis, and some unforgettable sentences. That's okay. That's low key. Funny. She explains how female insecurity has been captured, branded and sold for profit by companies and social media platforms.

[Katie]

Okay.

[Caroline]

If you want to understand America's psychological crisis, India argues we have to understand the economics behind it. She's absolutely right. What if it was you? That's the jump scare.

[Katie]

Big reveal, guys. And now we're joined by our first guest ever, Freya India. Welcome to the show. No, that blur is from none other than Derek Thompson, co author of our favorite book,

[Caroline]

Abundance Part of Abundance. I think that every great political movement has been a kind of redefinition of freedom. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan redefined freedom from government. Oh, yeah. Oh my God. I just. Talk about punching up. I just quote, tweeted him on substack because he shared this post being like, america's so rich. Why are we so sad? And I was like, dude, tell me you haven't watched Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette without telling me you haven't watched Sophia Copeland. Like, like support female directors. We have the answers here.

[Katie]

So these are all pretty much by all definitions, popular mainstream voices and in the case of Galloway and Thompson, purportedly left wing voices. These are not fringe right wing ideologues. These are men with New York Times best selling books. Though who knows if they've got they, you know, debuted at number two like Caroline did. I don't think they did.

[Caroline]

Although, Katie, I'm pretty sure that our sub stack is bigger than the argument.

[Katie]

True.

[Caroline]

So maybe it is punching down at this point. We'll see.

[Katie]

What are we going to do when we have when we like eclipse Joe Rogan and there's nowhere to punch but down.

[Caroline]

Oh, we kill ourselves. That's what women do at that point. Don't worry, there's a plan. There's an architecture there.

[Katie]

So. So we are spinning quite the. The scare quotes, diverse ideological web here in the endorsements that this book and by extension Freya's point of view has, has received. So based on these blurbs, what would you expect to find in Girls Caro?

[Caroline]

I mean, I guess I would expect to find some sort of liberal analysis that's maybe kind of Ezra Klein Coded. If I were reading those blurbs, I think if I'm you and I, I was reading those blurbs, I'd be like, oh, we've got a problem. Yeah. It would be like, we've got engine failure in at least one of our engines. Time to take over manual control of the plane and go to a different section of the bookstore. Anyone who recognizes those names is someone who at least purports to care about the world. Like you. You see them on cnn. They write in the New York Times, like, these are very accredited individuals.

[Katie]

You're you. You know how to read.

[Caroline]

Yeah. I mean, I think I would think, like, oh, this person must matter because these people don't. Like, it's hard to get blurbs.

[Katie]

Well. And I have to say, like, one thing that I kept thinking about when I was reading this book, I was so like, oh, my God, thank God I'm encountering this now as the person that I am at 31. Because if my 21 year old self would have read this, we could. I could have gone in a very different ideological direction.

[Caroline]

Oh, totally.

[Katie]

So we're basically being set up to believe that we are about to get a deeply reported and researched analysis of the economic forces shaping an entire generation of young women. And we are not.

[Caroline]

Oh, my God, I would be so fucking scared to see you coming. If I wrote a book about money, I would be fucking scared.

[Katie]

So I spent the last few weeks watching Freya's interviews.

[Caroline]

You've been deep diving this like crazy.

[Katie]

I've been on this for a month, you guys. Every word this woman has ever spoken publicly. I have, I have digested as part of. I literally had 25 pages of notes before I even opened the book. I was like, fuck. Good thing we're starting our recording at 10pm I read the last five years of her contributing writer work in prized publications.

[Caroline]

Oh, my God.

[Katie]

Such as Yvie Quillet and her substack Girls. I think it's quite transparent what is occurring here. So we are going to unpack why John Haidt, Scott Galloway, Derek Thompson et al. The disgusting brothers are blurbing this book and endorsing a young woman like Freya India. Because as the association with John Height might suggest, Freya's work is ostensibly about the effects of social media use. Caroline muted herself because she's eating pizza.

[Caroline]

Look, man, I'm on tour. I'm trying to do 50 things at once at all times.

[Katie]

Caroline is like red bear right now.

[Caroline]

I'm like, I'm looking in the tub, washing my armpits and my cracks while

[Katie]

also

[Caroline]

talking to you.

[Katie]

Mike's just like precariously like balanced off the side of the faucet, just like

[Caroline]

shaving my legs and also giving a hot take on someone that will be released publicly. Oh man.

[Katie]

Okay, so the point is that like the work is on the surface at least supposed to be about the effects of social media use and like the related things that you do on a phone, like sell your body on OnlyFans and swipe on dating apps, things of that nature and teenage girls. But we actually are not going to spend all that much time today debating the merits of the social media argument because as I'm going to argue, none of this is actually about social media. So I think it would be a mistake to engage with her on those terms. Okay, so who is Freya India Freya Race the Substack Girls One of the first popular substacks that I remember seeing in my feed when I joined the platform. She is 26 years old. She is from the UK and is pretty involved, as I understand it, in the social media ban conversation in the uk. She went to an all girl private school in Essex and then studied politics at King's College London and now lives in Washington D.C. with her fiance. And she, according to her about page, writes about, quote, the challenges girls and young women face in the modern world.

[Caroline]

Same.

[Katie]

She's also a staff writer for Jonathan Haidt's newsletter and has contributed over the years to right wing publications that we're gonna be reviewing today. And she summarizes her beat as follows. Caro, if you will finish chewing and then please read.

[Caroline]

I'm at this hotel in central London and there's a wood fired pizza place right next to me and I'm just on a first name basis with those dudes. Okay? In this age of atomization, sexual liberalism, rapid technological change and a deepening mental health crisis, Girls is a series of dispatches trying to make sense of it all. Expect all kinds of topics from critiques of contemporary feminism to scrutiny of the mental health industry, to rants about the relentless commodification of our lives.

[Katie]

So that's the description that she gives for her sub stack.

[Caroline]

Okay?

[Katie]

And if I remember correctly, I think this, it has been this for a long time. But I think if you were to strip that description of its underlying context and like the work itself, you could say that these topics are quite diabolical lies like the scrutiny of the mental health industry. Hashtag brought to you by BetterHelp. Even critiques of contemporary feminism could code leftist And I think that this is really indicative of Freya's sleight of hand in her positioning. So she has been called both the quote, anti woke voice of Gen Z women by the Times, as well as a new type of, quote, feminist author by the New Statesman. I'd also say that she speaks relatively compellingly about her beliefs. Like her written work feels, to my eye, much more extreme than some of what she said in the mainstream platforms that she has been given.

[Caroline]

Yeah, and that checks out. Like, I would also do that. I would kind of code switch a little bit between, like deep diving on our podcast versus talking on cnn.

[Katie]

Absolutely. So we're gonna do a little compare and contrast today. But it's very important to understand when you engage with this work that her worldview is very conservative, which is not always immediately clockable, depending on your entry point. So the first piece that I encountered from her was in my substack newsfeed in 2024, and it was about how we shouldn't document our lives in lieu of living them. So, like, pretty unobjectionable critique of social media use that I remember enjoying. And I think I even quoted a line from it in something that I wrote that year, because on its own, as a standalone, it was like just very unobjectionable.

[Caroline]

Didn't this piece go viral on Substack?

[Katie]

It did.

[Caroline]

I think a lot of her stuff is primed to go viral on Substack and you can take that however you want to.

[Katie]

Yeah, I wish. Frey, can you give me some advice? I really would like to grow my newsletter, but then there's this question of who are her fans? And I think most of her fans are actually older people. So if you click through the comment section of her work, it appears to be mostly middle aged men, not young women.

[Caroline]

I got an email from an older gentleman who's a family friend of mine who was like, I think he's vaguely aware of my podcast, but I don't think he's really clocking my politics. Or maybe he is, but anyways, he emailed me info.

[Katie]

It's not clocking to you that I am a radical.

[Caroline]

It's not clocking you to that. I'm standing on business. No. Anyways, he emailed me with Freya India's book and was like, I think you'll really like this. This is like a radical take on feminism that's coming out. And he's the only person I know who has been even remotely aware of this. So I don't know if that's Marketing. I don't know if he was already reading it or if it was Free Press, but I think that you're onto something.

[Katie]

Reading her book just convinced me of my theory about this audience even more because of how rudimentary the explanations of platforms like Snapchat or like Instagram filters are. It's not the tone or the level of detail that you would be going into if you were writing for your peers who ostensibly understand and have lived through these things themselves.

[Caroline]

Right.

[Katie]

And part of that could be because her biggest audience exposure is via John Heights newsletter. But I think. I think she really flatters that kids these days generational instinct to be like Gen Z is a bunch of pathetic little piss babies, in the same way that the Free Press flatters, like the free thinking tendencies of the highbrow Fox News viewer.

[Caroline]

Does she have a big social following?

[Katie]

She's not on social media. She doesn't have an Instagram.

[Caroline]

Okay, okay. So you think you're better than me. Okay, cool. So you think you're fucking better than me? Understood. So I'm down here. I'm down here in the fucking trenches, Slogging my identity on Instagram and TikTok for years, and you can just sell a book and talk about our generation and not even be with the generation on the channels? I don't think so.

[Katie]

You. Okay?

[Caroline]

This is my last piece of crust, so we should be done soon.

[Katie]

Okay, well, and the other thing that is worth noting at this point is that Freya is objectively very hot. And so the nothing burger observations come off as somehow enlightened because she is part of the generation. She's critiquing and, like, looks like a popular girl.

[Caroline]

So she looks like Olivia Nuzi.

[Katie]

She does.

[Caroline]

She really leans into that. She's actually very. She's like a doppelganger for Olivia Nuzzy. She's like the bright, bright blonde hair, the very tweezed eyebrows.

[Katie]

She has, like, a little beauty mark, too. And she very much positions herself as, like, behind enemy lines and confirming all the worst things that your boomer parents fear about the youth. So here is an example of what I mean, just to cite the text directly, this is from an article that she wrote in the Spectator.

[Caroline]

Okay. According to a recent Pew survey, the top reason from those who don't plan to ever be parents was, quote, I just don't want to. Many of us. Many of us, it seems.

[Katie]

Okay, read the quote.

[Caroline]

Okay. Many of us, it seems, have simply been convinced we can sail through life without the meaningful an. Okay. The meaningful anchors that previous generations grasped onto. And now, unsurprisingly, we find ourselves adrift. The trend for renouncing and disparaging motherhood because it interferes with living your best life, or for fear of personal discomfort, a symptom of something more sinister. A society convinced that life should be fun and easy all the time, to the point where we are beginning to show contempt for even the most natural of human instincts.

[Katie]

Dude, it's giving. Walking to school, uphill, both ways.

[Caroline]

It's giving when Scott Galloway and Jonathan Height will be like, women in the 1950s weren't around that much and that was good. And then they say, like five minutes later in the interview, like, well, everyone was just closer in the 1950s before phones. And it's like, well, fucking. Which is it? And also it's like, okay, Freya, if you're going to talk about economics, maybe do you want to take an economic angle on why people are having fewer kids?

[Katie]

It's TikTok. It's the TikTok is to blame, right? But not you, Carolyn. You're doing your part having a white baby. You're defying the statistics.

[Caroline]

An Aryan baby, you're having a Scandinavian baby. I mean, I couldn't do much more for the Nazis than that.

[Katie]

So we should just state this plainly at this point. Her primary message now, and the one that she has joint custody over with John Hight, is that social media is very bad for girls. The thing that you've kind of hinted at that I want to just, like, get out of the way, is that this is not an unpopular or even politically partisan message. That excessive social media use is damaging, particularly for young people and maybe even particularly for young women, is pretty widely accepted at this point as conventional wisdom. People across the political spectrum are more or less in agreement that Big Tech is bad. And that acceptance means that a loose critique of social media is sort of the perfect vehicle within which to hide different ideological goals. So you mentioned that you've seen this book. Someone sent it to you and was like, hey, you'd probably like this. The COVID and marketing of the book position it as your sort of classic pro woman read. It's a picture of a headless white person, I assume, woman wearing a dress that is actually a barcode. And in the introduction, she basically positions herself as someone who began writing about these issues because her concerns about young women were foundational to her interests. But as we will discuss today, it seems like that backstory has actually been retrofitted to paper over a slightly less tidy narrative about the intellectual journey that she has gone on.

