Did Florence Given Rip Off Chidera Eggerue? Or Is Instagram Ripping Us All Off?
Should feminism be distilled into pretty squares?
In case you missed it, last week involved a very public battle between two young Instagram influencers. Florence Given, or “Floss”, a 21-year old “feminist influencer”, recently published a book called Women Don’t Owe You Pretty. It’s got a fabulous swirly pink and yellow cover, a 70s font, and it’s the sort of stylish coffee table book you buy for a teenage niece for Christmas. The pages, in short, look great on the ‘gram.
Chidera Eggerue, also an Instagram feminist influencer (slightly older, at 26), has written two books. In 2018 she released What A Time To Be Alone, and this year she published How To Get Over A Boy. Again, both of her books are stylish, colourful hardbacks, packed with quotes that fit neatly into Instagram squares. Or tweets.
Eggerue, who goes by the social media handle The Slumflower, opened the debate a week ago by comparing — on her Instagram Stories — various pages of her books with pages of Given’s. Although the two young women have publicly praised each other in the past, and although they both seek to promote feminism in apparently similar ways, Eggerue stated that Given had blatantly copied her work. She said that in essence, Given had merely…
