The Extreme Crisis of Young Women - Freya India - #1090

Summary

Modern Wisdom Podcast #1090 The Extreme Crisis of Young Women Guest: Freya India | Host: Chris Williamson | Date: April 27, 2026

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EPISODE OVERVIEW

Chris Williamson sits down with Freya India, writer and author, to dissect her new book examining the ongoing crisis affecting young women. The conversation spans generational pessimism, the impact of social media, shifting attitudes toward relationships and motherhood, mental health trends among women, and the backlash Freya has faced for her critiques. The discussion is honest, at times raw, and both parties refuse to skirt around controversy and cultural taboos.

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KEY THEMES & DISCUSSION POINTS

1. Book Backlash and Critique Culture

• Freya’s Book Reception: It received one-star reviews from Goodreads users—a group Freya claims is mostly comprised of “normie liberal women” outside her intended audience. She’s criticized for being “right-wing,” “misogynist,” and dismissive of mainstream feminist ideas. (00:00–03:56)
• Double Standard: Freya and Chris highlight how similar conclusions drawn by left-leaning publications (e.g., New Statesman) are celebrated, while hers are condemned. “It was very interesting to me that the New Statesman can reach the same conclusions and it's sort of celebrated and welcomed.” – Freya (03:56)

2. A Generational Crisis: Why Are Young Women So Pessimistic?

• Research Findings: Surveys show young women are less likely to feel happy, ambitious, or fulfilled than men—and even more pessimistic about their futures. (02:00–03:08)
• Roots of the Crisis: Freya argues liberal, Anglosphere women face pathologization and medicalization of emotions, not a stigma about speaking up. The pressure is to stay single, optimize for the market, and self-actualize—rather than settle down. (05:15–06:07)

3. Social Media: Source and Symptom of Alienation

• Erosion of Anchors: Family breakdown, loss of community/religion, and the “simulation” of relationships online have left privileged young women especially rootless.
  • "They have everything they want and basically nothing they need." – Freya (08:33)
• Why Girls Are More Harmed: Girls from conservative backgrounds fare better; liberal upbringing often lacks the resilience and groundedness needed to resist the negative impact of social media. (09:31–10:57)
• Market as Authority: Without external anchors, girls look to social media and influencers for definitions of value—a phenomenon both alarming and overlooked by progressives. (28:38–30:01)

4. Relationships & Motherhood: Risk Aversion and Fear

• Shifting Norms: There’s more pressure not to settle down—rather, to perfect oneself first. The risk of motherhood (on body, finances, career) feels too high for many. (13:44–14:15)
• Perceptions of Motherhood: Young women less open to marriage and children than young men, partly driven by fear (due to unstable models at home, online discourse, porn, etc.). (18:01–20:34)
  • "I think it's a fear of vulnerability and dependence." – Freya (24:40)
• Duality of Female Independence: Traits that help in careers (assertiveness, independence) often hinder relational connection and emotional reliance. (25:48–28:30)

5. Sex, Social Messaging & the "Sex Recession"

• Paradox: Gen Z women are more exposed to sexually explicit content, yet are having less sex. Hypersexualized media, “empowering” feminist messages, and porn have made sex more anxiety-inducing and transactional. (30:07–33:37)
  • "It sounded horrifying and scary… It was like the sort of stereotypically worst masculine banter coming out of women." – Freya (31:01)
• Power and Objectification: Both men and women are taught to view themselves—at least in part—as products or brands to optimize for the attention market.
• Porn's Impact: Early exposure (as young as 6–8) warps expectations; even accidental exposure via social platforms can traumatize and distort self-image. (33:42–35:16)

6. Vulnerability as Performance: The “Therapization” of Girlhood

• Mental Health as Identity: Sharing struggles online becomes commodified and incentivized, especially for influencers. Platforms push users to “share their story,” often at the cost of deepening their issues. (38:18–41:01)
  • “Now you scroll through people livestreaming their panic attacks, showing their messy depression lives.” – Freya (41:01)
• Normalization vs Pathologization:
  • "Normal feelings are being reframed as disorders now." – Chris (44:20–44:23)
  • “All of these things...are linked to girls viewing themselves as some kind of object or trying to be perfect.” – Freya (45:51)

7. Political Radicalization of Young Women

• Leftward Drift: Contrary to media narratives, it's women—not men—who have moved significantly further left in recent years, driven by online "rabbit holes" of radicalism and emotional, safety-driven virtue signaling. (46:40–48:55)
• Dating Divide: Many won’t date (or even befriend) men with different political outlooks.
  • “I don't think I'd even be friends with one…They don't see you as human.” (48:55–49:49)

8. Social Contagion, Cancel Culture & Reputation Management

• 2020 as Turning Point: BLM and social justice movements made morality instantly visible on social platforms; silence or dissent now threatens social standing, especially for teenage girls. (50:30–52:36)
• Intra-sex Competition: Female competition has become less visible but more intense and omnipresent, especially regarding beauty standards and reputation management. (53:56–55:34)

9. Body Image, Beauty & Self-Love Paradoxes

• Endless Arms Race: The beauty industry’s standards escalate: now “anti-aging routines” start before puberty due to the influence of neurotic, status-maximizing influencers. (55:34–57:02)
• Facetune Reality: The use of heavy filters and face editors since puberty leaves girls unable to recognize—or accept—their natural faces. (58:36–59:37)
• Self-Love as Marketing: The “self-love” movement is often used to market beauty and editing products, fueling more insecurity rather than resolving it. (59:44–61:07)

10. Therapyspeak & Commodification of Emotional Support

• Friendship as Product: Influencers simulate friendship during “Get Ready With Me” vlogs, giving a sense of connection that prevents real-life relationship-building. (70:39–71:35)
• Mental Health Industry: Online therapy services and apps fill the parental/friendship void, but incentives are misaligned—fostering dependence on experts and pathologizing normal emotions. (97:08–98:22)
  • “BetterHelp specifically have these adverts...that's unhelpful. And then the better help code, and it does it with friends as well. It's replacing…” (98:22)
• Community as Commodity: Sedating company/connection needs with apps rather than real relationships.

11. Comments on Hypocrisy, Contradictions, and Resistance

• Double Standards: Progressive rhetoric often clashes with behavior (e.g., anti-capitalism but dependence on big-tech for clout; celebration of corporate careers but condemnation of mothers, etc.) (89:11–90:24)
• Attacks & Reviews: Freya is attacked from both left and right because she resists fitting into expected ideological molds.
  • “Freya India would prefer life without social media, trans rights or women's rights or therapy.” – Goodreads review (102:13)
  • “If I was just a right wing political influencer, I don't think I would get this amount of bingo targeted hate. It's because I sort of operate in the middle and I am genuinely figuring things out.” – Freya (104:03)

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NOTABLE QUOTES & MEMORABLE MOMENTS

• “They have everything they want and basically nothing they need.” – Freya India (08:33)
• “Our issues are not pressure to settle down. They're pressured to stay single and self-actualized.” – Freya (05:15)
• “The ultimate goal is to optimize yourself for the market...not to have a collection of human experiences.” – Freya (10:57)
• "Girls are being marketed as products, not people." – Paraphrased from multiple segments
• “At least the perfect lives are aspirational. Now you scroll through people livestreaming their panic attacks, showing their messy depression lives.” – Freya (41:01)
• “Normal feelings are being reframed as disorders now.” – Chris (44:20)
• “There’s more pressure to not settle down...You need to be perfect before you take on responsibility or commit.” – Freya (13:44)
• “If you're criticizing more than you're creating, you're sort of withdrawing from the system more than you're adding.” – Chris (104:58)
• “If you undermine all of these forms of authority, the authority will be the market.” – Freya (29:25)
• “There is a limit, right? You are not supposed to grit your teeth through your intimate relationship.” – Chris (81:39)

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TIMESTAMPS OF IMPORTANT SEGMENTS

• 00:00–03:56 – Goodreads backlash, accusations, and double standards in critique
• 08:33–12:23 – "Everything you want, nothing you need"; erosion of real-life anchors
• 13:44–14:15 – Pressure to remain self-optimized and unattached, not settle down
• 18:01–20:34 – Why women are now less likely than men to desire marriage or kids
• 30:07–33:37 – Hypersexual messaging, sex recession, Call Her Daddy analysis
• 38:18–41:01 – Vulnerability and mental health as performance/identity
• 44:20–45:51 – Pathologization of normal feelings; mental health industry
• 46:40–49:49 – Political radicalization of women, dating & political divides
• 53:56–57:02 – Escalating beauty norms; body image, beauty industry, Facetune
• 59:44–61:07 – Self-love as commercial strategy, paradoxes of empowerment
• 70:39–71:35 – Influencers simulating friendship and commodification of emotional support
• 81:39–82:22 – Limits of 'therapy speak' in actual relationships, over-pathologization
• 104:03–104:31 – Why Freya receives backlash from all directions

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FINAL REFLECTIONS

The episode is a dense, provocative exploration of the contradictions and crises facing young women. Freya India delivers a deeply reflective, often compassionate indictment of culture, tech, and the mental health industry—while neither she nor Chris shy away from pointing out the failures and excesses of both progressive and conservative circles.

If you're interested in the intersection of social media, psychology, gender dynamics, and contemporary politics, this discussion is essential listening (or reading).

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Where to find Freya India:

• Substack: freyaindia.co.uk

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Note: All timestamps are referenced in MM:SS format from the main content of the episode. Trivia, advertisements, and sponsor reads have been omitted.

Transcript

[Chris Williamson]

Why has your book got one star on Goodreads?

[Freya India]

Because I'm being attacked by normie liberal women, I think. So we sent out some galleys, some free copies to just avid Goodreads readers and women who are not in our sort of sphere thinking about things that we are. And I think also because the book looks like an anti capitalist Marxist book, there's no indication that I would sort of be skeptical of the mental health industry or talk about cultural trends like family breakdown. And so a lot of the reviews are women warning each other that this is not what you expect and you might be hit with a viewpoint you disagree with. And so it's a lot of girls who've got through the first chapter and then I've said something like about trans, and they've just given up and warned each other not to carry on.

[Chris Williamson]

You're horrendous. Yeah. When did you start writing about women and girls?

[Freya India]

I started 2021. So it's been a long time. And it was mostly because I felt anxious and I wanted to figure out what was going on. And so I was trying to map it all out. And it's taken me sort of five, six years to finally finish the book. So it's not only research that I've done, but it's basically years of my life. I've carried it through different phases and seasons of my life and this is where I've ended up.

[Chris Williamson]

I was talking to William Costello. You and him wrote an article together in Quilet, and I think you were still in sixth form college.

[Freya India]

It was so long ago. Yeah, yeah. So I've been writing for a really long time, but part of the criticism against me is that I just picked a topic and I'm using it to sort of funnel in my right wing agenda. So it would be. Freya just noticed that the mental health crisis was happening and she's using that to spread her sort of fascist ideas.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you're in good company here because I'm a fascist as well, apparently.

[Freya India]

Oh, nice.

[Chris Williamson]

We often hear about a lost generation of young men, but research shows that young women are more pessimistic across the board. They are less likely to say they feel happy, ambitious, excited or fulfilled, and are more pessimistic about the prospect of being happy for their life generally.

[Freya India]

Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

The fuck's going on?

[Freya India]

So was this the New Statesman piece? Yeah. So there was this huge new statement piece, angry Young Women, which made me an angry young woman when I.

[Chris Williamson]

Why did you get pissy about the New Statesman piece?

[Freya India]

Because they reached a lot of conclusions that a lot of conservative women, conservative people have just been saying for a very long time. So as you said, they were saying that young women feel pessimistic, that they have more negative views of men that than men have of them. And all we've heard about for the last few years is the manosphere and how men are getting radicalized. And ultimately the, the argument in their piece was that women are getting radicalized by social media and particularly by femosphere influences. So women warning them off other men

[Chris Williamson]

and women, all of the women reading your book.