[Caroline]

Interesting.

[Katie]

In the 19 page introduction, the words commodity, commodification or commodify are used nine times. And that's basically where the analysis starts and ends. That's about the extent of the. The economic analysis.

[Caroline]

Oh. So she went to the Scott Galloway school of. Of nonfiction books, where it's like, I'm going to shoehorn all of the numbers into the first seven pages and hope that you're stoned by the time you get to page eight.

[Katie]

I literally went through and started by. By the seventh commodification, I was like, all right, I'm not convinced. You know what this word means.

[Caroline]

Freya took a modification is me to the word notable on this podcast.

[Katie]

Oh, my God. It's like, who is. Who are we reading once? Where you were like, every paragraph is just seven topic sentences. Anyway, in the introduction, there is a lot of generalizing and a lot of dramatizing happening. So to give you a sense for what I mean, this is just one line from the introduction. And I'm. I. I'm pulling it out of context because it's not surrounded by any context. There. There's no. There's no unpacking happening. It's just. Take my word for it, okay?

[Caroline]

Over the past 15 years, my generation has not only been broken, but reassembled into something consumable, sellable, inanimate. Okay. I just want to. I just want to ring the bell that I always ring. I'm tired of hearing myself say it, but it feels very important to say, why that timeline? Why 15 years? Do you think that started 15 years ago? Do you think that started with Snapchat?

[Katie]

Yes.

[Caroline]

It's such a way to turn this into something that's just happening with this generation, when this is. I mean, this is as old as advertising itself, which is to say, not that old, but.

[Katie]

Yeah. I mean, the idea that women weren't commodified before 2004 is crazy. But then the book has. It has six chapters. So if you would please read the titles of the chapters.

[Caroline]

Ooh, I kind of like this. I'm gonna be honest. Filtered, diagnosed, documented, disconnected. Detach. Then quotes here. Empowered. That's clever.

[Katie]

Yeah. Little scare quotes around empowered.

[Caroline]

Yeah.

[Katie]

So the book is structured in this way, she says, to trace what has changed from the early 2010s to the present. So right away, we have a very abbreviated timeline in the grand scheme of things. And she says she's careful to note, though, that these changes are not just technological, they are also cultural. And then here's the list she gives

[Caroline]

for the changes from the evolving language of feminism. Okay. To the expansion of therapy culture. Okay. To the emergence of new progressive norms. Yeah, those I if you know what, Katie, Gun to my head, if someone were to ask me what the number one challenge is for women, I would be like, I think therapy culture and progressive norms, I think that's what's hurting women. Together, these cultural, technological and commercial forces collide and intersect, intensifying insecurities like never before before.

[Katie]

So the world that we are presented with in girls is one of Victorian fainting couch calamity. It is dystopian. It is a godless hellscape in which girls and young women are described frequently as, quote, falling apart, as, quote, unable to cope with, quote, age old anxieties. I lost count of how many times the phrases age old anxieties and falling apart appeared in this book. It is a world where where Gen Z is too afraid to order from a menu or talk on the phone.

[Caroline]

Friendly reminder though, that is a reference point to the autistic TikTok she shared.

[Katie]

There was no but dude, there was one study she cited that was like 86% of Gen Z is terrified to order from a menu. It was pretty light on facts or detail, mostly a description of Freya's perception of girls her age, which, like, fine, if you're writing a memoir. But this book is not positioned like a memoir. It is positioned as a nonfiction diagnosis as. As an analysis. Right? She closes her introduction with one simple call. Quote, that is why we need to go back.

[Caroline]

Okay?

[Katie]

That something has gone wrong and the answer is going back now. One thing that jumped out at me while reading this book is it was sort of striking how already dated the book felt. A healthy majority of what is in this book is just her recounting TikTok trends or citing Instagram captions. There was this long section about like the Kardashians and the Dove Real Beauty campaign and old Tana Mongeau YouTube videos about getting filler. All of this is at least 10 years old. There are some sections about how sinister family YouTube accounts are. There are sections about better help and talk space and the pharmaceutical push for SSRIs. It's actually quite sprawling in that regard and we really move quite rapidly between these kind of big picture things that I think again, on their own, most people probably would not find that objectionable or strange. But something else that happens repeatedly through this book is Freya basically sets up this picture of a world dominated by certain incentive structures to Extract money from you. Each chapter covers a different one and only uses the word capitalism one time on page 201 in a list that was intended to rattle off what people erroneously blame their problems on after they lost religion because of, quote, social justice messaging on social media. Incoherent.

[Caroline]

Okay, a serious question. I am maybe giving more credit than credit is due here. Do you think Derek Thompson read this book before blurbing it?

[Katie]

There's no way he did. There's no fucking way he could have read this because, like, I, I have

[Caroline]

my own qualms with his beliefs, but like, I still perceive him as someone who is like, decidedly a liberal. Like, this strikes me as like really, really obviously saying that we need to go back for Derek Thompson, Mr. Abundance, Mr. Forward Thinking Utopia. That strikes me as very odd.

[Katie]

You obviously have gotten blurbs. Have you been asked for blurbs before?

[Caroline]

Yes, I have.

[Katie]

So do you want to explain how the blurb process works?

[Caroline]

So blurbs are very political and they're like the bane of every writer's existence. I didn't know anyone when I entered the writing industry. I had no favors, I had no networking. I was very lucky to have editors and people on my team who helped me get blurbs in my understanding. It's very hard to get blurbs and people will not blurb unless they have read the book or unless they like, understand what the book is about. I mean, I'm assuming that these men did not read this book, obviously, but it's like very, it's like kind of shocking to me the extent to which either I don't understand who Derek Thompson is or that he would like, launder his reputation for someone who is so decidedly in opposition to like, his basic, basic principles.

[Katie]

Something that I think might be different between the fiction and nonfiction blurb world is that a lot of these, like, quasi self help authors are asked to blurb a lot of things. And typically when this happens, the editor of the person whose book you are being asked to blurb will draft a blurb for you and basically ask you to sign off on it.

[Caroline]

Wow. I don't know if that happens in fiction.

[Katie]

As a matter of principle. I don't do that.

[Caroline]

Oh, you're so high and mighty.

[Katie]

But that's also why I don't blurb things, like really ever.

[Caroline]

Right.

[Katie]

A lot. Like, you know, there are some finance authors like Ramit Sethi who just is like, as a general rule of thumb will not blurb anything for that reason because you're just constantly being asked and there's not Enough hours in the day to actually read every book that you're asked to endorse. And so my guess is that all of these men, with maybe the exception of John Haidt, who I do believe read it and agreed with it, they may have just been asked to like, hey, this is what this book is. Are you okay with us attaching your name to it with this quote? But, yeah, there is no economic analysis in this book whatsoever. I do want you to read this specific quote, the only sentence in the book, book that uses the word capitalism.

[Caroline]

This is what happens when you have too much pretty privilege. You gotta grow up ugly. And then you really. You really cite your sources. Okay. Not all young people were activists, of course, for teenage girls like me at the time, these were just there on our social media feeds across mainstream media, treated as common sense by university lecturers. This became another lens through which we made sense of the world and ourselves. Our problems, our anxiety, stress, body image issues started to seem less personal. They became symptoms of something bigger. Patriarchy, late capitalism, white supremacy, or other forms of oppression. Wait, so she's like, that's dumb, Correct?

[Katie]

She's saying all these dumb social justice ideas on social media made it sound like my body image issues were because of patriarchy.

[Caroline]

Wait, I just need to pause for a second. This is like in our last episode when someone referenced apartheid as a social justice term. Like, Like, I'm sorry, capitalism is not a social justice term. Capitalism is not like a wokey thing.

[Katie]

Like, like, capitalism is like, Adam Smith is like fucking. Excuse me, would like a word.

[Caroline]

What the fuck are you. Capitalism is our economy. Like, what are you talking about?

[Katie]

So this is a pretty strong focus of the final chapter, which made me laugh because something Michael and Peter often say, and if books could kill, is that these authors, like, save all the craziest shit for the end. And she. She definitely loads all the SJW stuff into that last. That last section. Those last 20 pages go fucking crazy

[Caroline]

for the 15 Midwestern grandpas who are going to be like, I knew it.

[Katie]

I knew that's why my granddaughter won't speak to me. So we are going to revisit parts of the tec of this book throughout the episode, okay? But honestly, I think we can kind of gain more from everything surrounding it, okay? Because like I said, it kind of drags. For example, in the filtered chapter, I have some fun examples of this. Now there are five pages devoted to describing James Charles facetune tutorial videos. Like, we get titles, we get thumbnails, we get view counts we get queen quotes, we get comments. Five pages.

[Caroline]

Dude, it's giving hate crime.

[Katie]

At another point, I actually took a picture of this page because I was like, Caroline's not going to believe me if I just explain this to her. This is a section about study tube or YouTube videos about people's studying routines. Can you please describe what you are looking at that.

[Caroline]

What? Wait, what am I looking at? Oh, I. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, this is her trying to dunk on like tech culture. And this is also, I feel like her trying to appeal to like the literary sensibility of like the listing trend that was very popular again in like 2015. Okay, so it's like a paragraph where she describes a YouTube video called Study with Me and then she says, I watch as 16 year old Ruby documents every second of her day. And then she basically lists out the documenting. And obviously the point is to be like, this is ridiculous. Why would someone do it? But it's just like, I don't know, you're just like dunking on an element of Internet culture without actually analyzing it or trying to understand it or provide any sort of insight.

[Katie]

Well, and we didn't need 27 lines of timestamps to understand what. Like she didn't need this to make the point. Like, this is unreadable. This is completely unreadable. There is just an excessive level of detail. And to your point, there is no analysis surrounding this detail. It's almost like she's trying to do a didion thing where it's like the example kind of of speaks for itself, but it's just not in this case, it's not having that effect. In the first chapter we get a pretty state accounting of like how different editing apps came to be. Like the timestamps of. And then Facetune did this and then in this year it was worth this much and then this and then this and a history of like how the news feed became algorithmic and then then it was monetized with ads. And then the grand reveal, the big takeaway is like. And that distorts women's self image.

[Caroline]

She's like, that is not capitalism, you fucking communist.

[Katie]

But it's like, okay, yeah, and this isn't really in question anymore. Like we don't really need a book in 2026 to break the news that this is how this works. Or for another very detailed timeline of the Kylie Lipkit phenomen on. And so I kept being like, what function is this serving? Like, why are we pointing out old and obvious things? And at an extremely painful Level of unnecessary detail, things that people just more or less agree on now. And I think to get a sense for what is actually happening here, we do have to examine Freya's work over time. How has it evolved and how does she exist in the ecosystem now? Because she has been publishing online since 2020 and her work has shifted in interesting ways. So the general thrust of Freya's evolution is that the whole social media is ruining the girls angle that she has taken on is a bit of a recent invention. This is how she describes her interest in these topics.

[Caroline]

Fix in the book In 2020 I started pitching to magazines and newspapers, trying to put into words how I felt about social media, about dating apps, about family breakdown, about how girlhood felt in the modern world. I began to notice threads running through it all. The pain girls and young women felt, the industries profiting from this, the commodification of everything, including our very self, the lies we were being told.

