Love Lives - Florence Given on female sexuality and internalised misogyny

Episode Date: July 17, 2020

This week, Olivia is joined by artist and author Florence Given.The two discuss how internalised misogyny manifests in dating, what it means to benefit from pretty privilege, and the presentation of female sexuality in the media.They also talk about Florence's new book, the Sunday Times bestseller, Women Don’t Owe You Pretty.Support Millennial Love with a donation today: https://supporter.acast.com/millennialloveFollow the show on Instagram at @millennial_loveSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/millenniallove. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Acast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. will not die hosting the Hills after show. I get thirsty for the hot wiggle. I didn't even know a thirsty man until there was all these headlines. And I get schooled by a tween. Facebook is like, and now that's what my grandma's on. Thank God phone a friend with Jesse Crookshank is not available on Facebook. It's out now wherever you get your podcasts. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com Hello and welcome to Millennial Love, a podcast from The Independent on everything to do with love, sexuality, identity, and more.

This week I was thrilled to be joined by artist and author Florence Given. She's best known for her feminist illustrations that have slogans that empower women and destigmatize what it means to be single. I actually have one of her t-shirts that has the phrase female gaze on it. Other popular slogans include love, sex, hate, sexism and it's a wonderful day to dump them. She joined me on the podcast to talk about her new book, a Sunday Times bestseller called Women Don't Owe You Pretty. We also spoke about how internalised misogyny manifests in dating, something I had never really thought about before, how we benefit from pretty privilege,

and the presentation of female sexuality on TV, and lots more. I hope you enjoy the show. Hi, Florence. Hi. How are you doing? I'm okay thank you. It's been a weird few weeks. Publishing a book is a weird feeling. It feels like a birth to child. It feels like I've let this vulnerable thing out into the world and people can now do what they want with it it's it's involved a lot of relinquishing control um which is healthy but yeah it's a weird it's a it's a process I've never had to experience before and I love I love new challenges I love I love having new opportunities um so I'm just like bring it on it's a weird time to be releasing a book as well like I suppose you would have

normally had a launch party for it wouldn't you yes and also with everything going on in the world right now if I could have postponed um the launch or the published date of my book I would have um it felt really weird and almost insensitive for me to publish a book um in the social context with all the with the black uprising and everything I wanted to um direct my energy towards that but I couldn't help that my book was like coming up in the middle of it um so it's been a weird it's been a weird one I had to cancel a lot of events um because it just felt wrong to be talking about anything else with my platform particularly because a lot of people follow me to be directed to resources and the literature and the articles of black women so that's how I kind of had

that's how I was using my platform the first few weeks so it was just a really weird time to be talking about a project it didn't feel comfortable but it was inevitable um and yeah just so so much so much mixed emotions and like you said I would have probably been doing a book tour um I would have been going doing live events and all of this kind of stuff so it's been I mean I imagine this is not the usual process for someone who's publishing a book with a publisher. Yeah, because this is your first book, isn't it? And I want to get onto it. The book is called Women Don't Owe You Pretty. So I do want to get onto that in a moment. But I want to start off by just asking you a bit about how you built your platform, because you've got

something like 400,000 followers on Instagram, haven't you? It's a lot. It's a lot and you're kind of known for your sort of witty pithy slogans about female empowerment and about dating which is why you're so perfect for this show so could you just start us off by telling us a bit about how you built that platform and what inspired you to start kind of creating those slogans? well um I think the first time I always pinpoint the first time I ever the first time how do I say this the first time there was a catalyst for me to inspect myself and look at who I am and look at my behaviors um was in high school I was in this clique in school and it was this really toxic environment um and then I was ousted from the clique and ousted from this group mentality and then I think it was being out of

this environment where you it was like survival mode it was like my school was the most wildest experience ever it was an all-girls school it was um it was just wild for the first couple years at school then I was ousted from the group and usually you would do anything to get back in but as I decided to stay out I didn't like the person I was becoming and then it was me who was bullied for the next few years of being at school and I think experiencing that and seeing the shift of being out of a group mentality I'm forced to kind of be on my own and be in isolation at school was the first time I started to reflect inwards and look at what who