[Freya India]

Yeah, basically. And unhappily. Yeah. So they, they came to the same observations as me and a lot of other people. But then after my book tour in the uk, I've had to put up with constant accusations of being misogynist, being far right conservative, for saying something is happening to liberal young women. They're not happy, something is happening in their relationships. They feel hopeless about the future. And even in the New Statesman piece, they found that more privileged women felt even more pessimistic. And these are things that I've been trying to argue very carefully and I hope with some compassion, but I've had to put up with constant smears and backlash. And so it's just, it was very interesting to me that the New Statesman can reach the same conclusions and it's sort of celebrated and welcomed.

[Chris Williamson]

I once spoke to Douglas Murray about this and I said, have you ever used your gay privilege card? And he said, well, on other gay men, of course. I said, well, you know what I mean. You know, you're from a particular protected group. Have you ever been able to cash in your status at some point? And he said, well, the problem is that I'm white and conservative, which makes me essentially an honorary straight guy. Like white conservative is the straight of the gay community. And you being white, British and right leaning means that you're essentially, your female privilege is totally dismissed. You don't have it in the same way as the New Statesman writers may do.

[Freya India]

So, yeah, a lot of the criticism against me is you're a white CIS heterosexual woman trying, trying to argue what's happening to women from that perspective. But then I'm like, if I wrote a piece, a book telling you what like black women are feeling, I'd get attacked for that. That would be awful. I don't know. And so I feel like, how can you not write a book from your own perspective and say, you know, there are, I think there's young women who feel this way too Because I have all the data.

[Chris Williamson]

What do you mean? Like white CIS heterosexual woman? Is that not what most women that you're speaking to are?

[Freya India]

Yeah, well, my book is for women in the Anglosphere who are facing specific problems. So our problems are not stigma around mental health, they're pathologization and medicalization of all of our negative emotions. Our issues are not too much pressure to settle down. They're pressured to stay single and self actualized. So it's unique issues to the anglosphere and to sort of women growing up in the liberal world like me and. But yeah, so the argument is basically the book is just my ranty opinion. From my privileged point of view, that

[Chris Williamson]

is a thin end of the wedge to funnel people into right and far right conservatives.

[Freya India]

Yeah, it's full of dog whistles.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Freya India]

But then that's why the New Statesman piece is annoying. Because it's like it's the exact same conclusions and they've gone out and spoken to women and reached the same observations as me.

[Chris Williamson]

It's the indignation, I think, that sucks. I wrote this piece ages ago. One of the worst feelings in life is being right but early or being right but the wrong class to talk about it in whatever way it is. Because you see, hang on, you want to scream it from the rooftops. And the problem with this is, as you're having these conversations, you see this. A good way to talk about this would be the climate people, the environmentalists. They believe that this is the most important crisis facing humanity at the moment.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And then they don't think that people are listening enough. And then they see the impact of these things happening. They see ice sheets melting, water levels rising, forest fires, et cetera. And they go, they feel emboldened because they go, hang on a second, I've been warning you about this. And no one's listening. And what happens is at that moment, you probably should do a sort of soft, but soft reminder. Hey, guys, this is really important. But what they do is think no one was listening. That means I'm a shout louder. And they shout louder and shout louder. And this is where people that have been campaigning for one issue for a long time feel like they haven't been listened to become. You see them and they seem so fucking deranged.

[Freya India]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Because.

[Freya India]

Are you saying I'm deranged?

[Chris Williamson]

Yes, that's the main takeaway.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Um, they seem deranged because the incentive has been. I said this, no one fucking listened. I'm gonna say it louder. I'm Gonna shout more. I'm gonna make my throw soup on a painting, glue myself to the M25. I'm gonna do all of these things so that people will finally listen, because I feel vindicated. You see that there's a problem. I can see that there's a problem. Everyone has admitted that there's a problem. Yeah, I'm just gonna shout louder until they listen. And this is sort of, you know, pick your pill from me. It's. Which way do you want to go? Because you have the option here to just start ranting and raving about it.

[Freya India]

It's true. I think. What? Yeah, it's the. It was actually the reaction to the piece. I actually think the piece was really good. It's the reaction where people were saying, this is so unexplored. This is unrecognized. And, you know, but. Or someone said, oh, they've got. They're the first with the balls to say it.

[Chris Williamson]

Or someone needs tens of thousands of substack subscribers, and someone needs to.

[Freya India]

Someone said, someone needs to think about women's unmet needs and how they got here, which is.

[Chris Williamson]

Someone should write a book on it.

[Freya India]

Yeah, they should. They really should.

[Chris Williamson]

What do you think women actually want in 2026?

[Freya India]

Well, this is sort of the argument in my book is I think women do have unmet needs. I think the reason that more privileged women were more pessimistic in that piece was that they have everything they want and basically nothing they need. So all of the foundations and anchors that help women and people in general feel stable have basically been eroded. And that's the argument in my book that we have had our families break down. We don't know our neighbors. We don't have communities. We are less religious. We're less religious than young men, even. So we don't have any of these anchors. And that is why I think when the social media platforms came in, they really destroyed young women because they offered substitutes and simulations of these things that we didn't have in the first place.

[Chris Williamson]

And that's why you think that women were more susceptible to the impact of social media.

[Freya India]

Yeah, in a way. And I think social media plays on girls specific personality traits and vices. So it was very addictive. But the reason it's so bad is because we didn't have any grounding. Because if you look at the mental health crisis, women who grew up in conservative and religious households, young girls are doing way better. And they seem to have had some sort of protective mechanism from that, which is actually why I became Interested in it in the first place. It's not that I was conservative or religious. So part of the argument now is that I'm some sort of fundamentalist Christian who's pushing this worldview. But it's. I generally, I was looking at the data and thinking there is a pattern here that liberal women who've raised in liberal households seem to be rootless. They seem to not have anything to hold on to, and that's why they are actually more addicted to social media. So liberal teen girls is about 31% say they use it for more than five hours a day, and it's much higher than other groups. And so there is something specifically going on there with liberal girls and having a liberal upbringing that's not happening with conservatives.

[Chris Williamson]

You said they're getting what they want, but not what they need.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

What is it you think that they think they want and what is it you think they need?

[Freya India]

Well, I think. So the argument of the book is that women are becoming something more like products rather than people. And so I think they're being encouraged to see their lives as. The ultimate goal is to optimize yourself for the market. The ultimate goal is not to have a collection of human experiences. And I think this explains a lot of things. So it explains what young women value and what they don't value. So, for example, not having children, having more of an aversion to having children someday than young men. I think that's because they think of themselves as a product, not as a human. And so people say things like, oh, that's the most human experience. Why would you not want to do that? But if your goal is to be a perfect pristine product, then why would you take the risk of motherhood when it could destroy your body? It's unpredictable, it's dangerous, it's scary. It's not really something you can display quickly. You know, it's like a long term satisfaction. And so I think we often view it from the wrong frame. We're thinking about women, previous generations of women. But I think this generation of women is very different and their values are very different. And so my argument in the book is that you're being encouraged to focus on all the wrong wants. Right. Rather than what you actually need, which I would argue is what all humans need. Basic human connection, dependence on other people.

[Chris Williamson]

Do you think there's a pressure for women to settle down and have children?

[Freya India]

I've actually argued that it's the opposite. And in my experience it's been the opposite, which is that. So Emma Watson was Talking about this recently on a podcast and she was saying that it's a violence and a cruelty against young women, this pressure to settle down and then it's overwhelming and that she feels in such a rush to do it. And I just couldn't relate to that at all. And I don't thinking about the women in my life, I don't think that is what's happening. I think for the women I'm talking about, there's much more pressure to stay single, to stay unattached, to stay available. And I think what Emma is really describing when she talks about the rush and the hurry is she feels pressure to cram in all her self actualization before she meets someone. So in the podcast she's talking about healing herself and fixing her mental health and becoming the best version of herself and becoming whole and healed and enlightened. And I think that's a core message that young women are growing up with, which is that you need to be perfect before you take on a responsibility or commit to someone. And, and so I don't think there's pressure to settle down. I think there's pressure to be perfect before you meet someone, which often is pressure to stay single.

[Chris Williamson]

And that's because your self brand your product online, that needs to be. You basically need to exit the business of your public profile because post motherhood you're not going to be able to go to brunch with the girls or wear cute heels in the same sort of a way and you're not going to be flexing, changing nappies on your timeline.

[Freya India]

Yeah, it's the end of something.

[Chris Williamson]

It's the end of the thing that is most valued by other people in the community that you are engaging with most, which is the Internet.

[Freya India]

Yeah. And part of the reason I wanted to write the book is to give people a sense of young women's childhood to how long they've been marketing themselves as a product and thinking of themselves in this way. And I think that's really hard to just switch. And so I talk about girls being on Instagram at 10 or 11, that every experience they have, they feel they have to document, market, perform for other people. Everything is done in anticipation of an audience. And then you're asking them to do things that are scary and have a quiet satisfaction and where they would have to give up some part of themselves. And I include myself in this. You know, I was on Instagram at 11and. And for me to get off Instagram and then not have the constant nagging feeling of I need to Take a picture. I need to document this. I need to prove to people that I exist. It was so hard to switch my mindset, even though I wasn't even that addicted. And so I think people really underestimate what these platforms are doing to not just how young women see themselves, but how they treat other people and what they actually value in their life.

[Chris Williamson]

Parents are registering their kids handles on Instagram before they're born.

[Freya India]

Yes. That's become part of like child content. So you'll plan your baby shower, you'll plan pack your hospital bag on YouTube, you'll do everything and then you'll select your child's username. Do you know nearly A quarter of 5 to 7 year olds in the UK have a smartphone?

[Chris Williamson]

A quarter of 5 to 7 year olds in the UK have got a smartphone?

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

So they can see the Internet.

[Freya India]

Yeah. And I think it's 38% are already on social media.

[Chris Williamson]

How old do you have to be to register for Instagram?

[Freya India]

I think 13, but I don't think there's any proper. You just put a birthday in.

[Chris Williamson]

It's not like pornhub where you some sort of verification.

[Freya India]

No, you just put a birthday in.

[Chris Williamson]

I was with Tony Abbott in Australia and I didn't know much about Tony Abbott before we sat down. Interesting guy. We were with the person who had spearheaded that under 16 social media band.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

In Australia. They were at the table too. It was this big, big dinner thing and I wonder whether that's going to get rolled out. I get the sense that the UK is going to feel way too much pressure. It's so tight knit.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

I think it's going to really struggle. Brits just don't like dealing with displeasure in that way. They don't like. We're a complaining country. Right. I'm aware that Americans are very litigious. If you trip over on a curb, someone's getting sued. But the UK have the equivalent skill but at complaining and I think that that is a weapon of mass destruction that stops progress from happening sometimes.

[Freya India]

I also think we are more of a surveillance state, as in there's so much messaging scaring the life out of young people for what they post and what they do online. And I think that that will end up being its own harm in the UK because we already have the online safety bill where it's age verification. So all adults have to upload ID to view. Half of it is illegal content. So fraud or child abuse. But then another part of it is platforms would have to protect users from bullying or Hatred against people, which is my substack. So they won't be able to take it. Yeah, it is, but yeah, it will be. I think the methods we're going to use in the UK will cause their own problems because Keir Starmer is already saying he wants to double down on age verification.

[Chris Williamson]

So what's happening with young girls desire for children?