[Katie]

So my original theory of the case was that she started with the social media shit and then got more overtly right wing over time. And making this outline made me realize that I think it was actually the opposite. I think she started with more overtly reactionary gender stuff and then had a breakout moment with a couple social media related blog posts about capturing your life online. And then that sort of became the lacquer over the rest of it, but the core message remains the same. She really strikes me as a person who probably wanted to be like a right wing self help guru, but then found herself in the John Hight influence bubble and is now doing like a weird hybrid of gender stuff and screen time moral panic. And so I tried to do a general classification exercise of her substack work over time. And what I found is that in 2023, labeling Queen 12. So over half of her work of her pieces were specifically about gender anxiety, anti feminism or otherwise explicitly regressive ideas about gender. Ah, in 2024 it was only 10 or one in three pieces that dealt explicitly with these themes and she didn't really publish much in 2025. I think she was writing this book but. But social media and mental health went from representing eight pieces in 2023 to 15 in 2024. So like the proportionality sort of flipped. Now that's obviously not like an open and shut indictment by any means, but I wanted to attempt to quantify this qualitative shift that I was sensing and it was notable in my mind, especially when you layer in her early work for Evie and Colette. So we're now going to revisit some of that. That starting at the beginning. Okay, so in 2020, we get two pieces for Evie. History says that female leaders are more likely to wage war than men, and toxic femininity creates dangerous men. Okay. These are her first published pieces online.

[Caroline]

I feel like we talked about one of these articles before about women waging more wars than men. And it's like, the two female leaders in US History.

[Katie]

I honestly kind of fuck with it. I'm not going to lie. I was like, you know what?

[Caroline]

Fuck yeah, dude. If I was in charge, I would also send all of the men to their deaths. Okay, We've all heard the claim that if women ruled the world, there would be no wars. If more women were put in charge, there would be less war, kids would be better taken care of, and there would be a general improvement in living standards and outcomes. Former President Barack Obama once sat at an event in Singapore. Singapore. He described women as indisputably better and blamed men, particularly old men, for not, quote, getting out of the way. Obama has also previously stressed the importance of, quote, putting women in power because men seem to be having some problems these days.

[Katie]

Okay, so, like, I actually don't mind the defense that women are actually bloodthirsty warmongers because, as we know, yeah, let women be awful. The official stance of diabolical lies has led women beyond awful.

[Caroline]

More women dictators.

[Katie]

But the thing that's kind of ironic about this article is that it actually kind of flies in the face of, like, everything that would come after it. All of her gendered reflections, which very much support the women as God's police line of thinking that women are, like, inherently moral and they need to positively influence men, which we actually see in the toxic femininity creates dangerous men articles. Now I'm going to have you read from that piece.

[Caroline]

Okay. Nobody can deny that masculinity can be taken to the extreme, whether this manifests as bullying, domestic violence, or sexual assault. But it's too simplistic to say that men are the only ones who need to change. If we want real progress, we need to look deeper. What? Oh, I see where this is going. What creates these dangerous men? Okay, okay. She's okay. I know, I know. Yep. Yep. What's feeding. What's feeding toxic behavior? What we don't often consider is the other side of the spectrum. That toxic femininity could also be playing a role. I think it's time we look at the main influence in most young boys lives. Their mothers.

[Katie]

That's right. It's the mommy.

[Caroline]

Yeah, she's right. We definitely have not scrutinized mothers in the past. I think moms have been given a free fucking ride, and it's time to hold them to account for their sins.

[Katie]

She then quotes Jordan Peterson quoting Carl Young, Wayne Gretzky, Michael Scott style on the devouring mother. And then she closes with this. This which I present to you without comment.

[Caroline]

On the other side of the spectrum, when infantilized men feel powerless and humiliated, they may become hyper masculine, overprotected by their mothers. I'm reading this in a David Attenborough voice. Overprotected by their mothers, these boys become overwhelmed by the feminine, often leading to predatory and controlling behavior like sexual or domestic assault. Okay, just look at Harvey Weinstein, who, after being identified as a sex offender in 2017. Okay, can we also just say describing Harvey Weinstein as being identified as a sex offender? I'm like, let's put more specific language to that. Announced. I have created a $5 million foundation to give scholarships to women directors. It will be named after my mom. I won't disappoint her. What is her point?

[Katie]

She's saying that if a man turns out bad, we should look at his mother because it's her fault.

[Caroline]

She's either, okay, go fuck yourself, overly

[Katie]

protective or overly neglectful.

[Caroline]

Well, we obviously have to call Freya, India's mom. I mean, that's the only conclusion here.

[Katie]

And just look at Harvey Weinstein, will you? Okay, so then that's her earliest editorial footprint.

[Caroline]

I think it just really, really highlights the extent to which our media landscape is a fucking circus. Like it. Like the fact that, like, the people who get the most attention are actually as stupid as you think they are and that they just bring up other stupid people to the top, and then they all just fucking whack each other off on cnn. This is why we're in war with Iran. On. It's so unserious. And I think that it is a very destabilizing feeling. I don't even say that with malice towards her. I'm just, like, objectively, intellectually, this is an unbelievably stupid argument.

[Katie]

She wrote that when she was, what, 21?

[Caroline]

Right. And so who's publishing her? Exactly.

[Katie]

Right, Exactly.

[Caroline]

And that is giving Jackie Eubanks. I will say that is giving Jackie Eubanks that you pull women up because they serve a role in this landscape. And you're like, oh, this woman will be a great punching bag. Let's get the woman to say that we should Blame mothers for stuff and they just happily do it because it's a paycheck. And I get it. I mean, look at the clickbait I wrote. Like, I'm not above that. I understand that you want to make money, but like, it's fucking dark.

[Katie]

It's stupid. And it also has a very particular view of girls and women. That is not. I was just so distraught by the amount of pain they were in and wondering what could be causing it. This is not that. That's not what she was doing. That's not, that's not where she started. Moving on. In 2021, we got a piece about why women should listen to Jordan Peterson. And it made me realize that Jordan Peterson is like pseudo intellectual girl, wash your face for boys. So if you find, if you find

[Caroline]

it motivated, he's like, let them them, let them and let you.

[Katie]

Peace be with you. And also let them. So if you find it motivating to be degraded by a man in a sweater vest, which I will not kink shame. JP is your guy. Like, there's a reason that he resonates with a certain group of people. There's a real self help element to his brand that I don't think I quite appreciated before I, I went down this rabbit hole for this episode. She said in a Quillette interview that a viral Jordan Peterson destroys feminist video was like her moment of political awakening.

[Caroline]

Okay, I'm just gonna pause. I really need to say because I bet a lot of our listeners don't know what Quillette is. Quillette is like deranged Steve Bannon shit. Even Evie magazine is like, poses as a little bit more middle of the road. Quillette is like, let's bring back race. Science cannot be overstated how wild it is that those are her credentials.

[Katie]

Good note, good note. And her earliest credentials again, from the time that like in the book is being self mythologized as like the beginning of her journey to understand the effects of social media on young women. Like straightforwardly. That's just not what was happening here. Then in 2023 we get, quote, are girls being lied to about marriage? I'm so sick of the gender divide and why I'm worried about the rise of liberal young women. Women.

[Caroline]

Okay, can I just say I'm so sick of the gender divide. Could be a radical essay to eliminate the gender binary altogether. So we could take that either way.

[Katie]

That's true. It's not. It's not. But it could have been. But it could have been. So I'm just gonna have you read some pull quotes of the theses from these pieces so you can get a little taste of what we're working with here. This is from. Are girls being lied to about marriage?

[Caroline]

Is she gonna like, push for the teen birth rate to increase? Okay, it struck me. It struck me because I think it perfectly captures the dominant cultural narrative about marriage today, that it stunts women's personal growth and success found within fluorescent pink self help books, tick tock therapy hashtags, and feminist Instagram graphics. Is this idea that women should chase their. That women should have autonomy, that women should chase their dreams and build their career and figure out who they are before they commit? Stay single and find yourself. Your twenties are your selfish years. Explore and experiment like last bad advice. Like last week when 19 year old actress Millie Bobby Brown's announcement of her engagement was met with comments like, she's too young. She hasn't found herself yet. Yet. She doesn't know who she is. Okay, I just want to note, Freya India is a working woman who sold a book, I'm assuming kept the money for herself and is only engaged at 26. So, like, follow your own advice, girl. You spent the majority of your 20s chasing your own career.

[Katie]

That is correct.

[Caroline]

Girl, wash your face.

[Katie]

Girl, wash your. Let she whose face is washed. Cast the first baby. Okay, but it's in this 2023 piece about liberal young women that we start to see the connection explicitly forming between some of these early ideas and the social media thing. Okay, so this is why I'm worried about the rise of liberal young women. This is a piece that highlights the growing, quote, gender gap.

[Caroline]

It's like the Spartan warriors marching up in a phalanx. It's like, no, they're all wearing like little, like pithy catchphrases on their shirts from like the 2010s.

[Katie]

Little pussy hats, Little spiky pussy hats. No, just like, on their way to

[Caroline]

women who have like, a rough idea of bootstrapping. Scary

[Katie]

to ask for a raise and vote for the Democrats. Okay, so this is a piece that highlights the growing, quote unquote gender gap between men and women in their political beliefs and essentially attributes it to the algorithm, saying that the algorithm is responsible for, quote, extreme beliefs like, quote, climate change and, quote, sympathizing with bin Laden.

[Caroline]

Okay, Clocked. Fucking clocked.

[Katie]

Homer Simpson backing into head.

[Caroline]

Honey, honey, sympathizing with Bin Laden is not liberal. Babe, that's way farther left. Okay, another. I mean, have we thought about Bin Laden's mom? I don't Know, I think we should take that into consideration. Don't get mad at bin Laden. Get mad at his bitch mom. He didn't do anything. Dude. Calling Harvey Weinstein a sex offender. I don't know what she would call bin Laden, but I'm certain it would not be a correct classifier.

[Katie]

Okay, a hyper masculine, aggrieved.

[Caroline]

Seriously, the Jordan Peterson of the Middle East.

[Katie]

Some good ideas.

[Caroline]

Okay, Another major part of this is social media. Take those natural tendencies of girls and women, of agreeableness and conformity, and add to them algorithms designed to track our interests and deliver targeted content to our devices. Some feeds evolve into endless reels of social justice activism and progressive politics, becoming more extreme to boost engagement. You may have started out being a bit worried about climate change, but by the time the algorithm is done with you, that minor concern is deep seated fear of an imminent apocalypse, like the heat death of our planet. Lucy Biggers just kicks down the door, Kool Aid man style, and it's like, climate change isn't real. Okay, perhaps you started with sympathy for oppressed groups, and before you know it, you're making TikTok videos agreeing with Osama bin Laden. The assigning of social justice to white girls is probably giving them more undue credit than they deserve. You know what I mean? Like, I don't think white Liberal girls in 2015 were, like, at the base of social justice movements, but maybe that's

[Katie]

just me incriminating myself just like militant Marxist organizers.

[Caroline]

Right?

[Katie]

No. Well, and also, I mean, I, I include this example because I think it's illustrative, but also because it's kind of

[Caroline]

funny to be like, yeah, it's hysterical.

[Katie]

Y know, woke dumb ideas like climate change. It's like, oh, you mean the one thing that actually is like a, you know, an imminent and undeniable threat to our existence? So when I read this, I was like, it kind of feels like she only objects to social media insofar as it is a place where young women are expressing values that she personally finds objectionable. And I think that that lens is going to be really useful when we listen to her most popular interview to date shortly. But she cites a statistic a lot, both in interviews and in her book that, quote, liberal teen girls are by far the most likely to say they spend five or more hours on social media every day. So right off the bat, Caro, anything about that that seems a little off to you?

[Caroline]

How do you know if a teen girl is liberal? What the fuck does that mean?

[Katie]

Thank you. You. Her citation for this statistic in the the only place that it is cited which is in print is an article in the Free Press that Jonathan Haidt

[Caroline]

wrote called oh my God, the Rushing Nesting Doll. Oh fuck.

[Katie]

Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank first and fastest and I'm sorry it was paywalled and under no circumstances am I going to give the Free Press any of my money. So we are just going to have have to hold hands and make a safe assumption that this research is probably bullshit, which I feel comfortable doing because a lot of researchers in this field take a lot of umbrage with the conclusions that he is drawing from it.

[Caroline]

I have also, I will say I've been dancing around an episode on social media regulation because I find it really interesting and much more thorny than I think that we are than we often give it credit for. Like I think like you're talking about it is such a bipartisan issue and it undeniably reactionaries are at the front of like these moves to regulate. And so I have looked into this and I think like any sincere effort to understand this would acknowledge directly that like all of our studies are conflicted. I am not even convinced that social media hurts children more than adults. I'm not even convinced about that. I think that there is a a big save the children sniff test to this when we actually have no idea how social media is impacting adults, impacting elderly people. It's really up in the air at this point and you have instincts but they are not verifiable at this point.

