What Girls Need

Freya India writes a column on Substack devoted to the problems that girls face in our contemporary culture. She has an article in this month's First Things (paywall) that would probably click with a lot of young women.

She begins with this:

I’m not sure how I got here, into these pages. Lately I’ve found myself in a lot of unfamiliar places: in conversation with Orthodox Christians, buying old Chesterton and Scruton books, wandering into chapels and churches, stumbling into a world I have never known. There is something hopeful, comforting, and strangely familiar about it, like coming home to a place I had forgotten, a place for which I always felt homesick but could never find.

Growing up I never prayed, never went to church, never had political or theological discussions around the dinner table. I grew up in a place where Christianity—and conservatism—were seen as not only backward and archaic, but cringeworthy, embarrassing, belonging to another world.

But I also lived with a feeling of something missing, a gaping hole. A hunger; a hollowness. I was sensitive and sentimental, as many young girls are, and had this idea of love, of life, that kept getting broken and beaten out of me. My family fell apart and so did I. Dating was disorienting and inhumane; I felt things far too deeply to handle it.

I was disheartened by the commodification of everything, and felt that some things — my face, my body, friendships, falling in love — had to mean more, somehow. I wanted vows and commitments. I wanted guidance and guardrails. I wasn’t cut out for a world that offered no refuge, no haven or hiding place, and I thought the problem was me. I’m not sure anymore.

Girls and young women are hurting. They are suffering from record rates of anxiety and depression. Some are starving themselves; others are self-harming until they end up in the hospital. Many feel alone, with few friends, little face-to-face interaction, often without a father or mother in the picture. They feel hopeless, powerless. Across the Anglosphere, suicide rates for young women have reached record highs.

India goes on to insist that what girls need is Christianity and a conservative way of life, but that in her experience, so many people who are in a position to help girls find these answers often try to appeal to a girl's reason when, in fact, what she needs - "community and belonging, certainty and stability, love and attachment, dignity and worth, purpose and fulfilment" - are more likely to be realized through her heart rather than her head, through feeling rather than intellect.

When I listen to conservative commentators today — columnists, podcasters, media personalities, some older than I am but many my own age — I notice an overreliance on intellect and argument, on numbers and logic. Charts on pornography use; statistics on loneliness; facts about birth rates. But the young women I’m talking about don’t care about your statistics on divorce. I know I wouldn’t have.

They don’t feel anything from your graphs on fertility rates. What they care about is the pain of their own families falling apart. They know how they feel, and they are hurting. I knew nothing about Burkean philosophy or social conservatism, but I knew that feeling of loss, knew it intimately. Dry lectures about social decline do not cut through. Describing feelings of hurt and homesickness might.

I think she overstates her case a bit and seems unaware of the plethora of books, speakers, pastors, and counselors who are doing exactly what she evidently sees too little of, but her main point is well-taken. People who are hurting don't need arguments and statistics. They need empathy and compassion.

I kept thinking about the many young women I know who just don’t believe anyone will stick around, who are terrified to start families because theirs fell apart.... Those who actually need help will not be reached by theological lectures on marriage or family. What they need right now is someone to give expression to the wound of growing up between two homes, someone who dares to talk about the pain....

I see too little consideration given to the possibility that young women might make certain choices because this is the only world they have ever known—that they might sleep around to fit in, might objectify themselves to feel loved, might feel confused about their identity because the world gives them nowhere to belong to. Maybe young girls behave as they do because they are desperate, wired, to be seen, to be accepted, to belong. They need refuge, not ridicule.

While I think it often has the wrong answers, at least [the left] listens. Meanwhile the right stays silent, despite the fact that the issues Christians and conservatives care deeply about—moral decline, divorce, pornography, the loss of family, the loss of home — are painful, emotional things. Things to do with the soul.

She may be quite wrong about the right staying silent, but she's quite right about everything else:

The right has a chance to speak differently. Forget the neuroscience of what online porn does to the brain. Talk about how it makes young women feel, knowing that the men they love watch it. That feeling of worthlessness when they look at their own bodies, the insecurity and betrayal.

Forget what falling birth rates mean for the economy. Talk about what they mean for young women, how hard it is to grow old without a family to rely on—the future we might face. Forget what the loss of local community means for the “principle of subsidiarity” or “little platoons.” Tell me first how it feels to have no community left, the sorrow of scrolling for a sense of belonging on Instagram.

Argue from feelings. Sometimes it’s necessary. We mock people who get “emotional” during debates or discussions, urging them to calm down. But these are painful realities, these are matters of the heart.

We don’t need sources or studies to know that a mom and dad breaking apart and barely speaking again is a tragedy; that seeking love by swiping through people like products is a travesty; that spending a childhood wrenched from one parent and passed on to the next is a crisis; that young girls crippled with anxiety about how sexual and sellable they are is a catastrophe.

Christians wonder why young women aren’t going to church, and conservatives ask where all the good women have gone, but I don’t see much listening. Not sincerely. Few try to understand what young women might be searching for in therapy culture, finding in liberal feminism, hearing from the left—what needs are being met that aren’t met elsewhere.

Don’t we see that this world offers them no other sanctuary? Don’t we see that many young women haven’t “abandoned” faith, haven’t turned their backs on the sacred, but were born into a world already desecrated? That they haven’t forgotten their worth but were never taught it? And the cruelty is that this caricature of the modern woman — this callous, calculated, emotionally detached “girlboss” — seems to me very often a defense mechanism, a heart hardened to cope with how cold the world is.

Listen to young women long enough, you will often hear pain. They might be brave enough to ask you: Do you know how it feels? How it feels to hold on to hopes of love and loyalty in a world of Tinder and hook-ups? How it feels to be reserved and conservative in a world that punishes those qualities, makes you feel pathetic and frigid and childlike?

To try to feel beautiful, even just enough, in a world of endless edited Instagram influencers, where hypersexuality feels like the only way to be seen, where humility feels like invisibility? Where if you aren’t sexual straight away, you can’t expect him to stay — why would he, with so many other options?

The agony of knowing that pretty much every man you fall for has been raised on and is addicted to online porn and watches it behind your back because you can never be enough? The humiliation? How it feels to dream of romance, only to grow up and find it dead? That disappointment? I can’t begin to tell you.

There's much more at the link and it's too bad that the journal is only available via subscription, but if you can find a copy of it in your library (May 2025) you should read it.