[Freya India]

I think that it's very interesting to me when I did the book that young men seem to be more seem to desire having children someday more than young women. So there was a Pew survey recently which showed that 12th grade girls were less likely to say they wanted to get married someday even than young men. And there were so many statistics about not just children, but being open to dating and having a relationship that men seemed much more open to dating. Single young women were actually more likely to say that they felt that marriage was outdated and old fashioned than men. And so what interests me is why young women seem more averse than young men now. I would think it would be the opposite. And I think part of that is my argument that women are becoming to something more like products. I also think as well it's general risk aversion and fear. And I trace some of that back to, you know, having your own family breakdown. I don't think young women have had good models of stable relationships that make them feel safe and that they could invest in someone enough to have children.

[Chris Williamson]

So you're saying the psychological impact of being in a home that's either unstable or maybe broken causes an imprinting for what you think relationships should be like

[Freya India]

when you get older and having children is terrifying. So it's so vulnerable for a woman. And so I think that fear is a huge part of it. And if you think of it's not just maybe you grew up in an unstable household, but you might have also grown up online. So you don't see a happy relationship between your parents. And then you learn about relationships from the Internet. So you learn from the sort of deranged gender discourse online. So you're hearing wounded adults talk about men and women and generalize and stereotype off the back of their own hurt and heartbreak. But you've got young people reading that before they've had an experience of a relationship. So you have that and then you also have online porn will be teaching you about relationships and teaching girls that men are sort of brutal and insatiable and predatory. And so. And I think this is happening for young men as well. I just haven't researched it as much, but it seems to me that all of young women's templates will be very scary and make that commitment even scarier.

[Chris Williamson]

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[Freya India]

I think the risk aversion. So people often talk about the child free sort of glamorizing their lives. So they'll be like in the Maldives and they'll be able to, you know, they have double income so they can buy all of this meaningless stuff. But that doesn't worry me as much as the general fear. So I'm gonna get you into trouble again. But the girl with the list, she lists out all of the terrifying things. I don't need one. I can say it because I'm a woman.

[Chris Williamson]

It's okay, go ahead.

[Freya India]

All of the terrifying things that can happen in childhood and that to me is way more dangerous for young women now. It's not that I think they're looking at child free lives and thinking it's really glamorous. I think they're just really scared. We know we're already a risk averse generation. And then, you know, you think of previous generations, they were not able to read through all of the physical risks and analysis and neuroticism about having children that we are. And so I think that really affects anxious young women where they think, why

[Chris Williamson]

would I do this to Steelman, that side, I think childbirth is so physically and emotionally taxing for women in a way that it just isn't for men.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

There is a huge asymmetry in terms of what women pay in order to go through childbirth and what men pay in order to go through childbirth. And I think what that leaves is a sense that any man or person, but specifically a man who doesn't fully recognize how big of a risk and sacrifice that is for a woman, if they appear to be flippant or not understanding or not compassionate about it, which can be overly sensitive, but still it appears as a man being callous.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And I understand if this is the scariest, biggest thing that you're going to do in your entire female adult life and some guy comes along and seems to be dismissive.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Of why this is something big and scary. Yeah. Fuck you, dude. Like, no, you. You should recognize. You should recognize why this is something that's big and scary to me. But there was a line in the New Statesman when the lady was interviewing a group of girls who said, it's a much bigger deal for us to become mothers. We have to get rid of our career. I'm not fully against kids. I just really don't want to lose the other things and become just a mother. I still want to be me and I will probably lose that. That's not the same thing that I'm talking about.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

I just really don't want to lose the other things and become just a mother. I still want to be me and I will probably lose that.

[Freya India]

Yeah. I think it's a fear of vulnerability and dependence. Yeah. I think this gets missed sometimes with the discussions on girl boss feminism and all young women just want to be a girl boss and for sort of selfish reasons. I think a lot of it deep down is animated by this risk aversion and fear and it's a way of having control. So you have a career and you have all of these other things that make up you, so that if something happens to your relationship, you have something and there's some truth to that. Yeah, but I think that's happening among young women and young men. A fear of vulnerability and chasing things that make people miserable because they're trying to avoid having to depend on someone and take that leap of faith with someone. So you see it with, you know, productivity stuff online for men, which is that put everything into your career because a woman will just hurt you. I think it's a similar thing with young women. But, yeah, I do think it can get caricatured sometimes. But deep down, it's.

[Chris Williamson]

It's fear most of all, I think that needs compassion. But there's definitely a challenge that women have. And I think this is going to happen more and more as women are socioeconomically more successful, as you've got more women getting careers and entering the workforce, they're going to behave rightly or wrongly, whether they need to or they don't, in a more independent, masculinized way. They're going to be more assertive, they're going to be more dominant, they're going to be more disagreeable. And that very well may be the thing that they need in order to get them through their career and to ascend the rungs of the ladder. I think that this creates a weird sort of ratchet effect where it's hard to ever go back from this level of independence and assertiveness. And unfortunately, when you want to start a family, when you want to get into a relationship, there's a degree of relinquishing that you have to have. When you want to move in together, the same thing happens. You need to compromise more. You need to show up for this person because they need you in a way that isn't just. What do do you want right now? Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. And then maybe you get married and financially you're tied. And increasingly, women are going to be the ones that if they don't get a prenup, they're going to be more liable if they're out earning their partner, and then you have kids and the same thing happens times a thousand, that you need to be able to relinquish control. You need to be able to be looked after. You need to have needs and make them known. And it's a strange sort of duality that nobody wants to strip female independence because how many marriages stayed together because women were basically financial prisoners? And at the same time, if you can't let go of your independence, it's going to be really, really difficult for you to have a successful relationship and start a family, because you're not supposed to be A solopreneur inside of your relationship. You're supposed to be a partner and then a mother and then a member of the unit, the house unit that gives and takes and doesn't keep score.

[Freya India]

Yeah, I think you've spoken about this before, that the personality traits that work for your career will not work in your.

[Chris Williamson]

What you're praised for in public, you pay for in private.

[Freya India]

Yes. And I actually don't have a problem with women working, obviously. But I do think my issue with stuff like lean in feminism and, you know, lean into your career fully is, as you say, it's then very difficult to lean back out when you need to. And I think for this generation, the biggest thing we need to learn to do is lean into risk and vulnerability. And I think putting that all into work very often comes at the expense of something which is that you can't depend on someone or compromise or sacrifice.

[Chris Williamson]

Do young liberal women hate capitalism or love the idea of an independent career? Because I can't work out which one it is.

[Freya India]

Yeah, that is very confusing to me because my book is criticized for. They think it's an anti capitalist book, but I don't call out capitalism because I believe in free markets. And so I'm criticized for not having an anti capitalist argument. But then I'm also criticized for questioning the motives of girlboss feminism and putting everything into your career. And so I don't understand how the two are compatible at all. And my argument in the book is actually, if you progressives sort of demonize all these other forms of authority, so religion, you don't want to be told what to do by religion, you don't want to be told what to do by your parents. You don't want right and wrong from basically anyone. And my argument in the book is if you undermine all of these forms of authority, the authority will be the market. The market will influence right and wrong. It will be influencers who tell you what right and wrong is. It will be influencers who come in and determine what you value rather than relying on all of these other things. So I often think that progressives sort of want to take down all of these other forms of belonging and meaning, and then all that's left is companies and industries, but then they're anti capitalist.

[Chris Williamson]

Difficult circle to square.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

What's happening with sex?

[Freya India]

Well, so that was interesting in the book because I had so much research about how hookup culture was pushed on my generation. So the book goes from 2010 to now, and everything that's changed sort of culturally and technologically. And I had all of these examples, like Teen Vogue teaching teenagers how to have anal sex, giving them tips on hookup culture, some crazy stuff. And then I had. I had to sit and listen to these Call Her Daddy episodes to get transcripts of what they were talking about. And this was sort of in the late 2010s, and it's all about sleeping around and hookup culture and why it's good and empowering and healthy for young girls. So I had all of this evidence that there was so much influence that that was normalized.

[Chris Williamson]

And Alex Cooper now happily engaged.

[Freya India]

Yeah. So I had that. But then you look at the statistics and we're not actually having more sex. And so I was thinking that's all going to lead to this huge explosion in hookup culture, and it really hasn't. And so there's a paradox there. There's so many paradoxes in the book between the messaging we were given and what actually happened, the outcome. And that's just one of them.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. It seems strange that Gen Z's hypersexualized and having less sex at the same time.

[Freya India]

Yes. But maybe they're linked, which is that the. When I was sat listening to the Call Her Daddy episodes and reading these articles, sex sounded horrifying and scary. And they didn't in.

[Chris Williamson]

Is it not advertising sex?

[Freya India]

I think that's what we think it's doing. But I mean, on Call Her Daddy, they're saying, you know, if you're a 5 or 4 out of 10, then you really need to, like, learn these sex tips in order to make up for it. You're just a hole. No, but just genuinely so. It's like the sort of stereotypically worst masculine banter coming out of women. Like, basically, they had this guest on

[Chris Williamson]

it sounds like something that Louis Theroux would have seen in the manosphere doc.

[Freya India]

Exactly.

[Chris Williamson]

Like, if you're Butters, you'd better learn to cook.

[Freya India]

Exactly. So they had this guest on called MILF Hunter.

[Chris Williamson]

Brilliant. Hang on. MILF Hunter for women.

[Freya India]

This is a guy, right. Who had slept with a load of older women and was giving them advice, basically.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay.

[Freya India]

And the advice is just horrifying. But then at the end, he shouts out, women don't care about you. Sorry, Men don't care about you. And then Alex Cooper and the other host are like, I hope you girls are listening. And even if you're married, you're not safe. He still wants to cheat on you. This is terrifying messaging around sex. And I think that is. I mean, it's the most listened to podcasts by women. And so I really think that would have played a part in why we're now seeing a sex recession is that you had it on both sides. You had this awful messaging from the feminist influences, the femosphere that the new statesmen now are finally talking about. But then you also have it from the manosphere influences. Everybody basically saying that investing in the opposite sex or being vulnerable at all is going to get you hurt and you have to put on this defense mechanism bravado. And it's the exact same messaging.

[Chris Williamson]

What do you think porn's done to expectations around sex and power?

[Freya India]

I think porn is another thing that terrified young women from my generation because they would have been exposed to it before, likely before they've had a relationship. And so you have. I had to go on this forum in the book of Gen Z adults talking about when they first were exposed to porn and some of them are like eight, six, and they're talking about accidentally seeing it on these platforms and way before they've even attempted dating anyone or can put that in context. So I think we talk a lot about the impact of porn on young men, but not so much on young women. Even if they're not watching it. I think there's constant sort of exposure to it on social media. So a lot of the statistics in the book were accidental exposure. So it's not young people going onto pornhub. It's very often on Twitter or Instagram and it's accidentally come up and it started an addiction. And so I think that plays into the same thing. It creates a fear around sex and it creates crazy expectations. I think there's porn brained women sometimes where the way they speak about women about themselves is so heartbreaking. Even listening to Call Her Daddy and some of the guests on there, the way they talk about themselves, it sounds like it's straight out of a porn site and that's they're viewing themselves as nothing but an object, a product.

[Chris Williamson]

There's another weird paradox going on here, which is porn is both something totally meaningless, transactional that you can do freely with whoever you want whenever you want.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And also the root of potentially the most traumatic thing in your life if it's done incorrectly. That I don't.

[Freya India]

No, I don't understand the consistent defense of porn from progressives. So this is part of the controversial part of my book is that I don't caveat. I don't give any disclaimers with that because I was so tired of reading books that constantly caveat. And so with things like porn, the

[Chris Williamson]

throat clearing land acknowledgement, well, we must remember that porn can. It does empower women to be able to. If they're a disadvantage, they've got an iPhone and a dildo and they can make the money that they would.