was that person I was becoming who am I now why are these people hurting me and I think to navigate and cope through that experience I I researched stuff and I learned a lot about internalized misogyny and in my knowledge of internalized misogyny informed so much of my work today because I'm just fascinated with it. I'm fascinated at how patriarchy gets women to do its dirty work for it by getting us to pit against each other,

call each other names to alleviate these insecurities we have, which were insecurities planted by capitalism and racism anyway so all of this um all of this horrible stuff i i couldn't believe that i had been encouraged to view women as competition rather than my comrades who are in this fight together with me um and of course at different levels i'm very privileged with the identities i have um but as people to help each other and hold each other accountable. And I think I reflected on knowing this, that it wasn't about me, that it wasn't, they found something out about my private life. And then that's when I was the one who was bullied.

Right. I was going to ask, what was it that led to you being ousted? Was it, so it was like one particular thing that happened? Yeah, they found out I had an eating disorder. And instead of helping me um i think a few people wanted to but even if they wanted to they weren't allowed to because the the head girl of like the group wouldn't let you if else then you would be ousted it was my god that's awful how old were these girls how old were you it was about when i was 14 years old it was very very high school clique kind of you know

stereotypical bullshit but um you know I was part of that group before it happened to me in my early years in school and it's this oh it's just this horrible environment and coming out of it and deciding to stay out it literally feels like uh you're leaving some kind of cult where everyone doesn't think for themselves and they think and they serve this main person it's it was so strange and I think realizing that I had become a doormat to everybody else's desires and what they wanted of me and that my body was just this part to play in someone else's fantasy it was weird and it was so disgusting and I was then they found out that I had an eating disorder I confided in a friend and then it got spread around as gossip and then it was like I was the one who was shamed and then usually

you would go running back crying to get back in the group or whatever it was um and then I didn't I decided to stay out and to endure this next few years of hell because I had friends outside of school and also books. That's when I started reading books. And I think learning about insecurity projection and how it wasn't me, I wasn't a freak for having an eating disorder. That's a whole other conversation, you know, in itself that I won't have because I know it's very triggering for so many people um but I think in learning about I basically opened the door to empathy because I saw myself in these women I saw them hurting and I would literally go to school and imagine myself in a bubble and imagine that what they were saying was bouncing off me and back onto them and I think it's through this process of being alone I learned to love my own company I found out who I was and about my

own desires that were no longer being influenced and pushed and pulled based on what another person needed from me which is so beautiful and a realization I came to at such an early stage in life and I um I think it was that opened the door to empathy and to learning about feminism um I stopped wearing a bra at school and a lot of people would like talk about it it was literally just because it hurt right bras it literally felt like a prison for my tits and I just hated it and then um a lot of people would talk about it and then I couldn't I couldn't understand why right because we're not taught about sexualization of women's bodies in school so I googled some stuff and oh my god right before my eyes a whole history of women's bodies being sexualized and objectified

then I learned about sexual harassment sexual assault and that was like the tipping point for me I think learning those words um and then coming into my own experiences dating people and being romantically and physically involved with people and entering my first relationship as well at 17 and going out at nightclubs oh my god seeing like how normalized groping was and now knowing that this was wrong and that I was the only person out of my friends who saw it I just became enraged and I channeled this into my artwork with my slogans I was the only person out of my friends who saw it I just became enraged and I channeled this into my artwork with my slogans I was kind of fed up with seeing this wishy-washy discussion on feminism I think it's very important for feminism to be accessible which a lot of my

work is it's very bright it's very provocative um it is cut through into the point but a lot of the stuff I was seeing was very um you know, love yourself without talking about the many reasons why people might not love them, might not love themselves, such as systemic racism or pretty privilege, which I talk about in my book, which I have a lot of. And all of this stuff I started learning about and then putting it into my artwork. this stuff I started learning about and then putting it into my artwork and then the next catalyst for growth was dumping my ex-boyfriend and realizing that I had been in an abusive relationship for almost three years and it took me a while to even acknowledge that it was that because you do go through so much gaslighting and denial of your lived experiences and it was just a repetition of what had happened to me in high school of this kind of um the emotional abuse that you go through and I think those two events I can and then coming out because once I was single and free of

