Taylor Swift Boat Veterans For Truth
1/12/2013
DR Williams
Taylor Swift's relationships, particularly the break-ups, bring their own special breed of ire among internet commenters, and while writing this comic I was having a really difficult time trying to figure out why.
The issue seems to be that she has been in a number of monogamous relationships: 'serial monogamist' being the term that is most frequently bandied around. This is something of an odd complaint to have against a person: is there a proscribed period of relationship-mourning that she should be going through following each break-up? Would we be happier if she dated a number of guys at the same time? This part of the argument fails the genderflip sexism argument rather quickly: while the media demonises Taylor, imagining a clingy, desperate, girl who begins writing 'Mrs. Taylor Gyllenhall' all over her composition books two days after meeting the guy, the same serial monogamy by, say, George Clooney is taken as a sign that he's a strong-willed guy who knows what he wants and is forced to break up with girls whenever they try to change him and tie him down into marriage. In short: bitches be crazy, yo.
The big issue really seems to be that Taylor writes songs about her break-ups. This should have come as no surprise to anybody after four of her first five singles were Tim McGraw, Teardrops On My Guitar, Picture To Burn, and Should've Said No, three of which are about ex-boyfriends and one about a guy she liked but never got to date. (Her third single, Our Song, was a about a couple who are still together.)
I don't quite understand the annoyance people feel from her choice of inspiration: songwriters generally mine from personal experience, and a 22-year old who has basically been independently wealthy from the age of 18 or 19 isn't likely to have many more significant emotional peaks and troughs in her life than whoever she's dating at the time. I'm sure she's very sorry that she can't be like Anthony Keidis, Lou Reed, or Trent Reznor and write a dozen songs about how heroin is both awesome and horrible at the same time, but you play the hand you're dealt.
(Incidentally, nobody bitches about guys writing songs about being on drugs, because that's considered to beal Real and Raw and Edgy, whereas a girl ruminating over the misspent emotional investment of a relationship is clearly just some Sweet Valley High horseshit.)
One of the real problems may be Taylor Swift's popularity. Over the past couple of albums, Taylor has reached the level of fame whereby tabloids will run entire articles about her walking down the street with a cup of coffee. Once a celebrity hits that level of exposure, everything that they do becomes instant rage-fuel for certain segments of the population. If Fiona Apple wrote an album of break-up songs, nobody would bat an eyelid; she's an indie darling, so writing raw emotional stuff is kind of expected from her. A pop singer, though? Good gracious, call the Vinyl Police. The really weird thing is that people being angry about her writing so many break-up songs goes against the major complaint against pop music, namely that successful pop singers often don't write their own material. (Swift has either solo or shared lyrical/composition credit on every single track on her four studio albums; by comparison, her most recent ex-boyfriend, Harry Styles of One Direction, is credited on two tracks of his first album and three of his second album.)
I'd also argue that it's an image problem: if Taylor Swift was constantly falling out of nightclubs, drunk off her arse and flipping off photographers, there would be a lot fewer complaints about her dating frequency. She has such a squeaky-clean image, it's like we want there to be something wrong with her, something broken and unfixable. The tabloids hunger for scandal, which is why there's usually an unsourced quote from 'friends' whenever she breaks up, asserting that it didn't work because she's too clingy, or because they weren't together enough, or because she wouldn't put out, or because of her strict Christian values, or whatever. Women get this treatment all the time in the tabloid press, men less so. Jennifer Aniston has suffered from almost a decade's worth of unsourced quotes saying that she's desperate to get married, she hates her ex, she wants kids, she's pregnant, she's depressed and smoking pot all the time, etc, etc, etc. The tabloids like a good scandal. They want a Chris Brown and Rihanna style break-up, a Rob Pattinson and Kristen Stewart-style scandal. They want cheating, they want blood. The tabloids don't care just as long as it has bodily fluids somewhere they shouldn't be. (That's why they call it a juicy story.)
In the end, I think there's two sets of people.
One set of people have a kind of envy: she's young, she's pretty, she's talented, she's wealthy, and she dates ridiculously good-looking and desirable guys. People have a kind of feeling - a completely understandable and human feeling - that she's so lucky and privileged to be leading the lifestyle she leads that she shouldn't get to complain about her problems. Boo hoo hoo, go dry your eyes with a wad of cash in your big fancy house - that kind of thing. Like I said: it's a normal human wormbaby reaction. It's why most people look at the Kardashian Klan and wonder why anybody in their right mind gives a shit about whatever crisis is so neatly encapsulated in this week's episode. It's the reaction of all single people reading their Facebook feed and seeing multiple posts about one of their friend's new boyfriend/girlfriends: alright, jeez, we get it. You're upset because you have to spend two whole days away from your significant other and it's just killing you. My heart bleeds. But as normal as that reaction is, we have to understand that on some level it is an irrational one: a person's problem always has to be judged within their own sphere of context. Relating everything to yourself is a terribly immature way to go about approaching the world, just as widening any context quickly becomes absurd. (At some point, if you widen the context enough, nothing matters: you just cut your hand off in a meat grinder? Some people don't have any hands, and at least you have medical care, and a bed to sleep in, and food in your belly.)
The second set of people is, I suspect, a largely male one. Taylor Swift writing songs about guys she broke up with makes guys unsettled in a way they don't want to acknowledge: because if Taylor Swift is talking about how she felt when a guy broke her heart, or when she broke his, or when everything fell apart, then what are all their exes saying about them? There is nothing men fear more than a woman with an opinion and a soapbox from which to shout it, and Taylor Swift holds this position of power with a great deal of pride. At the heart of it all, she's a girl with the ability and the platform to articulate her point of view, and like most women in the public eye that have done the same, she is being told to shut up and to feel embarrassed and ashamed that she wants to speak her mind.