Disclaimer: This is a review, and as such will contain opinions, spoilers and (often) general shit talking. (If you talk about what you don’t like about a work, you learn a lot. When you think through a work with the stakes presented to you by the creator, by the context of the work, you learn a lot. I review things, not because I love to dislike things, but because dislike contains rich and vital information for the process of experiencing something, but I cannot access it without interrogating it.) So, if you don’t want to have this thing spoiled for you, or don’t know how to behave when a person on the internet, that you don’t know, has opinions that don’t line up with yours, this review is not for you. It’s also not for the author/creator of the work. Please and thank you.
Women Don’t Owe You Pretty by Florence Given explores feminism, self-love, and empowerment, and is primarily targeting young women.
The book aims to challenge societal expectations and norms surrounding gender, beauty standards, relationships, and personal fulfilment, yet only manages to scratch the surface in most cases.
Given encourages readers to question the patriarchal constructs that have influenced and shaped their lives. She incorporates her personal experiences, as well as insights from feminism and intersectionality, to provide readers with tools for self-discovery, self-acceptance, and activism.
Women Don’t Owe You Pretty aims to empower women to break free from the constraints imposed by societal expectations, to prioritize their own happiness and well-being, and to build lives that are authentic and fulfilling.
The intent is good, yet the execution feels lacking.
I felt myself nodding along through much of the book, but this is mostly due to Given not saying anything new.
Though Given does encourage the reader to go explore the same source materials she herself has learned from, I wonder how many people actually will?
Had I read this book in my late teens-early 20s, I might have felt differently about it.
Maybe even benefitted from it.
But now at nearly 40, this feels more like the hubris of youth and classic feminist principles regurgitated for a social media audience that doesn’t like to sit with uncomfortable feelings.
I love the title, very feminist.
I only hope the content would have been as strong.
But, sadly, it feels like the true depth of the issues was often glossed over and some of the solutions I found downright distasteful.
For instance, the way Given speaks about marriage and dating seemed incredibly patronising to me who got married at 22 and is still married to the same person almost two decades later.
The idea that you should never have to compromise in a long-term relationship seems ridiculous to me.
While I appreciate the sentiment behind her ideas – understanding your own worth as a person, not tying your self-worth to external markers, not compromising your authentic self, and not subjecting yourself to toxic relationships – the whole “Dump Him” slogan (which I’ve frequently seen Given throw around on Instagram in a way that both is and isn’t a joke) doesn’t sit well with me.
(And why doesn’t she ever say “Dump Her”? Women can be toxic too.)
If I wouldn’t have been given a chance to change, grow and correct my mistakes in my relationships with the continued support of those involved, I never would have become a better person.
The way Given writes about toxicity in a relationship is as if only one person is the root cause of the toxicity, which always absolves you, the reader, from ever having to actually commit to a relationship or examine how you contributed to the toxicity of that situation.
Relationships are much more complex than she gives them credit for.
There’s a lot more of a grey area where things are muddy and it’s hard to tell where one person’s contribution ends and the other’s begins.
Women Don’t Owe You Pretty has a focus on romantic relationships.
But it’s easier to dump someone you’ve been casually dating for a few months than it is to extract yourself from a relationship that has intertwined your life with someone else’s, let alone if you’ve got children and people depending on you.
Cutting people out of your life because they make mistakes isn’t conducive to better relationships or better self-esteem – rather it only entitles you to never admit any responsibility.
I’ve had to cut people out of my life to protect myself and my family, and it’s not as simple as Given sometimes makes it seem.
And while I understand this isn’t what Given is going for – trying to challenge you to think differently with confrontational statements intended to wake you up rather than accept her statements as outright truth – the very commanding writing style doesn’t help.
Her often expressed direct commands – Don’t get married! Don’t desire a partner! Buy a vibrator and give yourself constant orgasms! – start to come off as aggressive as you progress further into the repetitive reading experience.
When it comes to educational content, I prefer the measured and methodical pedagog that challenges me to profoundly rethink biases and hidden patterns, rather than one who brings their own hurt and passes off anger or outrage as passion.
Women Don’t Owe You Pretty brings a slap-in-the-face energy which I find tiring in the long run. That might just be the fact that I’m not the target audience for this work.
The whole book, though structured as a series of essays, reads more like a collection of Instagram captions organised into book-form.
I feel like having this book as a coffee-table book, complete with illustrations from the author-illustrator herself to flesh out the Instagram captions, would have been a better reading experience and would have encapsulated her brand better.
Given hits on a lot of important issues yet never truly delves into any of them.
For a book that attempts to advocate for diversity and inclusivity, the overall sentiment I walked away with was that the world is a very one-sided place when you’re the Main Character – men are awful, the world is cruel, other people make mistakes and don’t deserve grace, and the solution to everything is to be a bad bitch.
I think the chapter about privilege and checking yours would have been more useful at the very start of the book.
While Given did acknowledge her privilege as far as physical appearance goes, she barely touched on class privilege. Being in your early 20s and being able to work as a freelancer, influencer, and author got very little attention.
She often started an idea, but before you could really sink your teeth into it, she was either off on a man-hating rant or already making the next point (maybe as the original post ran out of characters and the segues weren’t very strongly constructed?).
The energy with which she searched for solution also felt very triggered, like she hadn’t sat with her uncomfortable feelings for very long before offering up confident, catch-all solutions that swept the slate clean and absolved you, the reader, of all personal responsibility.
Maybe I’m just too old for this book, because I can see how her way of writing in short, high-energy bursts is both born of and made for social media.
If you aren’t controversial, confident or jarring in some way, nobody on social media will pay attention to you.
The energy in this book reminds me of a younger me, angry and always feeling like the world was out to get me, when I wasn’t as well-versed in dealing with trauma and unpacking my own biases.
Would I have listened to the calmer measured tones of a more matronly figure back then? It’s hard to say.
It’s not that I wasn’t exposed to it, because being raised by a feminist meant I got into 2nd generation feminist literature earlier than most.
But none of that stopped me from giving into my not-yet-fully-developed prefrontal cortex that drove me through life like a narwhal on a Harley.
So, while this will never be one of the greats of feminist literature, I think it has a place to inaugurate a young audience into feminism.
Since the material is easy to digest, much like social media (though I still think a coffee-table book would have been even more effective), it lowers the threshold for anyone to say, “Yes, I’m a feminist” and hopefully to understand that reading only this one book isn’t enough (as Given points out herself).
Did I enjoy it?
My views are already more deeply aligned with intersectional feminism than what Given presents in this book as “radical”, so I didn’t learn anything new.
I do think it’s a good entry-level book for someone new to feminist principles, a younger audience struggling with identity in the age of social media.
It’s easy to read and if this makes feminism more accessible to more people, I’m here for it.
I think the intention behind the book is good, but I do think fighting toxic fires with more toxic behaviours isn’t constructive, and I hope this book only empowers readers, rather than encourages them to embrace being more toxic in their own lives.
If this book makes someone feel seen, wonderful. For me, it just made me feel old.
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