my desires being influenced and my actions being influenced by this pushing and pulling of a person controlling me literally like a puppet I could find out who and what I loved it's interesting because I think what you said about accessibility is so important and you're so right about this narrative about feminism and self-love that we see all over social media and I'd even go as far as to say with something like body positivity like that's great but for a lot of people those things aren't achievable you know body neutrality is much more realistic or just self-acceptance rather than self-love and it's political babe self-love has to be political yeah exactly and and you write about in the book so moving on to the book the title women don't owe you pretty can you explain a bit about where that came from so um I saw this uh quote floating around tumblr which is at the beginning of my

book for years and it always sat with me and I didn't quite understand it because I think I was reluctant to think of me making myself look good as a currency I wanted to tell myself so badly that it was innate and all women just love to do this thing and if you do that's that's fucking incredible um but I started to analyze my relationship with prettiness um and my privilege within that but also how I apply it to get things in life and the quote was um prettiness is not a rent you pay to exist in the world um as a woman and i thought it just blew my mind when you know when a quote clicks and it made me uncomfortable for so long i think a lot of people feel that about my work as well they they reject it they neglect it because it's so uncomfortable to acknowledge and then eventually some people

come around to it and say okay i felt uncomfortable because it was true and with this quote um that's where women don't are you pretty came from I analyzed the politics of prettiness how um even though I am held to standards by the male gaze by patriarchy um that I you know men are repulsed if I don't shave my body hair or if I show up in spaces with no makeup blah blah blah all this stuff but even though I am expected to show up in a certain palatable way it's way worse for people who are marginalized or fat or trans or a person of color and I love talking about pretty privilege because so often people who have it like myself we just ignore it because first of all women we can because we don't feel the consequences of it absolutely it's but it's a different kind of privilege though because

it's not like um how do i say i am objectively a white person there's no refuting that but in society we still view beauty as subjective right we don't want to say i have pretty privilege because in our minds we feel that we sound that we sound vain that we sound big-headed that you think you're this person who is a narcissist what all the kind of words that we use to describe women who are aware of even even if they're just aware of their worth and their value we use these words to make women get back in their place right if someone complimented me a couple years ago um even recently if someone compliments me i will often deflect that compliment and say oh no no i'm not no i'm not you know and i think that's a habit that women have is that

beauty is something or prettiness is something that is given to us by men that we can't be aware of ourselves so to say you have pretty privilege you have to acknowledge that you are pretty and that's so uncomfortable um but if you look at prettiness as a sum of all the other privileges you have then it makes more sense so my quote-unquote prettiness or as i say in the book um and i learned from black women the appropriate term is desirability politics um it helps you understand that your prettiness is a sum of being thin of being cisgender of having eurocentric features all of the stuff that we hold to a high regard in society um does put you on a higher pedestal to receive better treatment from the world around you the world around you will respond to you and react to you

in a much more respectable way if they want to fuck you and that's the truth it's such a bleak it's such a bleak reality to accept but you're so right and it's not something that people talk about it's pretty privilege in particular because like said, women don't want to have to admit their own prettiness because they will be shamed for it. Or there'll be, you know, they'll, it's like a way of opening yourself up to further oppression because you say, I'm pretty, you then get silenced again because someone will try and put you back in your box.

And this is the thing with prettiness as well. It's the confusing thing about it is that you can't speak about prettiness without also acknowledging that when you are pretty or you perform and you present yourself in a pretty way, you do your hair, you wear makeup, you wear feminine clothes, traditionally feminine clothes, you do all this you all your interactions are also made more stressful because you get more street harassment um more men feel entitled to you they see it as an invitation to sexually assault and harass you and if anything this applied desirability through makeup through shaving all of this stuff that um you know patriarchy will say um that you deserved the treatment because you

were asking for it so you need to have an amount of prettiness to first of all and in the beauty myth by Naomi Wolf she says this she says that you need to be pretty to be believed of even being sexually harassed but then also that prettiness will be used against you to prove that you were asking for it because if you're not quote unquote pretty people won't believe that you were sexually assaulted they just because who would who would do that that's that that's the myth right such such a good point it's such it's such a fucking bizarre paradox whenever you read about these high-profile rape trials like thinking of the Ulster rape trial in Ireland a few years ago, and another trial where they passed around black lacy pants, all those kind of things. It's just every sign of conventional prettiness is used against you,

but then also it's the reason why you've got that platform in the first place. Looking for a screen-free way to keep your kids entertained and learning? Welcome to the Earth Rangers podcast. It's the perfect blend of animal adventures and eco-action that will capture their imagination and spark their love for the planet. Join thousands of other families and let your kids go wild with the Earth Rangers podcast. Find it on your favorite podcasting app and let the adventure begin. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts.

