FIRST THINGS – When Taylor Swift was a girl, the apocryphal story goes, she asked her girlfriends to go to the mall with her.
They begged off, so she went with her mother instead, only to encounter her friends enjoying themselves without her.
She wrote a song about the painful snub and felt better, a lesson that has served her well.
Swift was born in 1989, which means that by the time she was old enough to date, the “more sex and better sex” lie was so embedded in the culture, certain expectations had become the law of the land.
But in Swift’s case, when she suffered the predictable consequences, she didn’t blame herself or suffer in silence.
She didn’t pretend to be okay but went public with her humiliations, mapping the dark side of the female experience, calling out all of the contemptible male behaviors encouraged by a culture of promiscuity.
The refrains of her early songs are sometimes plaintive, even whiney (“Don’t you think I was too young to be messed with / The girl in the dress cried the whole way home”); sometimes they are gleefully vindictive (“And it’s too late for you and your white horse / To catch me now”).
Later songs are more sarcastic, manifestly weary of having to call out, yet again, predictable male strategies for moving on (“I know that it’s over / I don’t need your ‘closure’ . . . I know I’m just a wrinkle in your new life / Staying ‘friends’ would iron it out so nice”). In her saddest, most affecting work, Swift’s alter egos are simply heartbroken.
But if male relational delinquency is the explicit target of Swift’s animus, there is another, more slippery adversary with which she shadowboxes in her oeuvre, an opponent so internalized by her generation that she struggles to identify it by name …