[Katie]

That's also partially why I didn't want to make the episode about social media. But according to the research that is publicly available and not behind a free press paywall, a Gallup study from 2023 found that it is true that girls spend more time on social media than boys do. Every day 5.3 hours compared to 4.4 hours. But it's not broken down by political affiliation of the kids because they are kids. They are studying 13 to 19 year olds and five of those seven groups cannot vote. They are minor children. They cannot reasonably be said to have a politics. The only mention of political affiliation in the report is the political affiliation of parents of teens. And who is most likely likely to say that they restrict social media use with 43% of the most liberal parents saying they either agreed or strongly agreed that they restricted their teens screen time compared to 63% of very conservative parents reporting that they restricted screen time. Which is to say they asked the parents hey, do you restrict your kids

[Caroline]

screen time so self reported too.

[Katie]

Yes. And that was the split between the self identified most liberal and most conservative parents. Now there is some evidence in this report that the screen time of children whose parents say that they restrict use is lower. The children of parents, both conservative and liberal, who agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that they restrict their children's screen time do spend less time on social media each day between 3.7 and 3.9 hours per day on average, as opposed to those whose parents. Parents strongly disagreed with limiting use, who spent the average of five and a half. But that is a different claim than liberal teenage girls have a problem with social media.

[Caroline]

Right.

[Katie]

And I think this is a perfect example of a claim where the way in which she has changed it makes very transparent the actual function of her argument. She could just say teen girls use social media too much or teenager. Even teenagers use social media too much. But liberal girls is a very specific caricature that enables this underlying message that this group of feminism pilled wokies needs an intervention to function.

[Caroline]

Just to really sit for a second with that survey, because I feel like doing this project has given me such an appreciation for the way that we will just, the proverbial, we will just kind of throw around studies. And I think in the Scott Galloway episode we talked about how a totally like butt kiss study.

[Katie]

The Twitter poll.

[Caroline]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That he shared has since been re. Shared by all these other thinkers and it is now accepted as common knowledge. It just reflects what Jonathan Haidt wants to believe about allegedly liberal people. And I will say secondarily, just to take it at face value that there is some legitimacy to this survey. Okay, so you're looking at three and a half hours for conservative girls and five hours for liberal girls. Okay, what is that 90 minute difference difference mean? What does that mean? That like we're getting more. What are they doing on social media? Are they talking to friends? Are they looking at their algorithm? What counts as social media? Is it screen time? Is it them being on Instagram? Is it them being on Chrome? Like there are all these questions that I think cascade out from this where you start to really see just how useless this information is. But people will quote this and then all of a sudden like a CNN panel will do an eight minute minute segment on this.

[Katie]

Yeah, well, three and a half hours is the, the threshold on TikTok where the algorithm will start then serving you the Al Qaeda videos. That's like the, that's like the cutoff,

[Caroline]

you know, that's the bin Laden witching hour.

[Katie]

Right, Exactly. That's the witching hour.

[Caroline]

Yeah, that's when the globalize. The Centipata worm comes out.

[Katie]

They're like, okay, all the conservative good girls are gone. Let's talk about Hamas.

[Caroline]

Time to show some bin Laden be.

[Katie]

Okay. The piece then transitions to how this is a problem specifically because of a falling marriage and birth rate.

[Caroline]

Okay, why hasn't she had kids?

[Katie]

Here is Freya reading it for us.

[Caroline]

Freya, you're past peak fertility girl. Your eggs are dwindling. You should have had kids at 22. I mean, even that is arguably late. I mean, you're.

[Katie]

You're.

[Caroline]

Your compatriots in arms want you to have a kid at 17, so you're pretty fucking late.

[Freya India]

What does this mean for our future? Marriage and birth rates are already falling fast. In the UK, more than half of women aged 34 or under are now unmarried, and the majority are now childless by their 30th birthday. In the US too, 45% of women are predicted to be childless and unmarried by 2030.

[Caroline]

Okay, okay, I just want to note here, this video is on triggernometry, an objectively conservative site. Why is she getting all of her blurbs from men on the left?

[Katie]

Also a podcast that we have more subscribers. Just note that number two coming for the number one spot on the culture leaderboard. That's right, folks, it's diabolical lies. But yeah, so the fact that we've like made this jump in this piece from liberal teen girls on social media to essentially like collapse of Western civilization talking points, things that underpin actually a lot of Peterson person's work, distress over birth rates, marriage rates declining, declining Christianity, et cetera. Very telling at all. That. That is like what we're laddering up to.

[Caroline]

Right? Right.

[Katie]

It's almost like we're not actually worried about social media use or the intricacies therein. All right, and then here is how she wraps it up.

[Freya India]

Parents must also actively oppose ideologies that instill in government world's. The disempowering beliefs that valorize victimhood, that vilify men who present meaningful commitment as a patriarchal trap, that take detached individualism and dress it up as liberation. No more indulging this. Our priority now has to be protecting adolescent girls who are increasingly anxious, depressed and lonely from a demoralizing and atomizing ideology to which they are uniquely vulnerable. Lastly, then get. Get girls off of social media. If you are a parent, delay your daughter's entry until at least 16. These platforms not only expose her to extreme ideologies but rip her away from real life, real relationships, real resilience and learning about the world from what she experiences rather than what a pre packaged ideology presents her with. Parents must work together on this and shut it off.

[Caroline]

Can I just say something? I just realized she wrote a book titled Girls that is ostensibly about the plight of young women and only men blurbed her her book. Like, get a woman on board. Get Ann Coulter. Call Ann Coulter. She would have blurbed this.

[Katie]

Megan Kelly. Megan Kelly. Paging Megan Kelly.

[Caroline]

Megan Kelly just drops out of the ceiling.

[Katie]

You're needed like a.

[Caroline]

You're needed in the Trigger studio. She like comes in riding her extensions.

[Katie]

Walk three doors down from the Megan Kelly show.

[Caroline]

The whisper trad wifey voice she's putting on that's like, girls need to have babies.

[Katie]

Can the girls still podcast? That's what I want to know. No, social media is fine, but can they? Can they podcast?

[Caroline]

It will never cease to amaze me, the gall that these women have on the right to encourage women to give up independence, give up their careers, and have children when they prioritize their careers and often don't have to children. Like for Freya India to be saying this at 26, she's not even fully married yet. Dude, you're literally an example of the embodiment of the girls that you are insulting. You're a childless woman telling me that the problem with this world is childless women. It's unbelievably ballsy.

[Katie]

Yeah, at least I was married at 26, like a good little child bride.

[Caroline]

Same. Married at 26, currently with child, doing the work that Freya India wants.

[Katie]

Let's fucking go. So the loose argument that appears to take shape if you listen to her interviews and read her book is that social media is to blame for young girls becoming increasingly alienated from their true purpose as wives and mothers. And I think that this is really interesting. This was the, like, reading of an article where I was like, oh, she wants young women off of these platforms because it's where they're being. Being exposed to ideas that she does not like.

[Caroline]

Yes.

[Katie]

So, Carol, anything you'd like to note about the declining birth rate while we're here before we move on?

[Caroline]

I mean, how much time do you have?

[Katie]

So the birth rate has been declining since the mid-2000s, but almost exclusively for people ages 15 to 19 and 20 to 24.

[Caroline]

Right, right, right. The teen birth thing.

[Katie]

Yeah, right. It's been steady or trending up for everyone else.

[Caroline]

The age windows that she has aged out of. She is not she has not had children in those windows. Why? Because it is not advantageous for women to have children under the age of 24. Nine times out of 10.

[Katie]

Okay, so we're into 2024 now. In 2024, we got one of her most popular substack pieces to date called the Age of Abandonment. Now, in the Age of Abandonment, there's sort of a circular argument happening. She says a fear of abandonment is both caused by divorce and family breakdown, as well as the cause of lack of marriage and family breakdown. And like, I guess if you're making like a generational trauma argument, that could kind of make sense. This piece absolutely fucking crushed. She had another few viral hits that year about how nobody has a personality anymore. And again, the thesis is essentially, algorithms make young women mindless consumers. 2025 saw fewer pieces, as I mentioned, because I believe she was working on this book. And then she came back swinging in 2026 with how social media feminized us.

[Caroline]

All right, Derogatory.

[Katie]

The Women Joining the New Right, which is an out and out celebration of conservatism as a place where a young woman can gain something deeper than what the excesses of liberalism have to offer on TikTok. Okay, so now we've kind of reached the pinnacle of this episode. Last March, Freya was invited on a podcast called Modern Wisdom.

[Caroline]

Oh, great.

[Katie]

With host Chris Williamson, I would slot this podcast into the Diary of a CEO Extended universe. Chris Williamson is a guy who has actually, not unlike the Diary of CEO host, slowly introduced more manosphere adjacent talking points into his rhetoric in the last. Last, like 12 to 18 months. Hypergamy stuff, like all that whole bag, sure. But this podcast is unthinkably huge. It has 4.2 million subscribers. So again, we're in punching up land. We can be mean. And Freya joined Chris for an episode called Being Damaged is Not a Personality Trait with a thumbnail image superimposed with Freya's face and the words Girlbot burnout in all caps on top of it. So I want to spend time with this interview because to my knowledge, it is the largest platform she has been given to date and she mostly hits on the same talking points that are in the book. And I want to just go through claim by claim.

[Caroline]

Great. Are we going to do it Xand out at a half speed or are we. Are we above that at this point?

[Katie]

We were above it, but now, now that you mentioned it, I know it

[Caroline]

does sound kind of fun.

[Katie]

I did warn everybody that this was going to take three hours, so maybe Maybe we will. The conversation opens with a discussion of Freya's views on therapy culture, or the diagnosing of what she characterizes as normal human emotions and experiences with the platitude that therapy has replaced religion in our culture. And she admits that this is a cliche. She doesn't, like, claim to have invented that idea. Who Herself. But. Okay, yeah, sure, therapy speak can be annoying. No objection there. So let's listen to how she describes this phenomenon, and we're just going to kind of do like, a case study of how she navigates and weaves these topics together.

[Caroline]

Freya, India, fiance. Hold on. I need to find out whose fiance is taller, Mine or hers? Hold on.

[Katie]

His name is Evan.

[Caroline]

Evan, Fiance. Evan. Okay. Married at 20. Yeah. All right, I'll. I'll look into this later, but I think it's safe to say that mine is probably taller, so go on.

[Katie]

Yeah. Well, you're married to a giraffe, so.

[Caroline]

A very masculine giraffe.

[Katie]

A very masculine giraffe who is being

[Caroline]

feminized by the water.

[Katie]

Riley and the frogs slowly turning gay. It's just the.

[Caroline]

That sounds like a children's book that they would try to ban.

[Katie]

Says microplastics. Casey, just saying, just pops out of nowhere. She's like, did someone say she's wearing those fucking gloves?

[Caroline]

She's always wearing that evening wear that she wears? Florida in 150 degrees.

[Katie]

She says, like, you live in Tampa. It's July, babe.

[Caroline]

It's like, you look photoshopped. What are you wearing? You can't be surprised by the heat.

[Katie]

Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. Ready? All right.

[Freya India]

But in recent years, since social media, I would say therapy culture has just escalated to the point where I think young women don't see it as a worldview. They just see that as kind of life. So they interpret everything through this therapeutic lens. So their lives, their relationships, their emotions, and I think it has elevated to the level of religion. So you think of all the kind of characteristics of religion. We just mimic them with therapy culture. So instead of praying, we just repeat our positive affirmations. Instead of seeking salvation, you'll go on a healing journey. Instead of, like, you know, resisting temptation from the devil, you'll reframe your intrusive thoughts. And so I think for young women in particular who are becoming less religious, this kind of therapeutic worldview has completely replaced that void.

[Caroline]

What does a therapeutic worldview consist of?

[Freya India]

What does that mean, like, seeing problems in your life?