Here's a show that we recommend. I'm Jessie Kirkshank, and on my podcast, Phone a Friend, I break down the biggest stories in pop culture, but when I have questions, I get to phone a friend. I phone my old friend, Dan Levy. You will not die hosting the Hills after show. I get thirsty for the hot wiggle. I didn't even know what thirsty meant until there was all these headlines.

And I get schooled by a tween. Facebook is like a no, that's what my grandma's on thank god phone a friend with jesse crookshank is not available on facebook it's out now wherever you get your podcasts a cast helps creators launch grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere a cast.com one thing that you talk about in the book, I know you touched on earlier about internalized misogyny, and I never actually thought about applying it to this situation, but it's so interesting, and I think it will really resonate with a lot of people. When you talk about having feelings of hostility towards a partner who has an ex-girlfriend, towards that ex-girlfriend,

towards a partner who has an ex-girlfriend towards that ex-girlfriend and that is such a universal feeling I've had it myself and you almost you know regardless of how your partner speaks about that ex you're almost conditioned to hate them and to come up with all these horrible myths in your head about them yeah about how you are better so talk to me a bit about that and about how that manifests i think it's so interesting isn't it because your partner could literally whether they say shit about their ex or they bolster them up on this platform and say actually you're my ex is really amazing they're healthy you're always going to be want to want to be better than that person and it's i think it's um it's the reason i say that it's, it, it, it enables your internalized misogyny is because first of all, the internalized misogyny is when you put yourself in a competition

with a woman. And we do that with most women we interact with, unless we consciously tell ourselves not to, right? So when you have an, you're, you're with a partner and they have an ex who is, who is a woman, that's like you literally put yourself in competition with them because you want to be better. You want to be what that partner never was for your current partner. You want to not make the same mistakes. And also this can be used against you.

And this is why I speak about it. Sometimes it's not the girl. Sometimes it's your partner who is. It's called triangulation when people say stuff to you about someone to create this divide and this resentment so that if that person ever reached out to you about their experiences with your partner you would never believe them because they've been called crazy or psycho which are obviously awful ableist words but that's what people use to describe women who have been abused and I talk

about this a lot with my friends I've never said this on Instagram um but I often wonder how many women who have never interacted with me who don't know who I am actively think I'm crazy and psycho because it's what men who have abused me would have told them to discredit my voice and even with um women you know I often think about the women from my high school or or friends who have hurt me I wonder how many people out there think this have this tainted version of me because if I were to ever speak my truth about my experiences um I would already be discredited because they've built this image up and it's it's so interesting and I think you know I've not been in a relationship um for two years I've had this time to be single to date around and find out parts of myself I think

whenever you go on dates people mirror parts of yourself back to you and it's up to you whether you take that as a reflection or whether you say it's the other person and project it onto them. And I think, I absolutely think there's part of me inside me, inside everyone today that still exists that makes you want to compare yourself to your partner's ex and i think it's in in my book i said that the way i flip it is by literally flipping my criticisms of other women on its head if you see a woman wearing an outfit and you think what the fuck is she wearing flip it around in your head and say wow look at her confidence to wear that in spite of what other people might say and i think if you can empower women with your criticisms of them instead, and do the work with your ego later about why did that come up for you? Why did you feel that way? We can have much more healthier relationships with women, and then in turn,

ourselves. That's such good advice. I mean, it's such a prevalent thing, even not just with a partner's ex, but I'm thinking even if with an ex's new partner you know if that person is also a woman you then find yourself diving deep into their Instagram to find out all the ways that they are similar and different from you yeah exactly or sometimes I think I'll feel worse like sometimes a form of self-harm isn't it to be like oh they look like this and I don't look like that to prove that you are unworthy to yourself because deep down that's how you feel and we're always looking for reasons to to prove that um not everyone but a lot of people who have these wounds will search for reasons to prove that they are unworthy um and yeah no that's really interesting that you said that and obviously the title of that chapter is refuse to find comfort