[Freya India]

And I do that throughout the book. So another controversial part of the book is I talk about the mental health industry and I don't do the constant, you know, some medication really helps people and it saves their lives. And therapy is of course, life saving for some people. I do a brief acknowledgment of that at the beginning and then I go into what I think are the real dangers, because I think we've heard that other side of the story. There are so many books telling you the benefits of mental health awareness and opening up and taking medication. And the point of the book is it's the things that we didn't grow up hearing. And so I give the skeptical side of it. And I think that is very alarming to a lot of progressives. They want the constant disclaimers because they think it's dangerous to not have them.

[Chris Williamson]

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[Freya India]

Well, in the book I actually talk about, it starts with the sort of cliche of posting your perfect life online. So highlight reel of everything you're doing. And then I trace the start of influencers being vulnerable online. So I put it. I begin with Zoella, who is huge in the uk. You know the beauty influencer?

[Chris Williamson]

No. Should I? You don't know her, sorry, the beauty influencer Zoella. Yeah, I should be familiar with her.

[Freya India]

Okay. Maybe men and women do have different

[Chris Williamson]

roles, different echo chambers here, you know what I mean? Yeah. Does she lift?

[Freya India]

No.

[Chris Williamson]

If she lifts, then if she starts lifting, if she does a vlog with Chris Bumstead, I'll watch that.

[Freya India]

Okay. Okay. But she basically, she was huge for young British women.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay, British.

[Freya India]

And yeah, and she was sort of perfect looking and really sort of inspirational. If you were 13 and she was in her 20s and she was one of the first beauty influencers and she did this video where it was so dramatic. She was like, I'm going to reveal a really dark side to myself and you guys might not think about me the same, but I've just got to say it. And it was literally just, she has anxiety. But at the time it was so, it felt so personal and private that she was revealing this. And so she spoke about having panic attacks and it got millions of views because 13 year olds like me at the time were like, gosh, there's this perfect woman admitting to having a struggle. So that to me seems a healthy thing. And then I talk about how that basically became incentivized, a whole industry got built around that and other influencers began to see that opening up would be beneficial in terms of clicks, how's it beneficial? Because it's releasing sort of a private secret. So it's very clickable. So if you say I have to tell you how damaged I am about my personal trauma, it's like gossip. And so those videos do really well because they're intimate and vulnerable. And basically that was the start of girls like me seeing influencers offer up their deepest feelings to the market, to algorithms. And I think some of it was directly copying influencers. So we're so sick and tired of the filtered perfect lives that we're all going to start showing the vulnerable side of ourselves.

[Chris Williamson]

It's still a kind of performance.

[Freya India]

And. Yeah, and so my argument in the book is it became its own performance just as damaging as seeing the perfect lives. Now you scroll through people livestreaming their panic attacks, showing their messy depression lives.

[Chris Williamson]

At least the perfect lives are aspirational.

[Freya India]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And it's objectively, even if they're untrue, objectively, if we're able to truthfully get there, that seems like not a bad life to have aspired to.

[Freya India]

It's harmful to scroll through. And I think it's actually harmful for the young girls themselves to tell the Internet everything they're feeling and reveal their deepest emotions. And I actually say in the book that companies were explicitly encouraging that all through my childhood. So Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, they're all telling you, open up, share your story. We want you to tell people how you're feeling. Um, and I think it was more about sharing your data with companies than actually opening up.

[Chris Williamson]

If you think about the progress for let's use Instagram, you go from just being able to post images, to being able to post images and videos, to being able to post images, videos, and then stories and the reason for the story. I remember at the time the guy that was running Instagram, he said, sometimes I do something or take something that I don't think is good enough for my feedback.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

But I do want to share it, so that can go on my story. And then you have close friends.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

So there's even a, you know, members only, and there's a literal members only. It's like an OnlyFans section of Instagram for people who want to have paid for GateWorld members content on there too. But yeah, the only. The close friends Instagram stories thing can be exactly where you would put this sort of stuff. And then, you know, I've refined my having to break down content. Maybe it's fit for public consumption now.

[Freya India]

And I think you have. One thing I always argue is you don't know who you're going to be at 20 or at 30. And you have young girls sharing really vulnerable parts of themselves and sort of then categorising themselves as that thing. So if you're really struggling with social anxiety disorder at 13, you might not be struggling with it at 20, but you're giving the Internet everything about that struggle. And so another part of this is it's the social media platforms and how permanent they are. But then it's the mental health industry that will. You will get categorized, sold to, and then be encouraged to diagnose yourself with a disorder and take it more seriously, whereas you might grow out of it.

[Chris Williamson]

And if you have to do a U turn on that in future. There is this cemented fossilized record of where you were previously. Hey, hey, hey. You used to believe this thing.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And now you are saying this thing. Why?

[Freya India]

So often in the book I'll talk about influences and sort of how they've had, they've been called out for something or they've had a breakdown or something has backfired. And it's so interesting that young girls were basically mimicking on a smaller scale everything that they were doing. And so, for example, I talk about 2020 and all of the influencers getting canceled for not posting the right black square and getting called out. And the same thing is playing out amongst ordinary girls turning on each other for not posting the right thing. And it's a similar theme throughout the book. It's whatever's happening to influencers on a big scale, ordinary girls are mimicking because they also have an audience. It might not be a huge audience that influencers have, but they are performing for their followers and their subscribers. And the argument is that our role models were influencers more than anything else.

[Chris Williamson]

So normal feelings are being reframed as disorders now.

[Freya India]

Yes. And so that's a big controversial part of the book.

[Chris Williamson]

Nearly 30% of teenage American girls aged 18 to 14 to 18 seriously considered attempting suicide in 2021. 30% of teenage American girls 18 to 14 seriously considered attempting suicide in 2021.

[Freya India]

See, I think there's two things going on which is that there is genuine distress. And so I'm not someone who argues that young women are just diagnosing themselves, but they feel fine. I don't actually think they feel fine. I think they feel intense psychological distress for all sorts of reasons. But then part of that distress is a mental health industry that is encouraging them to ruminate, to go more inwards, to focus on it, to diagnose themselves. And so it's a part of it. But I think, yeah, if young girls say they have an anxiety disorder, they have social anxiety. I think what they're really feeling is actual distress from the world that they're growing up in. And so they have had less practice, they have had less face to face interaction. And so they do have this outsize reaction to socializing, but it's not a disorder. And so the problem is you have a lot of young women who typically by their nature will go inwards when they feel distressed, but you have industries encouraging them and telling them the problem is you.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, they're not making it up, but they are being manipulated.

[Freya India]

Yeah, yeah. And the point of the book is basically, there's nothing wrong with you. Your reactions are human reactions to the world and to a world that's trying to turn you into a product. The fact that you feel unhappy, what's the product bit? Well, I think that all of these things in some way are linked to girls viewing themselves as some kind of object or trying to be perfect. So trying to look perfect, feel perfect, labeling themselves. If they feel anything human or any sort of distress or human reaction to something, they will need to package it up and understand it. I think so much of girls lives is about, again, presenting things to the market and understanding labeling and displaying themselves for other people.

[Chris Williamson]

What's happening politically to young women?

[Freya India]

Well, so this is the interesting thing in that New Statesman piece is they actually admitted that it's young women who have been radicalized. So from the 2010s, it was young women who lurched dramatically to the left. It wasn't that young men lurched to the right. Young men pretty much stayed where they were. It was women.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. The New Statesman said the prevailing narrative is that young men under the influence of the manosphere and Andrew Tate, are being politically radicalized faster and in greater numbers than young women. The result is a gulf in political sensibility between British women and men who are now dramatically inclined to the populist right compared with other parts of the population. It's a compelling story, but it isn't completely accurate. Instead, it is young women moving to the radical left that is widening the political gender gap among the under 30s.

[Freya India]

Yeah, and I would put that down to social media, because obviously there's all different spheres of content on social media, and every trend, basically, you can get dragged toward the most deranged and extreme endpoint of that trend. And so I've been trying to argue for ages that young women are going down their own rabbit holes. Whether it's mental health trends, they hover over some content and then end up diagnosing themselves. And it becomes their full identity because they're dragged constantly toward more content. And it's the same with progressive politics. You start at a pretty normal place where maybe previous generations of women were, but then you get moved by the algorithm constantly further and further to the left.

[Chris Williamson]

Why to the left and not to the right?

[Freya India]

I think because progressive politics naturally plays into women's characteristics, especially the new sort of social justice culture of politics, because it's very much about compassion. Empathy also plays into our vices. So indirect aggression, cancel culture. Risk aversion, safetyism. A lot of the vices of young women are sort of indulged by the new social justice movement. So I think that's happening. But then also, you combine that with social media platforms and young women are just sucked into it in a way that young men aren't.

[Chris Williamson]

There was a. A segment in that New Statesman article. I asked if the women would consider dating a man with different politics. They all immediately said no. I don't think I'd even be friends with one. Said one girl. They don't see you as human. Only one woman, Evelyn, admitted to having male friends, though she was worried this made her a pick me trying too hard for male attention. Evelyn was concerned about what she the men that she knew were watching online. The stuff that's being said about women is crazy. They're getting all of these reels talking about, like, bad stuff about women. And I get reels of women saying bad stuff about men. I tried to think not all men are like this, but it's interesting that men get reels talking bad stuff about women.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And she knows that she gets reels of women talking bad stuff about men.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

But that the women talking bad stuff about men is warning her about what the men are watching. And that's true. But that the reels that are telling the men the bad stuff about women, that's actually where the danger is.

[Freya India]

Yeah. And I think that's where what the New Statesman would draw from all this is that women have negative views of men because men are bad, rather than why do they have negative views of men? What rabbit holes are they going down? When it's young men, it's always a rabbit hole that they've gone down. But young women are reacting to a real issue. Whereas I've seen so many parallels between the sort of extreme manosphere guys and Call her Daddy. It's the same language. It's the same, like thumbnails and titles. So it would be like, we don't need men and we don't need women. Exactly the same. And the way, again, they speak about women is identical.

[Chris Williamson]

Was 2020 a turning point for girls online?

[Freya India]

I think it was the first time that I remember being called out for not posting something. And so something really changed in terms of you have to join in the pressure and the fear of your reputation being smeared, especially if you were a teenage girl at the time. So I remember being. I think I was 19 when lives matter protests were happening and the sort of, again, you had celebrities and influencers being called out, but then you had ordinary girls coming after each other for not posting stuff. And I Give the context in the book that we were basically posting everything online by that point. So every relationship memory holiday was updated and compulsively shared with people. And so if you're doing that and then you don't post a black square, it looks really suspect because everything else is shared. And so I think what changed in 2020 is morality became measurable and instantly judged by your Instagram profile. And I think when you're a teenage girl, your life is basically just constant reputation management. And so that really hit young girls, this idea that you're not a good person if you're not joining in and you're not displaying where you stand on things.

[Chris Williamson]

What was that silence is consent tagline?

[Freya India]

Yeah, that was Cara Delevingne. So she had a Instagram story saying silence is consent, which is the worst.

[Chris Williamson]

It's not great to tell women, is it?

[Freya India]

Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, all. So it was young women pressuring each other and then going after each other for not doing it, because it became another form of reputation destruction that you have inoffensive and outdated views. And so I think it was even separate from what was happening politically. It just became another form of competition.

[Chris Williamson]

A quick aside, most people think that they're dehydrated because they don't drink enough water. Turns out water alone isn't just the problem, it's also what's missing from it. Which is why for the last five years, I've started every single morning with a cold glass of element in water. Element is an electrolyte drink with a science backed ratio of sodium, potassium and magnesium. No sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients. Just the stuff that your body actually needs to function. This plays a critical role in reducing your muscle cramps and your fatigue. It optimizes your brain health, it regulates your appetite, and it helps curb cravings. I keep talking about it because I genuinely feel a difference when I use it versus when I don't. And best of all, there's a no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration. So if you're on the fence, you can buy it and try it for as long as you like. And if you don't like it for any reason, they just give you your money back. You don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. And they offer free shipping in the US right now. You can get a free sample pack of Elements most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com modernwisdom that's drinklmnt.com ModernWisdom the female intrasexual competition thing is so fascinating to me because it's so hidden, it's so done behind the scenes, it's not out front. I guess what's happening with how girls see their appearance, how's that changed over time?