[Caroline]

She's like, have you heard of capitalism?

[Freya India]

Kind of pathologizing problems and experiences as something medical rather than I'm just experiencing this emotion or kind of age old anxiety. Now it's become a medical issue. So things like talking in the language of attachment styles and trauma and losing the language of just ordinary hurt and disappointment and things like that.

[Caroline]

And for some reason this is giving, it's like, how do I feel some kind of solace or comfort, order being brought out of chaos?

[Freya India]

I think it gives the comfort religion gives and the consolation of like, you see young women on TikTok saying things like, like they won't pray to God but they'll give a request to the universe. And like have faith in that.

[Katie]

Okay, so we loop in social media, Right. Social media has made this problem of therapy speak worse. Women on TikTok are requesting things from the universe. They're talking about attachment theory and that's annoying. And right away you are left with the impression that therapy culture replacing religion has been an issue for decades. Sure. But it is accelerating because of social media. And so what's interesting then is what happens when we get into her prescription for solving this issue.

[Freya India]

And Jonathan Haidt did some research on this showing that he like presented, he looked at a survey of statements and they were things like, I have no hope in myself, I don't believe, like really self disparaging statements. And he found that teenagers without religion agreed with them way stronger than teenagers who were religious and especially who were conservative. And I think there's a couple of reasons for that. I think one is kind of that external locus of control. So conservatives tend to have more

[Caroline]

of

[Freya India]

an internal locus of control, so they feel more control over things happening in their lives. Also if you're conservative teenager, you're more likely to be living with both parents, which I think protects your mental health.

[Caroline]

Okay, flag that.

[Freya India]

And also your parents are more likely to have clearer boundaries with you, which I think is actually very useful for anxiety and depression.

[Katie]

I can see you googling. Don't worry, we're going to get into it.

[Freya India]

There's different explanations for it, but yeah, it's a worry because young women are becoming less religious and their mental health is also tanking. So there has to be some link there.

[Katie]

Okay, so there has to be some link there. That's actually, that's not how causality works. This is the Jonathan Height school for correlation is causation. And okay, so think about what just happened there. We start with this broad statement about this ambiguous but I think generally understood phenomenon called therapy culture. She links it to social media and then she Zooms way into a kind of complete non sequitur. And by the way, religious conservative teens are happening happier and then zooms back out and says religion has been declining and mental health issues are worse. And so there must be some link there. I want to slow this down. Take these five rapid fire claims one by one. Okay, so she just layered five kind of half facts on top of one another in like a Jenga tower of misleadingness. And it's just disorienting. So, okay, one by one claim number one, conservatives feel more control over things happening in their lives. She uses the phrase locus of control. This is a very popular idea that the Cato Institute loves. The only evidence that I can find ever cited for this claim about internal versus external locus of control is a 1981 study that asked conservatives and liberals a series of questions about whether they believe their life outcomes are shaped by their own actions actions and whether their outcomes are shaped by powerful people or random chance. And conservatives were more likely to assign a higher value to individual action and a lower value to the forces in their environment. Any modern day articles about this idea cited this study and there are a few things to note about it. Number one, much of the research used undergraduate college students, that is not a representative population for making broad claims about political psychology. Number two, beyond that, the study itself is correlational. We do not know whether people who think they are individually responsible for everything that happens to them are more likely to become conservative because of that belief or if adopting a conservative viewpoint makes you feel more in control of your life. Number three, and I think this is the most important part, the author herself notes explicitly that sometimes believing that power greater than you are impacting or controlling your outcomes is actually just the most accurate perception of your reality. We should not pathologize that answer because you may just be correctly identifying an obstacle to change, not indulging in like personal helplessness.

[Caroline]

Just to add to that, she's also makes a lot of effort to describe progressive or liberal beliefs as kind of like a dogma that someone falls into without realizing. And she doesn't ever acknowledge that conservative beliefs are the same. Like going to church is a dogma in its own way. And so it's like, I mean again, moral neutrality to either of those sides, but like both of those are cultural frameworks that you either inherit or step into and then impact how you view the world. Neither of those are fixed variables, but she treats basically a conservative dogma. And she treats like prior language, like pre therapy speak language as this fixed variable and it's like, well, language is always changing.

[Katie]

Well, and it's also. So the biggest kind of LOL happening here is like we're writing a book and discussing essentially like radicalization online, when what is obviously the more dangerous and prominent version of radicalization online is right wing radicalization, like as defined by the fucking FBI, who is like, yeah, this is a problem for hoax. So if you are concerned about radicalization by algorithms, there is a story to be told there. But it's not teen girls talking about patriarchy, you know?

[Caroline]

Right, right. It's not teen girls fangirling over Osama bin Laden.

[Katie]

But I think this process is indicative of the sorts of claims that are being made here. When Freya says things like studies show. When you look into the studies, they're often small samples of undergraduates, kind of tenuous methodology. And here is a passage in the final chapter of the book where again we get claims about liberal girls, again citing John Haidt.

[Caroline]

One likely explanation, Jonathan Haidt argues, is a loss of agency. In psychology, this relates to our locus of control, the sense of how much power we have over our own lives. Those with an external locus of control tend to feel that life happens to them them, while those with an internal locus of control believe they have more influence. In recent years, adolescents sense of control has shifted outwards. Gen Z as a whole began to feel less in control of their futures. But the shift was biggest among liberal teenagers, particularly liberal girls. This aligns with decades of research showing that conservatives on average tend to have a more internal locus of control, while liberals lean more external. And the more external your locus of control, the more likely you are to feel anxious, hopeless and depressed.

[Katie]

Okay. The only citation in that entire section is a paper from 2014 about the quote, partisan personality conducted by a researcher whose specialty is social media and public relations. It used 610,10 quote, young voters with a study design that was considerably less thoughtful than the 1981 study.

[Caroline]

So unserious.

[Katie]

Okay, let's move on to claim number two. If you're a conservative teenager, you're more likely to be living in a two parent household.

[Caroline]

Yeah.

[Katie]

Okay, so first of all, we've covered this. The problem is that teens being segmented by their own politics doesn't really happen in serious research because they are minors who do not have politics.

[Caroline]

Right.

[Katie]

So I really couldn't find evidence for this claim as she's making it and

[Caroline]

she didn't cite it and she provides none of.

[Katie]

But we can segment for politics of parents.

[Freya India]

Right.

[Katie]

So maybe we can't say Conservative teens, but we can say conservative parents. There was an interesting piece from none other than our boy Brad Wilcox at the Institute for Family Studies.

[Caroline]

This is a cottage industry of people just keeping each other afloat and just coming up with stats to slip into each other's books. It's unbelievable.

[Katie]

Well, the problem with this statistic is that it's only half true. According to Brad, teens in the reddest and bluest states were those most likely to have grown up with continuously married parents. Which would appear to contradict the claim that conservatism is the best predictor of whether you live in a two parent household. So again, the most blue states and the most red states states. Now the theories about the various like causal devices happening here are different. We're really not going to spend too much time digging into those today. But the point is it's not just the more conservative the voting record in a particular zip code, the more likely you are to find a two parent household and then like it gets progressively more single as you like go across the spectrum to the left. Similarly, if you're asking which households have the lowest rate of non marital births, which means the fewest kids born to unmarried population parents, again, bluest and reddest. In fact, if you just look at the top 25 states, okay, the top half with the highest percentages of teens with married parents, 14 of them are blue states. And what really jumps out at you when you look at the list is that the lowest rates of teens with married parents are in the poorest states, which are largely red states. Mississippi, Louisiana, Alaska, Georgia, New Mexico, Oklahoma, West Virginia. So again, one of the strongest predictors of whether you stay married. And again, we don't really know the causality versus correlation here, but like statistically this is evident is whether you're college educated. So like race, income, education, these are big confounding variables here that can have correlations to particular political viewpoints points, but not with enough consistency or coherence to make the claim that she is making. So that's claim number two. Okay, Claim number three is the second part of the conservative teens live into parent households claim, which is that being a teen living with both of your parents protects your mental health. This is true if your parents get along like it is true that parental conflict is associated with, quote, poorer academic achievement, increased substance use, early family formation and dissolution, which basically means teen pregnancy. But this claim assumes that you only experience the effects of marital conflict if your parents get divorced. But if your parents have a high conflict marriage, divorce can Actually be what brings relief from the stressful home environment, not the thing that creates the stressful environment. High conflict. Continuously married parents produce statistically indistinguishable results from the other family types they studied. Plus like again, I hate to hammer meat nail here again and ring the bell but income plays a really big part in this outcome.

[Caroline]

I was just about to say this is a socioeconomic conversation. I feel like one.

[Katie]

Derek.

[Caroline]

Derek.

[Katie]

One study that I will link in the show notes cited a few others and they basically found that up to half the association between single parent families and the outcomes that are often studied as negative effects. So the children's academic performance, the teen pregnancy, the quote, idleness can be attributed to being low income which is often a confounding variable with being a single parent rather than like the generalized absence of a second parent.

[Caroline]

Right.

[Katie]

This is why it is so frustrating that the story you will often hear about social safety nets is that the family is supposed to be the location where you receive all the things that you need to survive. And hey, wouldn't you know it, married people, they have greater resources so everyone should get married to avoid all the pitfalls of single parenting. And like the social safety net is bad because it discourages people from marriage. Right. That is the story when in reality the social safety net can eliminate half the bad outcomes of raising a family alone. Like if you don't want those bad outcomes, there's a very simple solution that does not involve forcing people to get and stay legally married. Claim number four, conservative parents have clearer boundaries with their children. Okay, didn't really know how to go about fact checking that one.

[Caroline]

I mean I think you and I can probably fact check that one. Personally I'm like unclear.

[Katie]

And then claim number five, clear parental boundaries are helpful for anxiety and depression. I mean okay, sort of tracks if, if you think about conservatives relationship with order and rules based approaches to life. But like even then it's so tenuous. I don't, I don't even know how to respond to it.

[Caroline]

I was going to say it's just something that like potentially sounds nice.

[Katie]

I think it's, it's very much falls into that camp of that which you do not need evidence to, to believe. But what is the headline here? How did we end up talking about divorce rates and family breakdown? The question was about therapy culture on TikTok, right. How did we get here? Well it's not just about religion or staying off social media. Conservatism itself is being not so subtly positioned as the solution for the Mental health crises that she sees us downstream from social media. Media.

[Caroline]

Yeah.

[Katie]

So a trend that you'll notice is that India sees modern advice for women so like for example, don't be a people pleaser as antithetical to Christianity, which suggests putting other people's needs ahead of your own. And she talks about worrying that therapy culture, in what she calls co rumination spaces online, AKA places where young women gather and talk about their problems with each other, is making women.

[Caroline]

Are you referencing friends? Friendship. Do you know what friendship is?

[Katie]

No, no, it's co rumination.

[Caroline]

Sorry. Yeah, co rumination is making women perceive,

[Katie]

quote, constructive criticism from male partners as problematic.

[Caroline]

Put a sticky on that one.

[Katie]

So we are now going to watch a quick clip.

[Freya India]

But the problem with that is you shut down any constructive criticism of you. Like if your boyfriend has a construction constructive comment about you, if you are being selfish or something. Therapy culture does provide endless excuses to kind of twist that into.

[Caroline]

You don't need to hear this.

[Freya India]

Yeah, he's a toxic person. You're only like that because of your childhood trauma. He's just like an asshole. But you have like all of these reasons why you behave that way.

[Caroline]

Have you contrasted this, I don't know whether you've been able to look at it with what young guys see. Is there an equivalent for young guys? Guys?

[Freya India]

I, I think the only equivalent I could think of is the productivity stuff.

[Caroline]

Can you imagine your, your husband or your boyfriend being like, hey, I'm worried that your, that your relationship with your friends is getting in the way of my constructive criticism for you within this relationship? Like, run, girls, run.

[Katie]

The conversation I have every night at dinner with my husband, he's like, you text care too much.

[Caroline]

You're like, don't care. Shut up. Jealous.