in other women's flaws and i think that's that is that is what we do you know when you see someone having and I think part of that is to do with I think it's nice to see relatability in women I noticed that um a lot of people message me after I talk about mistakes I've made in the past and they will say thank you so much for talking about this because I had you on this pedestal for so long and I didn't realize that actually some people just want to be able to relate to people because they there's a difference between finding comfort in people's flaws because and tearing them down and then also just finding comfort in knowing that everyone makes mistakes and that you can bounce

back from them with changed behavior you also write in the book about how um queer first dates differ from straight first dates so i want to ask you about that because the thing you touch on a lot is the ambiguity and you explain very well how you know obviously on a queer first date there are fewer gender roles at play but then you say that many of them kind of follow a similar pattern so can you explain that a bit yeah so like it's so funny and within the queer community you have so many tropes that are just universally true and that is that every single date even if it's established that it's a date it still feels ambiguous because the way you interact with uh or rather I'll speak for myself the way i interact with women and binary people is in this way that it is so i don't have to perform a gender role i

don't have to perform my role my quote unquote my role as a woman um because there's so much freedom to just be and show up as my authentic self as opposed to when I'm on a date with a man and which I don't do very often um it's entirely different because you're constantly or subconsciously anyway performing around his masculinity at least that's what I felt and realized I was doing after I journaled about it I felt like I was going into a shrinking machine designed to cater to his ego and the version of myself that he would love the most. And I found that I was, it would be little things like not bringing up my very strong views, which now I do almost instantly because it's the best bullshit filter. And I just, I realized that I was slipping into this role subconsciously

of how I thought a man would respond well to me. It's this like people pleasing, the people pleasing leaps out on dates with men. And with queer people, like, yeah, like you brought up in my book, you say it's very ambiguous because almost sometimes you're like, are we talking as friends? What are we doing if if i put my hand like on their lap or

flirt with them will they not like it because this is just friends and they'll freak out there's all of this stuff that goes through your head um which is why i have a rule that i just established first of all if someone asks me for a drink um and they're a woman or they're non-binary and i know that they're queer that i always're non-binary and i know that they're queer that i always say are you asking to hang out or would you like to take me on a date and i think it's that clarity that i like to give out into the world because also i expect it and if i expect something i absolutely should be holding myself to the same standard and it's the same with giving closure as well if i don't like how a date is going I will

always text that person the next day to say hey it was so great getting to know you I just don't think we're compatible because I would like that in return rather than be ghosted it's interesting the ambiguity thing but ambiguity thing because actually that that does happen in straight relationships as well but on a much on a much more different scale I think because when I'm just thinking of examples of people I've dated but it's very rare that people use the term date explicitly when they want to go out with someone like it's usually like do you want to hang out yeah I found anyway and and I think a part of that is a wanting to keep it ambiguous because you want to like I don't know keep someone on their toes but also it keeps things it kind of absolves you of responsibility and it keeps things casual wow that's so true it's so weird isn't it and i've had guys do that with me and then and then they

you know they kind of they're very flighty and what you just said right then what you just said right then it absolves you of responsibility that is so true yeah oh my god it's like oh we weren't dating we were just hanging out it's so fucking weird it was just casual what did you think this was yeah i um oh yeah absolutely but this is funny because i actually recently did this um with a girl i was like oh is this a date or is this a hangout and she said well to be honest I was going to keep it ambiguous because I wasn't sure and then I was like well do you know what I'm happy to also enter this as ambiguous with like as long as you're both on the same page there you go so sometimes you're establishing that and then you feel so relaxed on the date but there is nothing worse

than bouncing the fucking pants of someone and not knowing if you can make a move because they think uh that it's just friendly and again that's a whole fear of rejection thing um but it's it's also kind of valid because i think you you don't want to encroach on someone's personal space and all this kind of and with women as well there's a whole other layer of that so it's um yeah it's very interesting I love yeah it's absolute torture that feeling when you're trying to figure out if someone likes you or not uh in 2018 you shared a photo of Megan Barton Hanson wearing a t-shirt with one of your slogans on it uh and it said stop valuing women based on their sexual history and that was something that I loved first of all because obviously if you've watched Love Island

