Hilda Bombay

As seen on Substack Picture this familiar scene. A young Gen Z woman in the bathroom of a rented flatshare, her puffy eyes brimming with tears. Looking up and down her naked body in the mirror and hyperfixating on every imperfection – moles, hip dips, a smattering of stretchmarks on a plump thigh. Wanting to scratch off every blemish which stops us fitting in with the image of womanhood that the looks-maxxing pornsick algorithm has created for us. Wishing we were perfect like the happy women who only seem to exist on our screens. The sad truth is that this is what me and many of my other Gen Z friends spent the last weekend doing after a video of Sydney Sweeney emerged online. Before we go any further, yes. She’s hot.

As seen on Substack It is three o’clock on Thursday when Saffie texts me asking to meet up at Blank Street for a Gen Z matcha. I know that she is feeling down because of her struggles with the job search, so I decide to lay my work aside. Without a friend to vent to, she would otherwise spend the rest of the day doomscrolling her Tik-Tok and melting her mind with extreme left propaganda about how multi-millionaire farmers should pay inheritance tax. Saffie’s radiant mother-of-pearl eyes are already brimming with tears when I sit down opposite her. She is wearing a strappy top, with a raincoat slouching off her shoulders, giving frame to her slender clavicle.

As seen on Substack I was in the middle of a mindless scrolling binge, when Isabella and Tash told me that Keir Starmer was finally going to stand up to the social media companies. I opened the BBC app to check if it was true that the government would be banning harmful content – putting an end to the era of digital commodification, online hatred and violent pornography for good. I let out a little shriek of joy. But this soon turned to a guttural moan, as my friends and I realised that – as young women in our early twenties – we would miss out on these protections since they would be limited to the under-16s. I threw down my phone in disgust, before picking it up again.