[Katie]

Okay, here we go. So selfishness versus selflessness comes up a couple times. And her focus on being selfless and putting others first is interesting because it really only appears within the context of romantic relationships. Like, in all the reading of her work that I did, I couldn't find an instance where the example of selflessness related to like working at a soup kitchen on a Saturday, you know, it was always tied back to the romantic partner. Her concern that women do not give enough of themselves to relationships and family and like, as we know, that is just not representative whatsoever of anything that we know about how women are spending their time.

[Caroline]

Right. Women are statistically proven to be the backbone of caregiving in this society, in every society.

[Katie]

So on that note, I want to take a brief digression back to the text here to the book because there's a section in the final chapter that I think is quite revealing in this vein. It's about the girl boss. If you will please read and just pay attention to the critique being made.

[Caroline]

I just also want to note for the millionth time, she is a fucking girl boss. She is the definition. What is the definition of a girl boss? I'm going to read this to you and you tell me if this is Freya, an ambitious successful woman, typically an entrepreneur or leader who thrives in male dominated female fields. Exit scene. Left woman with the right wing media ecosystem. Right wing media ecosystem woman who is 26, selling a book, building her own little media ecosystem in a field where she has all blurbs by men. I'm sorry, are you not a girl boss? Oh, have you been in a relationship for like a year? You're not even married yet, you have no children and you're on girl bosses when you are literally a girl boss. And Katie and I are out here doing the good Marxist work with our decades long heterosexual, boring white relationships and I am literally Mother Mary with child. Like, are you me girl? Wash your face. Anyways, what are we doing?

[Katie]

Beautiful. Read the quote. You're reading the quote.

[Caroline]

Throughout the 2010s too, corporations helped women remove any obstacles getting in the way of their goals.

[Katie]

Tracks. Tell me, tell me you've never worked inside a corporation. Corporation. Corporations are making it too easy for women to succeed, actually. And for my next trick, I'm going

[Caroline]

to argue this is giving. I've never worked at a corporation, okay? Companies like Spotify, Apple, Meta and Goldman Sachs, for example, introduced fertility perks for female employees covering the costs of egg freezing. Once again, Freya, until you have a child of your own, maybe we don't shit on fertility perks. Moving forward, everybody knows this is what you need to do to show management you are committed to the company and that you will push off having a family for many years down the road. One 26 year old executive at Morgan Stanley told the New York Post. Told the New York Post. Oh my God. This is. It's truly a, a, a drip castle of fuck. Okay. A 30 year old associate at bank of America said the same. There's definitely a silent pressure coming from Mittens management. Family life was increasingly organized around work. Companies like X and Zillow offered services like breast milk shipping so new mothers could go on business trips and ship milk back home. Some firms provided robotic cribs that acted as a virtual 20. Okay, I feel. This feels clickbaity. Some firms provided robotic cribs that acted as a virtual 247 nanny so parents could be more productive, while others offered on site childcare. The horror with 17 of the Fortune 100, including Boeing, Nike and Disney, introducing workplace nurseries to keep mothers at their desks.

[Katie]

Let me take that argument for a second and give you the. The. The. If I'm being excessively generous, what I would say, which.

[Caroline]

Why, that's my bit, Katie. We're. We're well into the second half.

[Katie]

Carrie. Yeah, you're right. Everyone that hates us has already stopped listening.

[Caroline]

Only the real ones are still here at this point.

[Katie]

The four people who are just not alone.

[Caroline]

Only Freya India, Jonathan Haidt, and Jonathan Haidt's bitch mother are listening at this point.

[Katie]

Don't forget Bin Laden and Bin Laden and his mother, Bin Laden from beyond the grave. If I'm being excessively generous, what I would maybe say is, okay, yeah, providing fertility benefits and not providing, like, a subsidy for child care. Like, sure, you can maybe spend that as like an affair. Various. Kind of like, yeah, put off the family. Don't have the family. We'd rather you delay this longer. Sure. I could, I could maybe see that as like a conspiratorial explanation for why you would get one and not the other. But the corporate world. Freya India paints here and for the record, has never been a part of.

[Caroline]

Right.

[Katie]

Is one in which corporations made it too easy for women to participate fully in work and accommodate their family life. She is mirroring the critique that people made of tech companies about having cafeterias and laundry service and, like, nap pods and shit with the intention of creating an environment conducive to employees working longer hours. But, like, this idea that, like, they're providing child care because they want you to never leave and they're, they're just making it too easy for mothers to participate. It's like you are not living in the same reality that the rest of us are.

[Caroline]

Yeah, I mean, this is one of those paragraphs where it's like, I have a hard time even deciding what to say because she obviously doesn't have research experience. So, like, it's not like she's looking into this. Because I never want to pretend that you can't speak, at least with, like, intentional eloquence about something that, like, you don't have to have a lived experience in order to understand it. I do believe that.

[Katie]

Sure.

[Caroline]

But, like, she doesn't have the research to back up anything she's saying. And, and she doesn't have the lived experience to talk about motherhood or to talk about working in the corporate world. And so she's speaking very broadly to the two realms that she hasn't, as far as I can presume that she hasn't even dipped a toe in. I would be willing to bet that if you asked her what the minimum federal leave is, she wouldn't begin to guess. She would have no idea what like the non corporate, corporate paid leave benefits are. Because as much as it's fun to on corporations, like having the parental leave benefits at like a Google is a fucking jackpot compared to what most Americans have. Google is the closest you get to Scandinavia. They have like a six or seven month maternity leave. And for all of the flaws of that aside and all of the incentives and blah, blah, blah, that's not nothing. That's actually massive for parents.

[Katie]

Yeah.

[Caroline]

And then the last thing I was just going to say is when she's talking about, about like keeping mothers there and like they're doing the work so that you can work less, I feel like she doesn't also acknowledge that women do that work at home.

[Katie]

Yeah.

[Caroline]

You know what I mean? It's like, yeah, I'm working there longer but like most women work very long hours in America and then go home and do a shit ton of labor. And so it just, every sentence in this paragraph reeks to me of like, you really don't know what you're talking about. To the point of this being like a nonsensical tirade that again, full circle, only a man would agree with. Again, only men blurbed this book. It's like, oh yeah, other people who also don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

[Katie]

I just thought that was such a telling passage. If the argument had been like, yeah, the workplace isn't set up for women and that's why you shouldn't be in it and you should just opt out. That would have been one thing.

[Caroline]

Yeah.

[Katie]

But to argue that it's making it too easy for women to participate, it's crackpot shit.

[Caroline]

And you know what I'm also thinking about is that she's pulling out these clickbait things of like robotic nursing ribs and they're shipping breast milk and like, I don't know, it's giving like all the clickbait. We had about like the Woke seminars when Robin d' Angelo was like waging, waging her tirade. But you know what's so funny and ironic is that you actually don't have to do what she's doing. To depict a dystopian world because the actual world that American mothers live. Live in is dystopic. You can be like, hey, do you know that women are being forced to undergo C sections because they don't have rights over their own bodies in states right now? Hey, do you know that women are bleeding out in parking lots? Hey, do you know that women have to go back to work when they are two weeks postpartum in this country? Like, you can play that game with widely relevant statistics that impact millions of women, but instead she's doing the Pierce Morgan thing, and she's, like, pulling at these things that actually are completely irrelevant to. To the vast, vast majority of Americans to paint a picture that is, like, in direct opposition to the actual dystopian reality.

[Katie]

Okay, next clip.

[Freya India]

And then you think of things like young people not wanting to get married and have children. And it's like, well, yeah, because there'll be a huge obstacle if we think that we have to have this perfect control over our mental health or our productivity routine. Anyone else is going to seem like chaos coming into that. And so I think young men and women can both go to an extreme of those, but it's kind of the same thing. It's like an avoidance strategy. It's like, I have full control in this situation, and I'm not vulnerable.

[Caroline]

Okay, you're. I can't. I can't with this. I can't with her pushing this and not doing it.

[Katie]

So it continues like that for a while. Okay, you can observe the same pattern.

[Caroline]

Oh, my God.

[Katie]

Start with the social media critique. Expand it to the broader demographics thing. Position conservative ideology as the solution. But it becomes really explicit toward the end of the interview.

[Freya India]

And I think what has accidentally happened is feminism pushed this idea of, like, girls and boys are just as strong as each other. And then that led to people thinking, oh, so they don't need. Girls don't need extra protection, which killed chivalry, but also killed. Killed fathers actually protecting girls. Because the problem is not like, women are weak. It's that girls are vulnerable. But now we think, oh, we should all step back, let girls do what they want.

[Caroline]

A lot of baby went up with bathwater.

[Freya India]

Yeah. And now you see a lot of

[Caroline]

chivalry went out with patriarchy.

[Freya India]

Yeah, well, we killed good authority.

[Caroline]

Good authority.

[Freya India]

We just killed all authority. And so now you have young women, like, demanding that their universities protect them and demanding that the government step in and. And, like, staring at someone becomes harassment on the tube because they don't have. We Degraded the authority of men they trust like good men and hopefully like their fathers and brothers. We just said, oh, all kind of protection is patronizing and we don't need it.

[Katie]

Hopefully. Hopefully you'd be doing a lot of work there. Hopefully doing a lot of work. Okay, say it with me, everyone. Citation.

[Caroline]

Fucking meaning.

[Katie]

That was a portion about OnlyFans. Okay, so you begin with the Internet based critique, the commodification idea. Then you expand quickly to. We need to bring back the idea that girls are inherently more vulnerable. We need to restore the authority of the men in their lives, okay?

[Caroline]

Because we know that, that, that incidence of rape is inversely correlated to the RA rates of singular authority in male driven societies. Of course, the more good authority we have, the less violence.

[Katie]

It's so fucking backward. That logic right there. We need to restore the authority of the good men, the fathers and the brothers, because otherwise the young women will sell their bodies on the Internet. Babe. Who do you think they need protection from?

[Caroline]

Right?

[Katie]

It's the stranger danger thing all over again. 75% of child sex above abused, that's a low estimate. Is committed by a family member or another like trusted male figure in the child's life. The solution is not to imbue young girls with even more unquestioning faith in the authority of the adult men in their lives.

[Caroline]

It's just so wild to me, once again to just highlight what a fucking donkey farm of our media landscape we live in. The fact that we accept point blank in allegedly objective news spaces is that incidents of rape and sexual violence and physical abuse have gone up with feminist liberation. When we have mountains and mountains and mountains of evidence to show that that has decreased significantly over time. If we were to take women seriously as people, this would be like a laughable thing to say. It would be one thing to, to argue like, well, you know, you know, you argue about the nuclear family and you do all that bullshit and you basically imply that like, women should suffer some violence in order for us to restore society. That actually is an argument that has more rhetorical consistency than arguing that women will be safer under these environments.

[Katie]

Essential voice of Gen Z. Gen Zed.

[Caroline]

Show some respect.

[Katie]

Gen Zed. Okay, so to lighten the mood, again, just briefly, something that's increasingly obvious to me from this interview and reading her work is that almost the entirety of her analysis is focused on like young women being annoying on the Internet. Like, it's all just so inextricably connected to how people behave on Tik Tok. Yeah, so I'm going To have you read one passage in the diagnosed chapter that I think illustrates this well.

[Caroline]

Okay. Feel misunderstood. Tiktokers suggested you might have adhd, bad at eye contact, could be autism. Watch the same TV shows over and over. Might be an anxiety disorder disorder. Replay the same songs in your head. Sounds like neurodivergence. I can't believe I just found this out. But having songs stuck in your head isn't normal, says one TikToker to 2.9 million views. This is common with people who have ADHD or autism, and it's called internal echolalia. Other influencers make these conditions sound fun and quirky. Neurodivergent has become neurospicy or neurosparkly, while neurotypicals are boring. Tiktokers call themselves hotistic, hot and autistic. Insist that's funny. Insist that hot girls have anxiety, and playfully ask followers what flavor of autism they have. I, I, I this is just so unserious. This is so boring.