[Freya India]

Yeah, I mean, that's another crazy arms race. I mean, I talk about again with beauty influences like Zoella that I grew up with. She would just do like a back to school makeup tutorial and it would be very simple and basic and not nothing really harmful about teenage girls watching that. But again, the competition, the amount of influences over the years that now have to compete for clicks and money mean that each beauty influencer also has to up their game and say something slightly more extreme or show something more extreme. So for example, you go from normal beauty tutorials to casual vlogs where you just show you getting a Brazilian butt lift in the middle of the vlog and that becomes part of a standard beauty routine. And you see it with stuff like anti aging, where it's just a simple anti aging routine then becomes like a 50 step anti aging routine. And you need to do it younger and younger because the thumbnail that says, you know, you need Botox at 17 does way better because people click it and want to know more about it. And so it's in all aspects of life for young women. It's the mental health trends, it's the political trends, it's the beauty trends. Basically, social media will drag everything to its inevitable extreme. And then if you're spending most of your waking hours on social media, then that is no longer the extreme. That is where you're getting your information. It's where you're learning about beauty and relationships and politics.

[Chris Williamson]

Has Instagram and TikTok changed what we find attractive?

[Freya India]

Yeah, I think so. I think it's more of sort of Avatar now where you there's a terror of aging among young women. And so I wrote a piece ages ago about 12 year olds worrying about wrinkles on Reddit forums and obsessively ruminating over pictures whether they, whether they aged, writing out all of the sun exposure they've had and checking, you know, is this something that could make me look worse in the future? Comparing all of their anti aging routines and their children.

[Chris Williamson]

You need an aging routine. You need to actively be aging at that point.

[Freya India]

Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, this is get more sun.

[Freya India]

Sometimes it's girls worrying about wrinkles before they've got through puberty. Because they've grown up with watching influencers who are worrying about that and who are having to sort of exaggerate their neuroticism. Up their neuroticism to get clicks. But then you have young girls that's the first they encounter. First sort of young women role models they encounter who are warning them about this. And I think social media in general just makes you ruminate. And so girls already ruminate more than boys. But then they're on all these platforms like Reddit where you all co ruminate together. The point is you talk about your

[Chris Williamson]

problems and there's an escalation on there as well. Yeah, there's always a sense of one upmanship. I always see this with my friends that are conspiracy minded and in a room there's always a. It's kind of like an arms race to see who can go deepest down the iceberg. Oh, you think that Epstein was just a guy that had an eyelash? Oh, you think he was just Mossad? Oh, you think he was just a reptile person? Dude, let me tell you the. Oh, that's cute. Let me tell you the real thing. And it's this. Yeah. Weird race to the bottom of the iceberg. And it's kind of the same here that there is this ratcheting up in intensity of this stuff.

[Freya India]

You see that most with the mental health stuff where it will be. Oh, you think it's bad. You've got adhd. Well, I've got autism and ADHD and

[Chris Williamson]

I've got a gluten intolerance and I've got a club foot and my dad walked out.

[Freya India]

Yeah, exactly. And I think the platforms, again, they encourage that because you have all influencers are competing for attention. But then you have influencers whose whole brand now is their mental health diagnosis. They are the ADHD influencer. And I think that creates some very bad incentives because then you, you, you basically compete over your diagnosis.

[Chris Williamson]

There has to be a psychological cost of growing up with a front facing camera 247 as well.

[Freya India]

Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

Right. What was that? There was a. Was it zoom face that people had during lockdown. Snapchat, dysmorphia as well, where people want to get surgery and to look like their filter. They don't like seeing themselves without their filter.

[Freya India]

Yeah. So you have girls who are using. Did you know about Facetune? Because I swear, no young men even know what it is. You don't know it.

[Chris Williamson]

What's Facetune?

[Freya India]

See, that's great. So Facetune is one of the most popular apps where girls would edit themselves to then post on Instagram.

[Chris Williamson]

Like filters.

[Freya India]

No going in and editing each part of your face. So you can slim your jaw, you can enlarge your eyes, you can change your waist, you can tan your skin, you can whiten your teeth. It's everything. But that is what girls were using as teenagers all throughout their. All throughout growing up. And then they've reached their 20s and people say, oh, why are they unhappy with the way they look? Why do they have body dysmorphia? And they're using this app where you. You change yourself and then there's like an undo button which if you click it, you look horrifying because then it reverts back to who you really are. But you had girls doing that during the most formative years of their life and then trying to adjust to how they actually look.

[Chris Williamson]

How does the self love messaging coexist with record levels of body dissatisfaction?

[Freya India]

Yeah, that's another paradox, I think, because it's a marketing strategy. It's much like mental health awareness. A lot of that was a marketing strategy. The Self love campaign was basically ways to sell things like editing apps. So Facetune was marketed as something that can help you feel confident and empowered. And I talk about these influencers in the book who are literally. They're literally talking about how they don't have any insecurities anymore and they've overcome it and they finally reached a stage of self love while they're literally reshaping their joy on Facetune, teaching girls how to do it. And none of the comments are calling that out or thinking it's hypocritical.

[Chris Williamson]

Why?

[Freya India]

Because I think it's been drilled into us that these things are self love. And so a lot of the time in the book, I talk about recognizing what are you actually being sold versus what you're being told. Because you're constantly being told you feel this way and that this app or technology or trend will make you feel this way, even though it's not. So. I don't know any young woman that would facetune herself and feel good, feel good doing it, rather than feel embarrassed and a bit ashamed and feel worse about themselves after.

[Chris Williamson]

You know, I think the same thing happened with the pickup artist movement. So what guys that did it learned was just how much they had to contort themselves in order to get laid with a woman. And even if it was effective, what they felt was the delta between who they were normally and who they were when they deployed the game by Neil Strauss.

[Freya India]

Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

And that gap made them, the normal version of them, feel even more disgusting and even more unwanted. Look at how much I've got to disguise and pervert myself in an attempt to try. Did you see the midget fight outside? Let's go to three other bars so that I can neuro linguistically program hack the back of your brain into coming to bed with me tonight. You go, I have to jump through all of these hoops. And this is where. So for the guys that it was successful for, if you don't do too much self investigation, hooray, you did it thing.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

But if you do a bit more self investigation, it's pretty. It can be pretty dark. And for the guys that did it and it didn't work, even with the best tactics in the world, I still can't make myself into someone that a woman wants. Yes, neither of those are good outcomes.

[Freya India]

Yeah, it's the same. That's so similar to the beauty stuff for women, which is that it can maybe get you what you want superficially. So you Facetune yourself and you get 200 likes on your Instagram post. But then it's a momentary bit of dopamine, but then after that you're now hooked on the app. You need to keep using it. You need the uglier. Yeah. And then you develop, which is what happened to me and a lot of girls I know, which was then having an aversion to having your picture taken naturally because you're so used to controlling it. So girls in my friendship group would fight over whose phone the picture would be taken on so that they could

[Chris Williamson]

go in and face the face.

[Freya India]

They've got the control.

[Chris Williamson]

Wow.

[Freya India]

And so then.

[Chris Williamson]

Wow, that is fucking insane.

[Freya India]

Yeah. Because it feels so out of control. And then also that explains a lot of, I think, social anxiety, because being in the real world is out of control. You can't control your appearance. You can't edit what you're saying or rehearse it. And so I think a lot of these apps actually then stunted us in real life because it feels so.

[Chris Williamson]

You know what was interesting? I was at. I was on Long Island, August of last year, good weather, sunset. And there was a group of young teenage girls that were taking photos. And I noticed that if it was really perfectly put together, I mean, they must have taken. I'm not kidding. It must have been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of photos. I get it. You want a nice new profile picture. Whatever. Like, is it a bit silly? Yeah. But whatever, it's fine.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

The other thing that Was interesting was if they were snapping as they walked because they stayed in the same area that was gonna have the best sunset, which is where everybody was eating ice cream or whatever. And if someone was sort of snapping away more naturally, more candidly, immediately all of their hands went up to their face. Have you seen this trend where girls sort of do this? So they'll do. They'll pose with their body, but cover their face with their hand. And as I again, like, I'm trying to get it, I'm trying to not curmudgeonly point a finger at someone that's 20 years younger than me and go, these kids, these. Okay, so what is it that they're feeling? Why are they doing this thing? What's the best interpretation of this? Like, it's a cutesy little. But it wasn't a Marilyn Monroe, shocked, open mouth sort of face. It was, I just need to do this. It was like the scene out of Four Lions where he's trying to stop the fucking CCTV from watching it.

[Freya India]

It's another paradox where we're vain and insecure at the same time. But there's context to it because, you know, I grew up with the dog ear filter on Snapchat. Please tell me you know what that is.

[Chris Williamson]

I've seen that one and I remember the. Do you remember the face mask that was bees?

[Freya India]

No.

[Chris Williamson]

So you know, like the face mask that you used to have in Covid.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

That very quickly became like an object of oppression or something that didn't work or whatever. Yeah, I swear there was one. And people can tell me in the comments whether or not I'm fucking hallucinating this. I swear that there was one that was yellow and had bees. Jared, Google, was there a Snapchat filter of a face mask with bees? I swear, fucking not Hallucin, but I remember the dog one. And then if you opened your mouth, it did a licking thing, right?

[Freya India]

Yes, but the dog one

[Chris Williamson]

made people want to be dogs.

[Freya India]

No, but it beautified you as well. So it would like enlarge your eyes and smooth your skin. And so you had 13 year olds using it because it was cute, but then suddenly hating the normal pictures of themselves and not knowing why. And it's because it was subtly changing your face.

[Chris Williamson]

Why do you think social media's feminized us all?

[Freya India]

Oh, because I think that it has. So because girls use social media more than boys and they say that they find it harder to give up. And as I said before, it sort of. These platforms tap into our vulnerabilities and our vices. But then lately I've realized that I think it does that for everyone. So I used to think that social media is particularly bad for girls because it makes you feel insecure, it makes you ruminate and it encourages this indirect aggression. So reputation destruction and going after people online. But now I see grown men online acting like teenage girls. And I think it's because the platform itself encourages these behavior that teenage girls already typically do. And so you see people online of all genders, of all different sides of the political spectrum, all different types of content, thinking like teenage girls. So becoming more ruminative, spending hours and hours on platforms where they have to share how they feel, how their day is their opinion encouraged to sort of catastrophize and ruminate over that. Then you have men and all different types of people becoming more insecure. So looking at themselves through a front facing camera, which is bad for girls, but even worse, I think for boys. It's just very unnatural to sort of forensically analyze and inspect your face. And so you have looks maxing and guys getting really obsessed with how they come across and how they appear and also thinking they have to be this perfect product. And then you also have guys using sort of the typical aggressive tactics of teenage girls online. And so Louise Perry and Mary Harrington have spoken about this, that the Internet forecloses physical aggression. You can't punch someone on Twitter and so you have to do things like spread reputation damage. Yeah. Gossip and yeah. Just destroy their reputation through posting like an unflattering picture of them or there's

[Chris Williamson]

a lot of catty behavior. Men on the Internet, you know, I go on X and I just see. Because I only log on maybe once every other day.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

So I see it, you know, when you go to a nightclub and strobe lights flash and you don't see someone move, you see them at frames. They're here, then they're here, then they're here. It's kind of like that. So I log on and see this breakdown between two people and then a couple of days later where that war has sort of evolved into. And it's. It is so especially for the most masculine academic y, intellectually, everybody has regressed to the mean of high school dinner table.