people listening uh Megan was a contestant who experienced quite a lot of slut shaming on the show and afterwards as well um so talk to me a bit about why that was such an important message for you to put out there and why you were so happy for Megan to be a spokesperson for that message well I think anyone can wear my message you You know, I'm not going to police someone and say you can't wear this because of blah, blah, blah. I just think, I think it was great that my t-shirt was like on, that slogan was just emblazoned across her chest

in the same desk as Piers Morgan. I just think that was so iconic. That message is so important to me because there is so much shame surrounding sex. When I grew up, I was called frigid for rejecting sexual advances from men. And when you think about it, that's just, you're using that word to shame a woman for saying no. And what kind of a message does that send to women about their bodies on every level?

It tells you that your body exists for men. And if you don't give it up, you're a bad person. But also if you don't give it up you're a bad person but also if you do give it up you're a bad person and i really want the kind of message that i want to lead women to in conclusion with this book is literally no conclusion at all the conclusion is that you are gonna be criticized either fucking way so just do what you want and you know what you might have to be single for a little bit to figure that out to um go through that loneliness and that period of not having any external influence on your desires to find out what your desires even are were your desires about you and what you genuinely love and what times you want and how you feel good in the world or whether you're about what society expects of you as a woman or an ordinary person or whatever kind

of label books that you have been pushed into and I think that the thing with that message is I used to slut shame my friends internally you know I would never call them a slut but in my head because of all these messages I had about women I would think that they were easy which is just a horrible thing to think and I oh again even saying that out loud is gross but I love oh my god I I love I love women and I love women who don't care about what other people think about them in their sex lives and that was a really important message for me because a woman's choices that she makes about her body should not be up for discussion because we don't hold men to the same standard we don't talk about their sex lives that way

and i read this thing that said um it was a tweet and it said it's interesting how men think that a woman who sleeps with 30 different guys has a loose vagina but a woman who has a boyfriend and has fucked him so many times is all of a sudden like not under the same category yeah all of these it doesn't yeah that's so true like that's biologically makes absolutely no sense it's very it's very true i just think back to megan it's so interesting how I think her being on that show raised so many of those important discussions about female sexuality and it happened the following season as well I don't know if you watched it but there was another person on the show called Maura Higgins who was also wonderful on it and you know she spoke about sex quite a lot she was quite upfront about her

sexuality but she'd only slept with I think six people and everyone in the villa and she'd never had a one night stand. And I remember everyone in the villa and everyone outside on the show being quite shocked by that. And it, it just really highlighted how we attach all of these really bizarre presumptions to women just because of a certain way that they talk and behave. And that's such an issue. Yeah. And I feel like with these characters on Love Island as well, they are these people that we see on telly and we project everything onto these people and it just dehumanizes them and turns them into these objects

or these screens for our projections. And like you said, yeah, everyone was shocked or surprised because she has this very sex positive attitude and talks openly about her sexuality. And I think I just want to, shocked or surprised because she has this very sex positive attitude and is very like talks openly about her sexuality and i think i i just want to i want i i love talking about sex it's like my favorite thing to discuss with my friends and even talking about masturbation like in extreme detail with my close friends and i think some of them find it so uncomfortable but not in a way

that um it's like they feel it's like you're a little girl again when you have these conversations with your friends for the first time it's like oh my god we're doing something really naughty but now it's like it's my daily lingo with my friends it's talking about wanking and fucking and shagging and what we like and what we don't like and also reflecting in a really critical way on our sexual experiences and i think one of the biggest realizations i had from dating for almost two years is that sometimes we have sex when actually what we're looking for is intimacy that was a big thing i learned um and how women in particular don't know how to um quote unquote offer something to someone unless it's sexual because it's what