[Katie]

It's just like she just, like, is annoyed. This is a woman who has built an entire, like, regressive media shtick on just genuinely finding her peers annoying. Like, this is boomer bait. This is designed in a lab to make people over 65 freak the fuck out that their grandchildren are going to start using a litter box. And I would add, this is important. Like, we did talk about the autistic thing earlier. It not infrequently flickers into transphobia. Like, that paragraph later goes on to being like. Or maybe you go from finding out what gender identity is to being told by tiktokers that, you know, being forgetful is a symptom of gender dysphoria.

[Caroline]

I've been trying to find a way to, like, say this without making it a personal attack, because again, I agree. I don't think the point is is really Freya. I think it's the ecosystem that she's swimming in. This ecosystem. These people who are so fixated on the Internet. I understand that she doesn't have social media channels, but it really gives the, gives the mouth feel of someone who doesn't spend time with people in real life. There is a little bit of an element here where I'm like, like, yeah. I mean, the Internet algorithms are decidedly weird. The effect of an algorithm is such that anything you look at for more than 30 seconds, it will give you an endless supply of that. So, like, for example, right now, to manage my mental health, all I see on Instagram are rescue horse farms. I'm not Going to write a book about how rescue horse farms have taken over the culture because I understand that that is specific to my own nervous breakdown. I, I think that Freya would do well to understand that maybe she is going through her own nervous breakdown, which. No judgment queen. Again, I'm right there with you, God soldier. And maybe she might realize that like on whatever burner account she certainly has where she's spending a lot of time online, maybe what you are looking for is being fed back to you to make you think that this comprises the entire Internet, when in reality the Internet is designed for, to make you feel like the center of the world. And again, you're not giving me the impression of someone who spends time in the actual world by implying that this is so much more prevalent.

[Katie]

There's kind of a funny thing happening here where like we are making the argument, I think that so much of the stuff that she's discussing is purely an Internet based phenomenon and like she is making an argument argument that this Internet based phenomenon is a bad thing. But I think the, it's like I don't think that anyone's in disagreement that algorithms can up your day or that like using social media can be a bad thing, especially in excess. I don't think that anyone is like pushing back on that necessarily. But I think what, what I tend to see her do and what, what this broader project seems concerned with is taking these interim Internet observations and then extrapolating them out to broader social ills that I just don't think we have data to support. She extrapolates the social ill and then is like. And conservatism is the answer.

[Caroline]

Yeah. And again, I think to your point, the idea that what's hurting women right now the most is therapy culture is like so myopic. I to again for me to be like, Derek, read past page five, please. I'm so. I'm genuinely curious what these men would say of these claims.

[Katie]

This is why we started with the blurbs because like to reread this, the Derek Thompson blurb. Terrific reporting, sharp analysis. Right. What reporting this is, that's not, is, is the reporting in the room with us? Is it because she's, she's, she's exciting the captions of YouTube videos like, so she really lays out her theory of the case here and I want you to pay attention to the sequence of events that she describes.

[Caroline]

Is there a lack of moral direction or adult guidance or something?

[Freya India]

Yeah, I think, I think in the modern world, like adults, they view everything as imposing on their children so we kind of became suspicious of anyone who's authoritative. So we think they're being controlling or like old fashioned. So adults kind of politely stepped back and kind of allow children just to become themselves and act the way they want.

[Caroline]

Sounds virtuous.

[Freya India]

Yeah. And, you know, there's obviously an element of that that's important in parenting. But I think what happened is parents stepped back, so they just became like our best friends. Friends. Then religion retreated away from public life, then communities broke down, neighbors stopped knowing each other. And then if you're an anxious young person, there's no one there. And we got rid of anything that was like more substantial guidance. So I think if you think of therapy culture today, a lot of people think whole. If you're an anxious young person, you have more advice than ever. Like you have all this guidance. But I actually think modern culture has very little to say to anxious young people because we got rid of anything more substantial because we thought it was judgmental. So you can't tell someone how to live their life or what to do. We got rid of anything to do with God or religion because that was superstitious. We stopped appealing to moral character and telling them they should improve themselves and be better because that's all also judgmental and claiming that there's a right and wrong and all that we have left is these endless empty platitudes of be yourself, you do, you, you know best. Adults telling that to young people who I think are craving some direction. Like, there's no clear milestones to adulthood anymore to follow. And so they look to the adults and the adults are saying, you know best. And of course you feel anxious. The. The anxiety gets worse.

[Katie]

Okay, so that's the theory of the case. Right? Adult stepped back. Okay. Parents became our friends. Then religion retreated, then neighbors stopped knowing one another, and then young people were told that they know best. So it's very interesting to essentially lay out this theory which like, lacks any sort of causal or explanatory mechanism, without looking at any of the underlying factors that may have caused the culture to shift in the ways that she is claiming that it shifted.

[Caroline]

Right.

[Katie]

Even if you were to grant that all those things are true, I feel

[Caroline]

like I would build this up to like a thesis of how the car changed everything. Like, yeah, let's talk about the history of the suburbs.

[Katie]

And that's why we need public transit.

[Caroline]

There's also, I just want to add too, because people can't see this. The visuals of this are pretty arresting. Where she's got her blonde Hair by Chrissy Extensions. She's very made up. She's wearing this like little white corset top and she's talking in this baby voice about the need for authority to this man who like looks frankly roided out. Like he's like huge and like really muscular and wearing like this tight T shirt. And he's speaking in a very authoritative voice with very short declarative sentences. And she's kind of waxing poetic about the need for women to have authority. And I, I really feel like it's very pornographic. Like there's something very ironic to the visuals here. Interesting of, of her basically like serving as. Again when you think about the idea of like the trad wife being invented in incel rooms, she's literally like cosplaying an invention of a woman here being like, women need authority. Women need to be protected by daddy. The world has lost its way and we just need strong men to. And like on the other side of this weird medievally sized glass table is this huge fucking dude being like, tell me more. It's just weird.

[Katie]

This video, this interview is not the only place that she has kind of laid out her sequential explanation. She says something similar in the Times piece that I'm going to have you read.

[Caroline]

My sense is that liberal parents sort of stepped back with good intentions to let their children become who they wanted, but they didn't realize companies would still step in. You can disagree with conservative guidance, but it does give young people the road map they're desperate for. Has anyone pushed back and been like where is your sense coming from? Is this personal anecdote? Is this research? Is this based on reporting? Like what do you, what is your sense? You're a 25 year old woman with no reporting.

[Katie]

I have not seen anyone publicly push back. I mean there, okay, there is one like incredible 7,000 word essay called At War with Freya India that I will link in the show notes because it was excellent. We're going to read an excerpt from it at the end. But no, I mean in these forums that she's being given, there's no like really like c A source, you know. And then again in the book, I'll have you read this dude petition to

[Caroline]

take all the money away from Freya India and to give it to Rain Fisher Kwan. That would be a moral world that I want to be a part of.

[Katie]

And then this is from the book.

[Caroline]

This leads to the second big loss which is moral guidance. Oh God's police. Baby girls today have more options and choices in life than Any previous generation. A freedom which can be liberating, but

[Katie]

also overwhelming, but also bad.

[Caroline]

But also, we have so many ways to turn, so many paths to take, so many identities to try on that it feels paralyzing. Okay. Also, the royal we is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

[Katie]

Yeah, like, speak for yourself.

[Caroline]

In the past, guidance came from families, communities, religious leaders, shared values and cultural traditions. You would think, based off of how she writes about America, that, look, we're all living in the Manson property together, and, like, there are no nuclear families anymore. Much of that now has fallen away. Now it feels as if the world is moving too fast for wisdom. And so adults have largely stepped back, and in their place, girls have been left with nothing but endless, empty platitudes. Okay, can I also just say one more thing? This is so funny that she's saying that, because you know what Scott Galloway and Jonathan Haidt's whole fucking bag often is? Is that parents are helicoptering with their.

[Katie]

Oh, interesting.

[Caroline]

So once again, it's like, which is it? Are parents abdicating their responsibility or are they soft parenting? At other points, they'll complain about soft parenting.

[Katie]

Well, you know what height would say? Height would say kids are. This is the line. It's. Kids are overprotected in real life and under protected online. So you kind of get this thing where it's like, trick question. It's both. So I have two questions. Okay, this. All of this left me with two questions. Number one, let's grant that young people would like a roadmap. Okay.

[Caroline]

Okay.

[Katie]

And let's grant that conservatism can give them that roadmap.

[Caroline]

These are two big grants.

[Katie]

What is the roadmap that they would be receiving then? Because in one respect, she's right. Conservatism does offer a roadmap for how to live. It does offer you a prescriptive ideology about the correct way to exist. And a big part of her message is that, you know, young women really need this. They need someone to tell them how to be. But we haven't really spent a lot of time discussing what that roadmap is or whether it would be preferable to just getting to make decisions about your life yourself. Number two is the only causal mechanism that we can identify that she cites is family breakdown. That phrase comes up a lot. Family breakdown. What is meant by family breakdown? What do we mean when we say the family is breaking down? She uses a lot of this.

[Caroline]

Daddy doesn't have to get to have sex with his daughters anymore when he wants.

[Katie]

This is Like a, I'm a dumbass. But there, there's. I know in the English language there's like different. I don't know what tense she's using here, but it's like, oh, yeah, this has fallen away. This has this. And then it's placed this da, da, da. And it's like there's something about that tense that kind of obscures the fact that you're not naming an actor. You're not, you're not naming the cause of what's happening or when it happened. It's just like it has happened.

[Caroline]

Yeah.

[Katie]

So we get a deeper understanding of Freya's view on this in the book than in the interview. And so I'm going to have you read a passage that I found to be one of the more we'll say bold in the book where we deviate from describing TikTok videos briefly to more overtly right wing talking points.

[Caroline]

Yeah, okay. Oh my God. The royal we. She like, really? It's so annoying. Okay. Some of our parents split because of constant conflict or worse. But many families fell apart for less obvious reasons. The pursuit of personal growth and emotional fulfillment had had in the last few decades become much bigger priorities. And more and more marriages were ending because they no longer felt right. The idea of having an authentic self was also taking hold. Divorce became a way for parents to find their true selves, finally becoming who they were meant to be, free from restraints and oblig obligations. Wow. That's a crazy way to characterize the need for divorce. With freedom seen as the ultimate goal, spouses became distractions and inconveniences. Commitments became burdens. Compromises and sacrifices felt like an affront to autonomy. Laws were also changing. No fault divorce, which allowed spouses to end marriage without providing wrongdoing, was first legalized in California in 1969 and by 2010, adopted in some form by all 50 US states. Dude. The UK followed in 2020 with the divorce Dissolution and Separation act, described as the biggest shakeup in divorce law for more than half a century, which in 2022 completely removed the ability of one spouse to assign blame or contested divorce. Meanwhile, in the UK and US online platforms promised to make divorce cheaper and simpler, allowing couples to prepare and file legal paperwork to themselves. Marriage vows came to feel more like business contracts. Divorce continues to be made easier and more convenient. Okay, number one, number one, go yourself. Number two, you have no understanding of basic history in any sense. Economic, gender history, political history. If you are claiming that people get divorced. If you are claiming that people get divorced because. Because they just feel like being selfish. Number three, and most importantly, let's circle in on this here. Marriage vows came to feel like business contracts. Tell me, tell me, Katie, you've never read a book in your mother life without telling me You've never read a book in your life. If you think marriage vows are now more like business contracts than they they were for all of history. Like what in the are you talking about, Freya?

[Katie]

Your father would have traded you for three cows a hundred years ago.

[Caroline]

I would trade you for three cows right now. The idea they use like marriage for anything but a business contract has only begun in the last, what? Half a century at the most? Again, this is where I just, I cannot take this seriously. I'm like you. This is so anti intellectual.

[Katie]

Caro. Essential voice of Gen Z. Essential voice.

[Caroline]

Oh my God. Open the schools. It's. I'm getting goosebumps. It's so stupid. It's giving me goosebumps.

[Katie]

So, like to conclude leaving a marriage that you no longer wish to be in and being able to do that with more ease is selfish in Freya's perspective, a bad thing. That's a negative development. A. Okay, quick question. Why is this in this book? Why is this in this book? This goes on for two more pages. She cites several articles in mainstream press that celebrate divorce. And as a reader, you're like, wait, we were just talking about snap streaks and be real. Like why are we talking about no fault divorce? And so you're left with this impression that family breakdown or willy nilly divorce is a problem. And it is a problem that is giving getting worse. So Carol, I ask you, is divorce happening more than it used to?