[Freya India]

But it's interesting because ideologically men and women might be further apart. But I think behaviorally that is one place that we're converging is that we're all regressing back to being teenage girls. And I also argued that it's not that the thing about being a teenage girl is it's miserable. Like a lot of women would say they do not want to go back to being 13. It's one of the worst stages of life for a lot of women. And so not only are we acting more catty online, but I think it's bad for our mental health because it traps you in this sort of particularly destructive developmental time.

[Chris Williamson]

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[Freya India]

Yeah. So that's a big part of all kinds of influencers. So beauty influencers, mental health influencers is that they present themselves as a friend. And I think this happened quite naturally at first. So the original influencers were just, hi

[Chris Williamson]

girls, here we are today.

[Freya India]

But now it's a tactic. Now they know that they have to appeal to young girls and make them feel like a friend. And so I talk about these Tactics in the book where they will literally say something like that. Their YouTube title will be let's Get Ready, like We're on FaceTime. And they'll do their makeup and talk to you like you're on a FaceTime call and literally simulate friendship with girls. And I think that is a huge issue because it stops girls from getting lonely enough to actually go out and make friends and do something about it. Because they can simulate all of these things online.

[Chris Williamson]

That's so good. You've heard my male sedation hypothesis thing, right?

[Freya India]

Maybe. Which one?

[Chris Williamson]

Young male syndrome. Throughout history, when there's a lot of sexless young men, they tend to cause uprisings and push over granny and set shit on fire.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

We've got the highest rates of sexlessness among young men that we've ever had. Why is there not the concordant antisocial behavior?

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

It's my belief that it's porn screens and video games. Porn giving a titrated dose of sexual satisfaction. Screens distracting. And video games giving a simulacrum of goal seeking.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

So they're being said that male sedation hypothesis, they're being sedate. That's why like a study done by William is where are all of the incel killings at? Like, why are there not more? There should be. If you were to run it by the numbers. That's not a fucking request to the dj. But where are they? And what's interesting about this is what are some of the young female pathways? What are the nutrients that they want? For guys, it might be progress, mastery, a sense of teamwork as they move toward a goal.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

For girls, belonging, advice, emotional understanding. And it's interesting, I'm going to guess. Jared, can you chatgpt what the teenage gender split is for playing video games? Because I'm going to guess that it's way more on the male side. But if you were to look at Day in the Life vlogs, I bet

[Freya India]

that Get Ready With Me.

[Chris Williamson]

Who the fuck get Ready with me? It takes three seconds. You know, it's like it would be called Put yout Pants On With Me and it would literally be a 15 second video for a guy. Oh, wow. 99% of boys play video games. 94%.

[Freya India]

What other games though?

[Chris Williamson]

Among teens, 39% of boys describe themselves as daily gamers. 22% of girls do just search. Do you know what the relative amounts like daily play time is? Because it's got to be more. There's no way 93% of teenage girls playing video games.

[Freya India]

Yeah, but is it like Sims in Animal Crossing?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, maybe. I guess. So. This is where the gender difference becomes more boys, 1.5 to 2.5 hours per day on average. Girls, half an hour to one and a half hours. So boys are one and a half to two times as much. First person shooters, sports games, action combat games. Strategy and other competitive multiplayer games for boys. Social sandbox games, Roblox, Minecraft simulation Sims. Animal Crossing. You nailed it. Candy crush, Subway surface puzzle games, short sessions, low commitment.

[Freya India]

Cozy games.

[Chris Williamson]

Stardew. Yeah, cozy games.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

I saw this quote the other day. I'd be interested to know what you think about it. The average woman's misandry comes from online radicalization, not experience. What do you think about that?

[Freya India]

I think they may have bad experiences. So when I was writing the book, a lot of the complaints from young women were things like situationships where there's no clear commitment. And so I do think there are less incentives for men to formalize a relationship.

[Chris Williamson]

And also girls have to be super cool with that.

[Freya India]

Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

Because sex is supposed to be no strings attached. You should have sex like your brother and work like your father. It's super chill.

[Freya India]

Yeah. So a lot of the forums are full of women asking each other whether something's okay. Like he, I'm not actually his girlfriend yet, he is dating someone, but we are exclusive. You know, it's like it gets really muddled and asking each other that, is this normal?

[Chris Williamson]

Should I put up a Christopher Nolan movie plot?

[Freya India]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I think there will be cases where young women are coming across more men who do act like that, depending on the type of young women and who she's going for. But a lot of the time I do think that online radicalization is at least stopping them from treating those as specific examples. So they're then generalized to all men. So I think they might have had a bad experience. But then they go online and people say, this is all men. This is happening to me. This is happening everywhere. And I think similar with women. So sometimes I read comments that will say things like, you know, like 1 in 2 girls are onlyfans stars, or they're all promiscuous. And that's just not true. That's just generalized from the Internet. And so I think it happens to both sexes, which we're just again, encouraged to catastrophize and generalize online.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, the most egregious stories are the ones that go viral.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Right. So you end up, I call this recursive red pill learning, which is the most Ridiculous stories that you can find on the Internet. This guy leaves the house for two hours, but he lost his job the day before and he comes back and his wife's in bed with the milkman and the milkman's dog. And then she leaves him and he's broke and he gets addicted to fentanyl. And whether that's true or not, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. That is the story, because it's so extreme. That's the one that gets pushed online the most, which means the most people see it, which means the most people learn from it. And that then just feeds this cycle of. If you were a training Data set for ChatGPT.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

You would be being trained by exposure because you don't see everything because you're not omnipotent. You would be trained on the most extreme stories. So you have the least representative stories because they're the ones that get the most attention online. This guy and his wife had a minor argument and after a couple of hours they came together and had a cup of tea and everything was okay.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Like that is hopefully what most people should be experiencing.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

But that's not going to generate any clicks online, which means that you're less likely to see it, which means also people are less likely to post it. So it's this bidirectional tri directional incentive system.

[Freya India]

Well, if you look at Reddit in particular, you've seen that study about, you

[Chris Williamson]

know, the advice of can you, can you Google Reddit? Relationship advice graph will come up and

[Freya India]

I think compromise is the least popular that's gone down.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. Was it like just talk it out, go to therapy? Ticked up a little bit.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

But it's. You should just break up.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And the interesting thing is chatgpt, I think some huge proportion of its training

[Freya India]

data is on Reddit.

[Chris Williamson]

Is on Reddit.

[Freya India]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

So that being said, I haven't heard many people say. I haven't heard many people say that ChatGPT has told them to break up.

[Freya India]

True.

[Chris Williamson]

Here it is. So 15 years of relationship advice on Reddit. 1,166,592 comments. End relationship or cut contact has gone from 30% to 50%. Communicate has dropped by like a quarter. Give space and time has dropped by even more. Seek therapy and counseling. Ticked up a little bit. What's that yellow one? Set and respect boundaries. So kind of the, I guess, weaponizing of therapy language. A little bit there. And then compromise also dropped by probably half.

[Freya India]

Yeah. I was going to say, because some of the examples in the book, I take from Reddit forums where actually I wonder what that advice is for. I'd love to see a breakdown because sometimes it's a young woman presenting a completely valid opinion about her relationship. So she's saying, I feel, let's say, her partner's addicted to porn. And there was one example in the book where her partner had said to her that he was addicted to porn and he watches girls that look like her to try and reassure her. So don't worry, but she's all right,

[Chris Williamson]

darling, I only go for blondes. It's fine, it's fine. It's basically me watching you.

[Freya India]

Well, I think he was saying even worse, that like, I watch people with average bodies like yours. Like, I also watch normal women. But anyway, she wrote this like heartbreaking post on Reddit to say, how do I deal with this? And she kept saying in it constantly, like, I know that I need to get over this, but you know, it's upsetting me. I can't stop crying about it. I can't have a conversation with him. Literally every single comment was, you are the problem. I think you have an anxiety disorder. I think you have an attachment issue, because this is completely normal. And so I think there's sort of two things going on. I do think there's also, when there's legitimate problems, the sort of inward spiral of Reddit can make you overthink it and go too far inwards.

[Chris Williamson]

I keep seeing this everywhere and this is another example of it, that for instance, mental health problems are both underdiagnosed and over diagnosed. So there is a bucket of people who have serious mental health issues that aren't seeking medical attention or advice or treatment for it. And then there's a huge number of people who don't have mental health problems but have convinced themselves or been convinced by the Internet or gaslight themselves into believing that they do. So they're both underdiagnosed and over diagnosed. It's that relationship advice is both too fragile and too forgiving at the same time. It's too accusatory and too blameless.

[Freya India]

Well, as you've said before, the people who don't need that advice will take it.

[Chris Williamson]

Hyper responders.

[Freya India]

Yeah. And so you have, if you're a girl that's self critical and likely to go inward and someone tells you you are the problem, you're going to take that seriously.

[Chris Williamson]

And you'll also gravitate toward a community of people who believe that too.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

So you will echo chamber that. I mean, this is The. It's great, I think that guys who take responsibility and girls that take responsibility, dudes that like, you know, lock in and fucking get shit done. Great. There is a limit, right? You are not supposed to grit your teeth through your intimate relationship.

[Freya India]

Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

You're not supposed to subdue your needs or push simply because that's what's been successful elsewhere in your life. Like your relationship is a place that you're supposed to feel safe and regulated. Not another challenge for you to go to war inside of.

[Freya India]

But I actually think sometimes the therapy language in relationships can obscure the real problem. And so if you're constantly encouraged to communicate and talk it through and see their point of view and understand their boundaries and it's their personal taste and preference, you have a generation who's so articulate in therapy speak, but then find it very hard to see what is the actual problem and react to the actual problem.

[Chris Williamson]

There's a great Alain de Botton video where he says that after a while you need to realize that the late night journaling sessions and the couple's counseling and the four hour phone calls are just an indication that this isn't working.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

That the fact that we now have the tools to be able to do rupture and repair and to work out our attachment styles and learn our love languages doesn't mean that there isn't a limit to incompatibility.

[Freya India]

Well, this is what I've spoken about, about girls thinking they're anxiously attached when they're just with a really bad partner and again, doing that thing where they feel like they can't ever be jealous or insecure. And so instead they think that being, being securely attached is never being insecure or unhappy or reacting to things. And I think a lot of that is because they're reading relationship advice on TikTok, which has no context and, and basically is as dramatic and extreme as possible, and tells them that they have a problem.

[Chris Williamson]

Megan Cooper, a British trauma informed holistic therapist, has a podcast called Higher Love in which she discusses violence against women, hyper masculinity and the ecosystem of manufactured male victimhood. On Instagram, Cooper posted about conflicts in Iran, Palestine, Beirut and Sudan. I don't know about you, but for the past few months my bones have ached, she wrote in March. The viscerality of the feminine wound. There's an interesting injection of sort of female coded language into global wars and conflict that I don't, I'm not, I don't, I don't fully see the link there.

[Freya India]

No, I don't understand that the only thing I can think is that it becomes again, another form of signaling you are a good person.

[Chris Williamson]

Look at how much I care.

[Freya India]

Yeah. And these would be the same women who've again grown up with believing that what counts as being a good person is what they post

[Chris Williamson]

also empathy to steel, man. That this person is, if that's the truth, this person really cares about what's going on in the Middle east and is genuinely pained by it. And that's a kind of investment that's really impressive.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

I don't. I don't know whether, like, one of the concerns is that the incentives align on social media for empathy. In particular, a very sort of public. A very obvious kind of look at how much I care. This is my. These are my tears for the people of the Sudan. These are. This is my concern. I want. But that's a kind of. It can be deranging, and it can actually stop you from doing something that could help or focusing on something that you can have an impact on. It's interesting to me that in the New Statesman article October 7th was a huge turning point for lots of these women.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

But not the 77 bombing. But not issues that are much closer to home. Not the grooming gangs crisis that we've got, which is directly affecting women. Like the concern here, the viscerality of the feminine wound. I'm gonna guess when we're talking about the Middle east, most of the casualties are probably going to be men because they're the people that are military actors on both sides. Same thing goes for the Ukraine. The same thing goes for Gaza. Like, yes, women and children are not enemy combatants or combatants at all. That's a huge fucking tragedy. But it's more men that die in war. And the viscerality of the feminine wound seems like a kind of weird injection of gender into something that's just a tragedy. And the same thing around October 7th. There are much closer to home issues that could trigger that, but for some reason haven't and didn't. And I wonder whether it's maybe because the grooming gangs in the UK is right coded.

