my real introduction to taylor swift happened when my friends and i were getting ready for a school dance our senior year of high school, 2007. "teardrops on my guitar" comes on the radio and my friend turns it up a little and starts crooning about how much she loves taylor swift.
the thing about this friend is that she is also blonde, blue eyes, thin, classically pretty, trendy, pretty conservative but very popular with the guys, nice to everyone but so much so that it sometimes came off superficial. as far as looks went... and actually, in more ways than that... she was pretty much a clone of taylor swift. during our years of high school, a lot of my heartbreak and the heartbreak of my then-best friend/her long-time best friend/i-think-i-got-to-get-really-close-to-that-girl-because-they-were-feuding friend came from this girl that loved taylor swift. she always got the guys. she was always the preferred acquaintance. she was always coming out on top for everything. they knew the same people and, again, especially when it came to guys, this friend was never, ever, ever actually in the running when it came to her and t-swift-lover. none of us were. and this taylor swift lover was so genuinely nice. she did and said things for me that other people never have. we hung out and she was the first friend i told that i got into college. but our friendship was essentially doomed not because we didn't love each other but because of how everyone else treated us when we stood side by side. it could never work unless i, and all of us, were willing to do that and take the back seat every time.
so from the beginning, taylor swift was representing something that i could not only not relate to, but that harmed me and my non-thin, non-blond, non-taylor swift friends without meaning to. i never had teardrops on my guitar, i knew what the real shit was with romeo and juliet, and i definitely wasn't looking for a "love song" and was confused about why an 18 year old was singing about getting a marriage proposal, i wasn't daydreaming about someone else's boyfriend, and in general i was never, ever, not even as a teenage girl, into that fairytale stuff.
this is essentially the same problem i have with taylor swift today. i don't have a long list of ex lovers, i've never been to new york, i've never really been super stylish, and i don't have any cats, which is most of what taylor swift talks about. don't get me wrong, i worship her for sticking it to the media when they ask her sexist, stupid questions. but in general, she is on a planet where i not only don't live but have never been to.
when "shake it off" was released i was so happy; i really like the song. it was around this time that i would be listening to the radio in my car and something would come on and i would think wtf this is terrible and it's grating my brain turn it off now and my hand moved immediately to the power button. what was happening was the release of taylor swift's other singles. so fine, the music isn't my type. today i listened to "1989" in its entirety and as an album, it's a good piece of work. i'm glad taylor got out of the country industry. i'm sorry to everyone that loves country, but people are kidding themselves if they think she could have gotten so big without breaking up with country. i think she's becoming a new kind of artist and really succeeding in transforming herself. but add onto the publicity of the album all the news about her hanging out with karlie kloss and crew and going on vacation with them and everything, and she just reaches a whole 'nother level of unreachable for me. you vacation with your friends and put them before guys. great, girl power. they are also all models and extremely beautiful and successful women in certain industries, and that is not a club i will ever, ever, ever be in. not even in real girl world.
her entire public representation runs on the idea that she is "just like you," just like every other teenage girl or young woman out there. but everything i see coming out from her only reminds me that i will never, ever, ever be like her. to me, she's the kind of girl that's okay with leveling the "girl playing field" and lifting up and supporting other girls when, whether she realizes it or not, whether it's fair or not, whether she understands it or (probably not), she will still always always win. it's nice to say that "let's all women just be friends then, this is from the patriarchy and women don't need to compete with each other," and i agree. but i don't think taylor swift does. her track listings clearly show that she is in completion with women, especially for the attention of guys. her entire last album, with the exception of a few songs, fails the idea of the bechdel test, and it's her album!! i love beyonce and lily allen singing about their husbands and i love feist's moody music about relationships. but damn, somehow it's just not the same with taylor swift.
the thing is that this is an unsolvable problem. erasing patriarchy between women and having a "sisterhood" (hate that word) does not erase it between men, and as long as men are still buying into patriarchy, taylor swift wins at work, in her personal relationships, and indirectly in her relationships with other women whether she's helping other women or not. it's not her fault that she's a talented, wealthy, white, slender woman, so we can't hold it against her, right? that's where a conversation about privilege comes in, and hers is insurmountable. it's kind of like olivia wilde (whom i love) coming out and urging women not to "cut their faces" and get plastic surgery all while she has one of the most distinct and beautiful faces in the industry.
it's a difficult problem because if you were to ask a backseat girl like me or my friend to choose between feminism/making taylor swift feel okay and getting a job/having a chance to biologically reproduce in a family environment, it gets uncomfortable really fast.
rather than taylor swift, give me some lorde. oh gimme, i love lorde. the thing is, ella and taylor are really, really good friends. genuine friends (as far as i can tell). and this should be the marriage-metaphor, that the blonde girls that patriarchy prefers and the kind of weird, more cerebral underdogs (to put it in very simplified, stereotyped terms) can live together in perfect harmony. i realize this is a severe faucet of internalized misogyny i have and that i need to work out. my way of working it out right now is to recognize how problematic it is and ignore it and play nice and theorizing about "taking the back seat" and try to transform it. taylor swift does a lot right. she is an improvement in so, so many ways. that can most definitely be enough when she has never personally done anything to me.
the only other problem i have with taylor swift is how she indulges celebrity idolization. she owes her success to her fans and rightly recognizes that and gives back to them. there is something obviously really wonderful about that. but there is also something really harmful about that. you can argue that the relationships are genuine because she is indeed connecting directly with her fans through social media, and it is therefore a real relationship. but is it? social media is entirely a problem of its own that i won't go into, just like i won't go into this much more right now. but taylor swift sending her fans christmas presents just is not as genuine to me as jennifer lawrence, the most bankable star of 2014, not going to the oscars because she doesn't actually like it, didn't want to, and wasn't contractually obliterated. so she didn't. she didn't feed into the fame-fake-worship that causes so many problems. jennifer lawrence has her own problems, definitely, but that is something i relate to a whole hell of a lot more.
i will never be a part of taylor swift's club.
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