The Cistern That Was Always Going to Leak

What's happening

Freya India, a 24-year-old British essayist who runs the Substack GIRLS, has published Girls®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything, reviewed at The Gospel Coalition on May 13, 2026, by Rebecca McLaughlin.

India argues that beauty influencers, mental-health TikTok, OnlyFans, AI companions, and pornography form an industry that monetizes adolescent female loneliness while relabeling it as empowerment. She cites that nearly 1 in 3 U.S. teenage girls seriously considered suicide in 2021, up from 19% a decade earlier, and a 2020 UK survey finding 71% of British men 18 to 39 had choked, slapped, gagged, or spat on a partner during sex now framed as desire.

Progressive critics blame structures; conservative critics blame cultural breakdown. India, secular and edging toward Christianity in Justin Brierley's interview, blames the product itself. She also faults churches for chasing young men while leaving young women behind.

What the Text says

Jeremiah is preaching to a 7th-century Judah that has begun to think of itself as sophisticated. The prophet uses an image his audience could see from any hillside.

Jeremiah 2:11-1311Has a nation changed [its] gods, which really are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for that which does not profit.12"Be astonished, you heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid. Be very desolate," says Yahweh.13"For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the spring of living waters, and cut them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.

A spring in Judah was free water. It came up out of the ground on its own. A cistern was the engineered alternative: a pit cut into limestone, plastered on the inside to hold rainwater. If the plaster cracked, the porous rock leaked, and the cistern sat empty.

The prophet names two acts. The people walked away from the spring. Then they dug cisterns to replace it. The Hebrew calls these bo'rot nishbarim, "broken cisterns." The word for broken is structural. The cistern was built out of a material that could not hold water in the first place. The labor was real. The thirst was real. The vessel was always going to leak.

The reflection

India is doing the diagnostic work most of the people positioned to do it have refused. The progressive frame cannot say the product is the problem, because the product was sold as the liberation. The conservative frame is tempted toward a vindication register that has no business being anywhere near a 1-in-3 suicidal-ideation number. India is a young secular woman noticing that the cistern she was handed does not hold water, and she is doing it without the vocabulary that would let her name what she is reaching for.

The text does not gloat. Jeremiah weeps through most of his book. The girls inside the data are not a debate-club point; they are the audience for whom the question of where water actually comes from has become survival-grade. India's line that the church is failing them specifically belongs in the data, not outside it. The diggers usually cannot see the leak until the thirst gets honest.