[Freya India]

Yeah. It's too political. It's too. Not politically correct. But also it's interesting. In that New Statesman piece, did you read what that young woman spoke, what she said about her boyfriend being a Labrador?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, he's a fucking Labrador. He's never endured any discomfort in his life. It's hard for someone who's never faced adversity and has been privately educated to understand this. I actually think I'm the adversity in his life.

[Freya India]

So where's the empathy for people directly in front of you? That is what concerns me. That's why I am suspicious of sympathy

[Chris Williamson]

for being in a relationship with you.

[Freya India]

Yeah. Suspicious of being suspicious of it being actual empathy because it doesn't seem to translate to even more closer to home than the grooming gangs and the 77 bombings. Your actual family or partner.

[Chris Williamson]

What's been the response to this by the press?

[Freya India]

To the New Statesman, basically.

[Chris Williamson]

No, to yours. Oh, to your book.

[Freya India]

Well, dangerous, I think, is one of the. One of the sort of key themes has been that. Actually I think more from the press, it's been that it's not genuine empathy, ironically.

[Chris Williamson]

So that should have talked about the Sudan.

[Freya India]

Yeah. So the Guardian said it was like a bit of a grift to talk about what's happening to girls. The New Statesman said, you know, I can't possibly save anyone because their argument was because I'm selling the book. And so because I talk about consumerism, I can't actually sell the book. I just need to write it and just leave it on the floor.

[Chris Williamson]

It's interesting for someone who's got a publication that's behind a paywall.

[Freya India]

Yeah, but you have to sell who isn't. Who has so much integrity that they didn't even sell their anti capitalist book. They just gave it to people like, you know, I just don't think that's an argument.

[Chris Williamson]

But yeah, it's also not an anti capitalist book.

[Freya India]

Yeah. But I think what's happening is there's been all kinds of criticism from all different directions and some of them cancel each other out. And so I think the real thing is that I'm just not the politically correct person to say it. And I don't have all the disclaimers. I don't talk about political issues in the Middle East. I don't talk about the patriarchy. I talk about what I genuinely think affected me and is affecting young women that I know. And so I think they come up with all other angles of criticism rather than saying it's because she reaches conservative conclusions.

[Chris Williamson]

I don't understand why this isn't seen as progressive. Like surely saying that these tech companies are abusing and commodifying children for profit should be the thing that's being called out and pushed back against.

[Freya India]

No, because they think that we live in a patriarchy and the problem is men. And I'm sort of deflecting it onto social media platforms. Also that social media platforms are where girls can learn about feminist ideas and express themselves and you know, those are good for women.

[Chris Williamson]

But they also hate billionaires.

[Freya India]

Yeah, well that's an irony with all of these industries. I mean, a lot of these young women define their lives by DSM diagnoses that were basically voted by rich white men. No, the actual pharmaceutical labels.

[Chris Williamson]

Right.

[Freya India]

So all of these industries have the influence of rich white men that they hate. But because I draw different conclusions from them and because I have the cultural stuff in there about divorce and porn, all of these sort of conservative coded concerns and then the whole book has to be dangerous. So a lot of it. Yeah. Is young women warning each other how

[Chris Williamson]

is being anti divorce conservative or how is being pro divorce progressive?

[Freya India]

Because it. Divorce is now how women self actualize. And so I talk in the book actually about going from the normalization of divorce to the glamorization of divorce and then divorce being a means to self fulfillment and self expression.

[Chris Williamson]

People have divorce parties.

[Freya India]

Yeah. And basically I think that women interpret that as me saying women should stay with the absolute worst husbands at all costs. But really I think that the normalisation and glamorisation of divorce hurts women as well, hurts wives and it hurts children.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, we're already hearing a lot, although it seems to be not fully backed up by the data about the double shift. Women coming home from work and then having to clean up around the house. When you add in other types of especially emotional labor and emotional containment that men do, the numbers start to fall away. Yeah, but if you're worried about the double shift, imagine the fucking double shift, but without the helper. Because that's what it is. Especially if it's young kids. If it's young kids, they. Erica Commissar was amazing.

[Freya India]

She's amazing. That was a great episode.

[Chris Williamson]

Thank you. Her saying custody shouldn't be 5050 at all because baby doesn't need dad as much as it needs mum. Maybe it needs to add more in later life. But people seem to break up between the ages of like six months and three years because it's really hard. And the cracks that were in the relationship before have been really exposed by this additional level of stress. If you break up during that time, you are going to be as a mum, you are going to be the one that's going to bear more of this burden and you don't have a dual income household anymore. So it's like quadruple burden. I don't know this sort of theme, the trend that I'm kind of fascinated by and it's good to see Us kicking all of the tripwires of are the sort of paradoxes of these hypersexualized but also having less sex. Sex is something which is really sacred, but also something that if it's done incorrectly, can be incredibly traumatic to you. The world is more connected than ever before, and yet people feel more isolated. We have. Independence is what you should strive for in your career as your highest calling. And also maternity leave needs to be increased. Billionaires are bad, but working for a company can be where you find your greatest meaning in life. Freedom is really important, but also it's a really interesting. When you see these paradoxes and it kind of like cultural hypocrisy in a way. It's usually a suggestion that it's not fully thought out because it should be smoother than that. It should be more easy to deconstruct logically. You've got a number. You do the division of this and the number's 45 characters. There's a ton of decimal points after. As you try to sort out what this equation means.

[Freya India]

Yeah. I think the way I view it is. I think some. Again, it's overthinking a natural instinct a lot of the time. Like, if you think about divorce, a child's parents splitting apart and not living in the same household with the child, that's going to harm the child. I don't really need data sets and research for that to seem true. That feels true. And you see it playing out with people who've had divorced parents where they carry that into relationships. And that's what's interesting is progressives love attachment theory and they love talking about abandonment issues, but they never talk about what's causing those abandonment issues.

[Chris Williamson]

So it's only ever looking backward, never looking forward.

[Freya India]

Yeah. So if you say all of these young women feel abandoned because they were more likely to have divorced parents, that's not politically correct. But you can talk about all of these young women need to be in therapy and they need to be healing their inner child, and they need to be giving money to these industries because they feel a certain way. Like we should be figuring out why they feel a certain way, why they're so dependent on the mental health industry.

[Chris Williamson]

They're prepared to kind of under the bus the previous generation and say, well, you know, our parents didn't have the therapeutic tools. Yeah, they didn't understand attachment theory. They weren't able to hold me when I needed it. They weren't able to look at. And all of these things are true. And I agree, and I think that a lot of an attachment informed child rearing strategy would make kids lives and then the adults lives better. Yeah, but saying they weren't able to hold me as a kid, which is why I need to go to therapy now. But also if me and my partner break up, that's something to be celebrated. How little do you think you're going to be able to hold your kid if it's at your father's, your ex husband's house?

[Freya India]

But they think that. I think they think the reason they have an attachment disorder is that they are disordered, they have an illness. It seems to stop at the label, which is that I have a problem. Whereas what I've tried to do is give some of the context to that because some of the context of that has ended up conservative coded. That's when it becomes an issue I still can't understand.

[Chris Williamson]

You know, there's this, there's a bunch of different movements at the moment. Unsubscribe, resist and unsubscribe. Scott Galloway's thing that I think maybe Netflix is on there, There's a bunch of companies that are on there. I don't know whether there's any social media platforms that are on there, but if you want to look at who are the companies making the most money that have the most influence politically powerful. Every left leaning Gen Z goal should be deleting their Instagram account. They should be deleting their Instagram account. They should be deleting TikTok because of the abuses to workers in China and they shouldn't ever be using that. Also shouldn't be on X because Elon Musk's got loads of money and they don't like his politics and how he influenced the American connection. I mean, I don't know who fucking owns Blue Sky. Maybe that is as a company is run. That's like as socialist of a capitalist company as you're going to get. But that's where it seems self serving or at least it feels a little bit hypocritical where you say, well if you're going to kick up a stink about these companies, but give a pass to the one that you think is cool and that you want to gain status on because everybody else holds it in high esteem. That suggests to me that you're not talking about this in order to move the conversation forward. You're doing it because you want clout, which is why you're not prepared to neuter yourself on the platform where you want the clout to be.

[Freya India]

Yes, I genuinely get Confused by some of the criticism because it does seem to me so progressive to be skeptical, at least of these companies and to figure out the need. It's sort of a Marxist idea. What is the need that we have that is then being exploited and sold back to us? So something like BetterHelp. Why do so many young people think they need to be in therapy, young women especially? And why are these companies, these online therapy companies, marketing themselves in a certain way? So, for example, the therapy companies have now shifted to filling the role of almost parents, where they'll say, you know, if you need to talk about dating or how you feel or your crush or exams, you can come to us.

[Chris Williamson]

Just a friend. Yeah, it's just renting a friend or a parent.

[Freya India]

Yeah. And a lot of it is like guidance that your parent would give you growing up.

[Chris Williamson]

You know what this is like. Have you seen those stories of people that pay for cuddlers?

[Freya India]

Yeah, it is like that.

[Chris Williamson]

It's the emotional, social, emotional equivalent of paying someone to come around and hug you because you don't have anyone to do it.

[Freya India]

Yeah, they have. So BetterHelp specifically have these adverts where they have. They'll have like a young woman and her dad, and the dad will say something like, you should just go for a walk in the sun or something, and it will just come up. That's unhelpful. And then the better help code, and it does it with friends as well. It's replacing.

[Chris Williamson]

I'll fucking advocate for a walk in the sun all day long. I'm not saying that going for a walk in the sun is going to cure all of your problems. No, but there are very few problems that a walk in the sun won't make better.

[Freya India]

Yeah, but it's just, I'm so suspicious of a company telling you to be less attached to the people that love you and more attached to them, like anxiously attached to experts.

[Chris Williamson]

It is. I don't know, I mean, it is very deranging. I do feel a little bit sometimes like, am I losing my mind?

[Freya India]

Yeah, me too.

[Chris Williamson]

When I go on the Internet, and especially if you're in the middle of a eye of a storm. You are now. I was a couple of months ago. You're like, am I the dickhead? You remember that scene in Mitchell and Webb where they're dressed as Nazis?

[Freya India]

Oh, yeah. Are we the baddies?

[Chris Williamson]

Are we the baddies? Am I the dickhead? Maybe I am. I actually might be, because everybody else on the Internet seems to have consensus about this thing actually being right. And I'm really trying to work it out and I just can't get there. So maybe I'm just. Maybe I am a bad person. I just can't understand. I can't understand how saying the sentence just a mother is raising up women. Yes, that just a mother thing. It's like, I don't think that working for a company that doesn't care about you and would replace you in a fucking heartbeat if you got hit by a bus is your highest calling. I don't think that independent women are the only ones that are useful and that mothers are being conned by the patriarchy into becoming domestic prostitutes. I don't think that any woman that supports men is being a pick me. I also don't think that any man that decides to go after his career is being a tyrant or that any man that talks about his emotions is a useless SOY boy.

[Freya India]

How dare you.

[Chris Williamson]

I know, I know, I know, I know.