we're used to having our value placed on so that's something I learned a lot about last year through day but I didn't write in the book but it's just something I realized so that's so true that's so yeah so true I want to um finally I want to touch on a brilliant comment that you make in the book you compare ghosting to capitalism which from the outset make no sense at all but the way you explain it really resonates so can you just tell the listeners about that comparison yeah I remember writing it and I was like oh shit this is like capitalism it's like capitalism because capitalism is a system which almost exactly and entirely replicates narcissistic abuse um people who are in positions of power donald trump his entire regimen is narcissistic abuse it instills fear

in people it creates insecurities and then profits from those insecurities capitalism racism patriarchy they are narcissists these bodies of oppression and ghosting is another form because it's another form of emotional manipulation not always I've ghosted people for my safety because someone was encroaching on my boundaries and I felt like I had no other option I'm not going to communicate with someone who's harming me absolutely no way sometimes it's because I didn't know the situation and I was busy with life and this person had prioritized me like their number one priority and I was just busy for a few days and I wanted to get back to them in my own time but in their reality I had ghosted them so it's contextual but when it is done in a way that

someone will avoid you and then come back and avoid you and then come back this is why I said it's like capitalism because they almost plant this insecurity inside of you that you've done something wrong by not talking to you for a couple weeks right there's passive aggressive silent treatment where you you internalize all of that it's happened to me i've been ghosted a few times and it makes you feel shit what did i do so only this person can heal this insecurity in you because they have the supply they give you the information that you need to feel securing yourself again like capitalism fancy insecurities in women in marginalized people in fat people

in all of marginalized identities anyone who um has an insecurity is because capitalism has told you it's wrong so you have that insecurity and and people enforce this insecurity in you by calling you names um and treating you differently when you are fat or you have hairy legs as a woman so you then also go to capitalism to buy the product to quote unquote cure you of this this this ailment or this this this um sorry this flaw that you have um and i think the best example of that that insecurity planting and then also selling back to you the solution is with shaving so in the early 1900s women didn't shave um but then gillette realized that they can they can make a fuckload of money selling razors to women made them pink and then also made them cost more because of the

the pink tax that every black brand applies to women's products and now we all fucking hate our body hair and shave it so it's again it's that they create the void and the supply and the demand and that is like ghosting it's it's explained a lot better in my book i'm not sure if i did that no no you did you explained it really well and the shaving thing i only learned that recently as well that is absolutely mad that's where that comes from yeah i have no idea i mean there is a history of um people in different in different cultures shaving their hair in the western world so finally it's time for our lessons in love segment so this is the part of the show where I ask every guest to share something

they've learned from their own relationship experiences and how it shaped their understanding of love moving forward so Florence what is your lesson in love oh okay on spot, but I like it. I have so many lessons in love. I think, um, number one is that you cannot change people into versions that you want them to be. You have to accept them for who they are, where they are in life, when you meet them. And because even though you want this, so for example, everyone everyone is most people right now are very aware of politics and I think there's this need for me anyway I've been in situations where I've dated men where I just wanted to grow them into these incredible feminists I wanted these men to learn and to um to grow with me and to understand all of this stuff. But this person has to want to do that

work. And even though you want to grow this person into a better version of themselves, it's still manipulative. And when you realize that you're trying to create someone in your version of how you want them to be, whether it's better for them or not. You can literally know, you can date an alcoholic and know that them getting sober is going to be better for their life, but you still trying to have a part in that sobriety by doing stuff to make them. So it's still manipulative. It's still manipulation. And I think it's, I've learned so much that offering space for people and offering support without intervening is the best way to approach love and that person always has to want to do the work themselves and I think um particularly as women we want to grow people into the best

versions of themselves while neglecting while neglecting ourselves in the process to avoid getting to know who we are and what we want because that's how we've been socialized so i think to round that point up the lesson i've learned in love is that you cannot invest in people's potential and it's also very delusional to think so because you're not falling in love with them you're falling in love with a false version of them that you've created in your own mind and you are not entitled to be disappointed when they don't live up to that fictitious story about them you've made up in your own head you're just setting yourself up for disappointment that's it for today thank you so much for listening if you're a new listener to

the show you can subscribe to us on apple podcasts spotify acast or anywhere else you can comment and leave us a rating too so that more people can find us. Keep up to date with everything to do with the show on Instagram. Just search Millennial Love. See you soon. T'was the season of chaos and all through the house not one person was stressing.

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