[Caroline]

Tap Smike. No.

[Katie]

No, it is not. The refined divorce rate which measures divorces divided by the number of married women 15 and older has been declining steadily since the early 1980s. This is different and more accurate from the overall divorce rate, which just does like divorce is divided by all women. In fact, it fell most dramatically between 2008 and 2023, which is essentially the period of time that Freya is covering in this book. So to the extent that family breakdown can be measured by the rate of divorce, it is going down. And that trend holds true in the UK where she is from as well. But there is one group for whom divorce rates are up and it's people over 50, which is notable to me because it means we're talking about people who got married in the area era that Freya would likely have considered the golden age of the family. So like, I don't know, is your 65 year old aunt divorcing your uncle because she's selling her body on OnlyFans? Probably not. There is no plausible social media explanation for that one. Unless you want to like work Facebook messenger into this and this is the only group for whom divorce rates are rising. Okay, the second reading of this comment is that family breakdown is referring to fewer families being formed. She is arguing pretty explicitly that young women should get married and have children and stop complaining in their co rumination spaces online and that this will help them with anxiety and depression and meaninglessness.

[Caroline]

And yes, again, again, Katie, Katie, Katie. She as a woman who for a full time job complains in co rumination spaces online, has no child and is very recently married married, if just currently engaged. Continue.

[Katie]

And yes, fewer people are married today than in the 1990s. The rate has been declining steadily. But the top line married data is less helpful than if you also consider how many people live with their partner. In 1996, 59.6% of people were married or living together with a partner. In 2025 it was 55.5, so 4 percentage points lower. And a larger portion of those people were living together but not married. Which is to say the idea that people aren't interested in partnership anymore or are like have been convinced to avoid the inconvenience and challenge of partnership by TikTok influencers is very overstated. Alex Earl but even then there are two things worth noting. The first is something you said a long time ago that I think about all the time time when it comes to marriage rate discussions or birth rate discussions, which is that there is an implicit assumption in these conversations that the rate in the past, AKA the rate that we have declined from the rate that represented the time when women didn't have a choice was the correct rate and that any deviation from that must

[Caroline]

indicate that it was the natural rate.

[Katie]

Yes, must indicate some issue where whereas the complete opposite is the far more reasonable conclusion, which is that now that people have the autonomy to make that choice, this would be considered the more natural rate of like what people would do when they have more optionality. But what struck me as interesting, if we're talking about the so called, you know, sharp economic analysis in this book, over half of unmarried but partnered people who would like to get married who said like yes, we want to get married married, cited finances as a minor or major reason they were not yet married. Okay? And the rates of marriage are lowest among low income, low education people. Again, I think this is really a story about the divergence of income and education and less about like these dang girls are just too darn anxiously attached for their own good. Yeah.

[Caroline]

And I would also add to that. I mean, we talked about this in the who Wants Kids episode, but it is, I, I think it's even more complicated than people would think with finances. When you think, think about like a Denmark or a Sweden that have such a strong and robust social safety net where people feel less financial pressure and even then they're not having kids at the rate that these countries want them to. So like you can talk about how that's the result of capitalism or the 40 hour work week or that, you know, it's just, or it's just the natural end state is that people will want more kids. But like it really is not cut and dry in the way that these people claim for it to be.

[Katie]

There's a double sided sided coin with the like not getting married because of financial reasons. Because at the same time you could I guess make the argument that in a country like the US you are financially incentivized to be married. So like you might stay married because financially you are trapped.

[Caroline]

Right. People are still forced into marriage.

[Katie]

Yeah, yeah, people are still forced.

[Caroline]

So yeah, it's even, I mean, to get health care.

[Katie]

Me saying that now we have all this choice and optionality and now we just have the natural disability decision. It's like that even is overstating the level of autonomy that people have. A lot of people, I don't have the specific numbers, but like I know there are women out there who are in marriages they do not want to be in specifically because they feel trapped in them financially.

[Caroline]

Yeah.

[Katie]

But of course, you know, Freya sticks the landing and this is how she concludes this conversation. We're gonna visit her final thoughts now.

[Freya India]

There's like crippling anxiety among young women, but also this really loud I don't care message. I think, I think young people in general are very nostalgic for a time they haven't known, which is a time before smartphones and social media. So if you look at like Jonathan Haidt again, he did a survey recently and found that a lot of Gen Z wish things like TikTok and Instagram never existed, which is kind of unusual. You don't really get that with any other, other inventions. Like he was talking about the bike and like the hairdryer. Like it's really not that level of I use this all the time and wish that I didn't. And I think there's a lot of that ambient feeling among Gen Z of, like, longing for a time, for example, when love wasn't, like, reacting to someone's Instagram story or swiping on TikTok Tinder. You know, some young women have never experienced love before. It became that, like, the mystery of having a crush on someone and falling in love. Like, now you just. You can't wonder what they're up to. You just kind of skip through their Instagram story or look at their Facebook profile, and it's all listed out there. So I think there's a real feeling of, like, disenchantment with the modern world where it's like everything has become so commodified and cheap, and there's like a nostalgia for a time maybe that didn't exist. But everyone tells me the 90s were way better, so I'm just gonna assume they're telling the truth. But a time before phones and the Internet and the commodification of everything became so extreme.

[Caroline]

Okay, okay, okay. So just to summarize. To summarize, we have a book where she says commodified every other sentence, but will have an economic lens. And she basically summarized her entire ethos as a writer, which is. I'm just going to assume these people are correct. I wasn't there personally. I have no personal experience in this, and I will not be doing any research. But I'm just going to assume that there was no capitalism in the 90s. And also, don't say capitalism, because that is like apartheid, which is a dirty woke word.

[Katie]

Just like patriarchy and white supremacy. It's not real.

[Caroline]

Right, right. Not around in the 90s.

[Katie]

Yeah. I mean, okay, look, I think her politics are, like, flagrantly obvious. I think it is like we're being hit over the head with what she is doing here. And it's just so interesting to me that in this little concluding segment, she's like, yeah, and anyway, commodification of everything. People wish we didn't have smartphones. I'm like, that. That does nothing.

[Caroline]

Right, right, right.

[Katie]

That's not what we're talking about. So the surface level messaging here that I think most people who would be obliquely aware of Freya India or who would have encountered one of her most popular pieces is that social media in the, quote, modern world is bad for girls. Like, spin off of the anxious generation thing. Bipartisan support for these ideas, you know, but you spend a little bit more time with what she's doing, you start looking at the back catalog, and you're like, I think something else is happening here. I don't think Freya India is a villain or intentionally nefarious. I just think she serves a very valuable role in cloaking right wing ideas within a critique that is more superficially palatable to women in a pretty inventive way by speaking to a legitimate observation, which is that social media and being constantly marketed to kind of sucks. And so, like, I don't know, if you're me, you're heading into the concluding section of that book and you're going, okay, well, like, what's the answer? Like, okay, Freya, what do we do? What do we do?

[Caroline]

Right?

[Katie]

And her solution is basically opt out, delete the apps, laugh at the advertisements, don't post thirst traps on Instagram or listen to mental health. TikTok, log off, touch grass. Be more private, be more aloof and, you know, like, if you can manage it, start a family and find God. And I want you to just read this little section of how she kind of closes out the book. This is Freya's recommendations for how we deal with the constant commodification of everything.

[Caroline]

If you. Ladies, ladies. If you. Girls, girls, girls. If you grew up feeling alone and abandoned, this is such a subversion of Lena Dunham's legacy. If you grew up feeling alone and absolutely and abandoned. Now is your chance to prove that something better is possible. Become an example. Find someone and commit fully. Be the partner.

[Katie]

Pause, pause. Find some. I thought this book was about the commodification.

[Caroline]

No, no, no.

[Katie]

The profit seeking by.

[Caroline]

No, no. The barcode was a little stunt. It was a little pivot. Be the partner who shows that loyalty is not too much to ask for the p. Parent who shows that love can last. If I have a daughter someday. Girl, you better have a daughter someday. I don't want to model for her, a strong, independent woman who doesn't need anybody. I want to model a strong woman who shows it's okay to depend on someone, it's okay to take a risk to be with someone, to give up some of yourself to belong to something

[Katie]

bigger along a heterosexual, monogamous relationship, along

[Caroline]

with stepping back, becoming more private, investing in real relationships and trying to take care of others. I don't know. When we talked about taking care of others, I think we need to find faith. Not necessarily religious faith, but faith in something more. A conviction that more than this life is possible. Something beyond hedonism and consumption and competition. Wow.

[Katie]

So to close us out, today, I am going to read you an excerpt from that aforementioned 7,000 word piece by a writer named Ella Dorn about Freya India's role in this ecosystem.

[Caroline]

Oh my God, Katie. Can I just say.

[Katie]

Yeah.

[Caroline]

I just checked into her tour and she is starting her tour at the Manhattan Institute in conversation with a man.

[Katie]

Love. It's incredible.

[Caroline]

You can't write this shit. You can't write this shit. She can't be paid to have a conversation with a woman. It's amazing to me.

[Katie]

Okay. Ready?

[Caroline]

Yeah.

[Katie]

Okay. Girls takes the new rights theory of civilizational collapse and repackages it into pseudo feminist concern. It is a work of pure entry ism designed entirely to compensate for a historical lack of right wing influence on middle brow women's culture.

[Caroline]

Wow.

[Katie]

We follow India's deluge of facts and half facts from one point to another. The point of the facts is where they go. And in girls, they only take us in one direction. Direction out of sight, out of school, out of the office, off our meds and back into the home. I know that anyone with four brain cells who listens to what she says or, you know, reads what she writes is going to clock this shit immediately. But I repeat, this is the woman that John Height, Scott Galloway and Derek Thompson endorsed as an essential thinker. And while some of the observations she makes about consumption or commodification and competition are completely unobtrusive, objectionable, the point of these facts is where they go. And with Freya, the broader right wing project happening here, the solution to the soul sucking elements of modernity is more tradition. It is as she says in the introduction, we must go back. So why do three prominent men, at least two of whom at least theoretically support left wing politics, believe that Freya is the voice of her fucked up gentleman generation? Because believing young women are annoying, insecure, feckless little sluts who low key kind of need spiritual and masculine authority and boundaries in order to avoid falling apart. Is. Is neoliberalism a mostly bipartisan view? Unfortunately, yeah. As we have learned.

[Caroline]

Yeah, I really, I mean, bravo. I really think I would. Was just thinking that as you were approaching the conclusion that like my takeaway from this has nothing to do with Freya India and everything to do with those three men.

[Katie]

Yeah.

[Caroline]

There is no conclusion that does not implicate them. Either they don't care about what this woman wrote, or they don't care about women's issues, or they genuinely believe that this garbage is representative of women's issues. I think the most likely outcome is that these men genuinely do not read work by feminist scholars. They do not read work by women altogether. They do not communicate with women. And this woman also won't communicate with women. She is always in conversation with men. She is appealing to men. She is a pick me. This is intellectual porn for your 70 year old Midwestern uncle. And let them whack off to it also because this isn't going to work. Oh my God. That was crazy. That was so much more nutso than I thought it would be. Dude. I did like, I did not know

[Katie]

how, how nuts, how batshit that was.

[Caroline]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's like. I would have been meaner from the.

[Katie]

No, I know because when I saw the blurbs, I was like, oh, this is going to be good. But like, I was not prepared for how off the rails that book was.

[Caroline]

It's giving. Taking sex differences seriously. My book I read in college.

[Katie]

It is, dude, the three pages on no Fault Force. I was like, all right. You know, you were hiding it pretty well until like page 210. And then it was just like, fuck it.

[Caroline]

I live the door down. I live for a woman who is not married and doesn't remember the 90s telling us why no Fault Divorce Horse was important or not. Wow. Amazing.

[Katie]

All right, that's the end. Bye.