[Freya India]

No, it's true. I. It's really deranging. My mum read the book recently and she called me and she was. She said, you know, I'm so proud of you. And she said, it's. It was so loving toward girls. And then I'm looking online and it's like, this is a hateful book. You know, she's a misogynist. She hates women. One of the reviews, the title was Freya India Would Prefer a world without Women's Rights.

[Chris Williamson]

Can we look at. Can you just Google Freya India Girls? Goodreads, please. Jared. I want to. I want to do. I want to do some highlights of our favorite ones. It is really fucking deranging and I think it's important. It's important for you to have people in your life that you can message the. You know, I've got my group chat. Yep, There it is.

[Freya India]

Oh. 3.2, 3.1, 3.16.

[Chris Williamson]

97. Here we go. Let's go down.

[Freya India]

Let's go on some of the 1 stars. Handmaid's Tale.

[Chris Williamson]

Beautiful. What starts off as disappointing through its lack of nuance and depth, make contradictory points and statistics that feel cherry picked in order to back up points the author is desperately trying to make quickly descends into conservative pearl clutching before ultimately concluding as a manifesto for girls getting back to family values and baby making. That could be written by Serena Joy of the Handmaid's Tale herself. The premise of this book is interesting and important. The reason I picked it up in the first place. Yet somehow it manages to miss the mark entirely. Side note, I have never read the term age Old so many times in my life. Does no one edit it?

[Freya India]

Oh, that's painful.

[Chris Williamson]

Cannot recommend. Absolutely not nuanced in any way. So bad. I won't. Oh, this person.

[Freya India]

Click the rant. There we go.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, it's a blog post.

[Freya India]

Without social media, trans rights or women's rights or therapy.

[Chris Williamson]

Freya, India would prefer life without social media or trans rights or women's rights or therapy.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Wow. I'm glad that it's got no comments.

[Freya India]

Yeah, it's hard growing up.

[Chris Williamson]

I. Yeah.

[Freya India]

Transphobia and terf rhetoric.

[Chris Williamson]

Terf rhetoric. I mean, look, you're in incredibly good company here, but it is strange. And that's not to say that we're right about everything that you're right about everything that I am. No. But I have this theory around how you can tell if a content creator has your best interests at heart and it's whether or not the group that they belong to and say that you belong to to abound together over the mutual love of an in group.

[Freya India]

Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

Or the mutual hatred of an out group.

[Freya India]

Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

That is one of the earliest warning signs. Another one is when was the last time they admitted that they were wrong?

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Another one is when was the last time that they surprised you with one of their takes? Or when did they bring somebody on that they disagree with?

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Not to mock them, but to genuinely try and learn from them. So that's four. Someone once asked me how what do I do to my content diet? And obviously I do this horrendously and I follow loads of people that I shouldn't do and it wrecks my nervous system. But that, like, when was the last time that you were surprised by this person's take? If they're just a cookie cutter, you know, one of their perspectives and from it you can accurately predict everything else.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

They're obviously not a serious thinker.

[Freya India]

I also think with my book in particular, because I don't know how to phrase it, but because I have some unpredictable takes as well. So, for example, it's mostly about commodification of women, which conservatives don't often talk about. I think that I get more hate as a result of that.

[Chris Williamson]

If I was seen as an unreliable ally as opposed to an outright conservative.

[Freya India]

Yeah. If I was just a right wing political influencer, I don't think I would get this amount of bingo targeted hate. It's because I sort of operate in the middle and I am genuinely figuring things out. And so I think that becomes almost more threatening. But I'm fine. I don't Mind people criticizing the book. But there's a sort of tone of criticism that is

[Chris Williamson]

I am evil, snarky, dismissive, judgmental.

[Freya India]

Yeah. And also, you know, I read loads of books I disagree with. I read loads of books with liberal assumptions that are sort of weaved into the book. Every book I read about social media is pretty much like that. But I never feel the urge to go on a 2000 word rant destroying someone else's book. I just put that energy into my own.

[Chris Williamson]

I think you could kind of see it as a criticism creation, balance sheet. And if you're criticizing more than you're creating, you're sort of withdrawing from the system more than you're adding. And that's probably. I mean, even if you get close, it should be 10 to 1. Right. Some people are critics. Right, Whatever. But for the most part, you should be contributing way more than you are. You know what's a great way to do this? Go on somebody's Twitter and look at how much is original content and how much are quote tweets.

[Freya India]

Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

If it's tons of quote tweets. And presuming that it's not just this is awesome. And I really like this, which no one is doing. Go. You're extracting from the system more than you're adding to it.

[Freya India]

It's always people who've never written a book that say, this is so badly researched. This is so lazy. This is this way, this is this way. And I've noticed when it's. Yeah. When it's really visceral criticism of the book, they tend to have a profile, which is criticism of everyone else's attempt to do anything.

[Chris Williamson]

The loudest shouts come from the cheapest seats. With that, it's the people that are furthest away from doing something that are the ones that criticize the most. I mean, one other thing that we haven't talked about that I thought was fucking insane was the reframing of the potential to give mothers in the UK a tax benefit in the same way that mums in Hungary got it as an inverse tax penalty on women who want to be child free.

[Freya India]

Well, that New Statesman piece said there was a young woman worried about reform forcing them to have babies. And that's how they framed it. They think reform will force them to have children. And that's why I laughed at the Handmaid's Tale, because it's like they have one story that they just extrapolate onto everything.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, it's the same with history, right? Because nobody knows any history except for a Tiny bit of Nazi Germany. Yeah, everybody just defaults to Nazi and Hitler. Yeah, it's the only piece of history that they know in the same way as it's the only piece of literature that can be used for this. It's Handmaid's Tale. So, well, if you offer, what is it, 25% off your income tax for the first kid, 50% for the second one, and 100% for the rest of your life if you have three or more. I think that's what it is in Hungary, something like that. How can you say that that's penalizing women who don't have kids? Like, it's just adding to the system. Now, you could say with anchoring bias, no one should ever pay any tax, that's fine. But if you're saying we need to give more money. A lot of the reasons, the justifications that are given for why women aren't having more kids is because of economic conditions. It's cost of living crisis. It's a fear of being abandoned by their partner, divorced, and then they're not going to be able to afford to keep themselves and the kids alive. Etc, you're okay, well, let's incentivize that. You go, well, you're persecuting women that don't have kids. Yeah, the women that don't have kids are being disadvantaged. You go, no, that's not the case. That's where everybody is right now. And so we want more money for mothers. You go, okay, well, hang on, that's excluding women that aren't mothers. You go, okay, so do you just want money? Yes. But for women? You go, yeah, I fucking dude. What?

[Freya India]

You can't exclude. So one of the side effects of everybody only knowing Nazi Germany that one period of history and then applying it, is that anything remotely exclusionary or suggesting closing things down rather than opening up endlessly becomes suspicious. And so any turn back from an overcorrection becomes a slippery slope to fascism. So you can have a perfectly reasonable tax suggestion, but because it starts toward encouraging women to have children, they just envision it careering off into.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, that's interesting. I suppose that you. Let's say that I'm gonna give you something that you really want, but it's gonna come packaged in a way that you might not be too keen on. You want this new toy, but it's going to be in a box that you don't like. Let's say there is a cost benefit analysis that you're doing here. How much of the thing that I want do I Get versus how much of the thing that I don't want sort of comes along for the ride. Let's assume that you've interpreted it correctly and not incorrectly. This is kind of the same across the board with, well, capitalism bad. But social media companies, I quite like those because that's the thing that I'm allowed to get my clout through. So the packaging for this thing is sufficiently Okay. I don't really mind what it's sneaking in underneath the.

[Freya India]

Yeah, yeah. I think as well with a lot of the criticism toward my book and just in general with conservatives who talk about these things, is that a lot of these women will not have come across a conservative leaning view ever by accident. So I'm constantly coming across liberal assumptions on things because it is the culture, it's the media and books. Most of them are leaning that way if they're talking about something broad like social media. But I don't think there are many books where the person writing it is just leaning toward being more conservative. And so a lot of the time they say there's no warning on the book.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, you jump scared them with a conservative view.

[Freya India]

There's no disclaimer. And they say that they've said that about my substack for years, which is that I have like a. It's like a girly magazine aesthetic, the title. And that is me tricking them because

[Chris Williamson]

they're not honey potted them into reading conservative propaganda.

[Freya India]

Yeah. So I need a big disclaimer saying warning.

[Chris Williamson]

You remember when those mixtapes used to come out, the Marshall Mathers ep, the real Slim Shady and stuff. And it would have that explicit warning at the bottom, the black and white thing. You basically need that. But you're like the cigarettes of blogging. You need to come with a health warning on it. Do you think that women's preferences have fundamentally changed or is it just the environment that they're in?

[Freya India]

I think they're the same, but as I said before, they're sort of being funneled toward a fake simulation of the thing.

[Chris Williamson]

And so it's kind of a big Ponzi scheme.

[Freya India]

Yeah, it's like even as we were talking about with empathy, I feel like a lot of, you know, sometimes conservatives will say young women are radically left wing because they're evil and they want to tear down Western civilization. I think a lot of the time it is well intentioned. As in they want to look compassionate, they want to look good in front of their friends, but it's being funneled in a weird direction. So it's strange that you have all of these young women in Britain caring so much about the Middle east and then talking about their boyfriend with zero empathy at all. And I think it's similar with things that are happening online where, again, you have a need for belonging, but you're getting it through YouTube. That's where your family and friends are being simulated somewhat. You have a need to get advice from your parents, and you're getting it from a betterhelp influencer. And so I think a lot of the challenges my generation has are not necessarily new, but we have way more simulations than previous generations did.

[Chris Williamson]

How do we know when the left's gone too far?

[Freya India]

When they rate my book one star.

[Chris Williamson]

Ah, there it is. There it is.

[Freya India]

I think when it.

[Chris Williamson]

You know what I mean? Because this is an old Peterson thing that it's obvious when the right goes too far.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

But we don't have the same sort of rules. The entire New Statesman article is saying the skew of women to the left. The radical left.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Is more aggressive and is, I have to assume, is they think is too far. Even as something that is left of center.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

You go, okay, well, how do we know? Because how does it show up? It's like just obscene amounts of empathy that if you turn empathy up to 11, just becomes a different type of judgmental tribalism.

[Freya India]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

I don't think care for groups has to be constrained to one group, and then it means that you're not that group. So you're the oppressor, not the oppressed.

[Freya India]

Yes. I don't actually think it can go too far because I think about being. Sometimes people will say, oh, she's had success because she's pandering to the right wingers. But you can, even if you're slightly conservative on one topic and all of your other opinions were very progressive, you're immediately coded as right wing. So there's barely any room to even be moderately conservative or even just curious about the conservative approach. So a lot of my interviews have been guilt by association. It's just people that I speak to and who will listen to me. Then you get coded as too far, too right wing. So there's barely any room on the right, but I think there's so much room on the left. You can say you're a communist and write a book about caring for girls, and no one will, you know, scrutinize your motives. But if you write a book about caring for girls and a few of your opinions happen to be conservative, then there's no way that you have genuine care for them. You have to just be a political operator.

[Chris Williamson]

Screw you Freya India. That's what I say. Screw you Freya India. You're great. I think you're so fantastic. Book's brilliant. Blog's brilliant. Where should people go to check out everything you're doing?

[Freya India]

Yeah, so just my substack, freyaindia.co.uk. i'm not on Instagram or TikTok.

[Chris Williamson]

I'm excited to see what you do to get in trouble next.

[Freya India]

Thank you. You too.

[Chris Williamson]

All right, bye everyone. Dude, awesome.

[Freya India]

Amazing.

[Chris Williamson]

So good.

[Freya India]

Thank you.

[Chris Williamson]

If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the Modern Wisdom reading list. It is 100 books that you should read before you die. The most interesting, life changing and impactful books I've ever read with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And you can get it right now for free by going to ChrisWillX.com books that's ChrisWillX.com books.