Why we owe Florence Given
Who on earth is Florence Given and why do we owe her all of a sudden? Two very good questions with thankfully two very straightforward answers.
I only discovered Florence Given recently myself when my Instagram started buzzing about an upcoming book launch of some social media influencer. Normally, I wouldn’t waste my time. I don’t care how many followers/subscribers I have or about any super-sketchy diet lollies that are magically going to stop me from eating cake or looking at cake or even thinking about cake. I’d rather just eat the darn cake.
However, for some reason, I just could not escape the name or the glowing reputation that seemed to follow it. Naturally, I took to my laptop and almost immediately crawled back under the rock that I must have been hiding under all this time.
If you’re like me and still have no idea who I am babbling on about, let me have the utmost pleasure in enlightening you. Florence Given is a 21 (!!) year old queer feminist and activist. In the last couple of years, Given has used her substantial online platform to raise awareness on vital and too often overlooked issues. You might have seen her on BBC Breakfast, challenging the stigma that young women face about being single. Or maybe on NBC News when she launched her campaign against the fatphobic show “Insatiable"? Either way, it is that activist spirit paired with her unique artistic stamp and 493k loyal Instagram followers that have made her debut the most hotly anticipated and game-changing book of the year.
The less straightforward question is: does it stand up to the hype?
I’m always reluctant to read bestselling books with rave reviews like “Women don’t owe you pretty” as I’m fearful that I will be disappointed or worse. Everyone else’s opinion will ring so loudly in my ears that I will barely be able to form my own opinion amongst all the noise. However, I plucked up the courage to read a couple of chapters one Saturday morning as I nursed a truly bitter hangover. The verdict? I cried my eyes out. Truth be told, it was mostly the hangover but Given’s no-nonsense and conversational style definitely had some part to play.
What started as simply the side effect of a hangover turned out to be the best way to read this book. Each chapter is important and needs to stand alone. Don’t attempt to read it all at once or passively skim a couple of chapters at a time. There are 21 of them and although it will take longer to read this way, I promise you that it will be worth it. There are a lot of what Given herself describes as “uncomfortable truths”. At times, I felt that discomfort, that over-exposure and I even felt criticised but that’s the thing about growth- it isn’t meant to be easy. Given says that Feminism will ruin your life and she’s not wrong.
I’ve always considered myself a Feminist. It is part of my identity and my DNA. I don’t know how many times people have snarled at me, telling me to “take a day off”. Too many to count I’m sure but Given gets it. It’s not something you can switch off, it’s with you all of the time. Now I’m in desperate need of a “What would Florence do” bracelet because everywhere I go, I’m thinking about this book and the uncomfortable truths that it is making me face about myself and those around me. Her chapter about protecting your energy ( Chapter 8 ) is something that I think about every day. I saw myself in its pages and truthfully, it frightened the heck out of me. It told me everything that I subconsciously knew about myself but had refused to accept until now. That after years of being gaslighted and playing the role of the unpaid therapist to many around me, my mental health had suffered and would continue to do so until I put in place the necessary boundaries to protect myself.
I could praise each of Given’s 21 chapters in turn and find enough to say to publish my own book about it but Given really says it all. She says in an interview with Positive Chain ( see above) that it’s a book that she needed years ago. You can see that in her writing and the make-believe conversation that she includes with her younger self “Young Floss”. I couldn’t agree more. If I had understood what my boundaries were and what my real self-worth equated to, I might have saved myself a lot of grief and I hope it does for a lot of young women who go on to read it now.
That being said, I doubt that “Women don’t owe you pretty” would have struck such a chord with me had I not experienced these things and had I not been as ready and open to read it as I am now. On an emotional level, it has undeniably left its mark on me as I expect it will on many of you. As a piece of feminist literature, however, it must also be considered as exceptional.
We often look into mainstream media and literature for those voices that reflect our own, for people that look like us and understand our backgrounds and experiences. As a 21-year-old, Florence Given has brought an emerging generation’s voice into the forefront of our society. She treats intersectional feminism and the ideals that it incorporates as standard. She acknowledges and recognises her own privilege respectfully where mainstream dialogue is only beginning to learn what that actually means. She cannot talk for the experiences of BAME, Trans, disabled and fat people and does not attempt to so. She reflects on her research and how integral the research by women like Munroe Bergdorf and Chidera Eggerure (amongst many others ) have been on her own ideals, thesis and inevitably the book itself.
Perhaps, the less straightforward question of whether it stands up to its hype is less about it being straight forward than it is actually a complete no-brainer. Everyone should read this book and I don’t just mean young white women despite Florence Given reflecting their voices and view of the world. I mean Everyone because if it is not clear already, we owe her for saying all the uncomfortable truths that we need to be telling ourselves every day. And if this book is anything to go by, I have a feeling that we are going to owe her a lot more still.
