When Beyoncè was Taylor Swift’s age, she was onstage with Destiny’s Child, proclaiming: “The house I live in / I’ve bought it / The car I’m driving / I’ve bought it / All the women who are independent / Throw your hands up at me!”

The rush to exalt Swift above all others residing in her age/gender/music demographic is (I believe) a desperate attempt to infuse our country’s apocalypse-bound-mindset with a palatable conservative ideology in the form of a complacent, repressed feminine ideal. And for the most part, it’s working because Swift writes good songs and America is terrified that its children have been scarred by Britney Spears’s vagina and Miley Cyrus’s tumultuous adolescence.

Swift’s package is “Purity Sue Ingenue”: eternally childlike, obedient and one-dimensional. Mothers love this package, and teenage girls are hypnotized by her simple songs & pretty hair & propensity for crying on her instruments.

However, true role models aren’t suspended children, trapped by projections and unable to grow until affirmed by an idealized male partner. Role models grow and change and challenge themselves and are rewarded for exceptionalism, not potential. Independently.

Furthermore, Swift’s lyrical message to teenage girls is clear: BOYS. That’s it. Just boys. Wanting boys you can’t have, fairy-tale princess this, white horse that, more pining at the window, more pseudo-stalking, more incomplete hearts yearning for your touch.  Crying over boys and feeling broken and/or completed by boys. 

In fact, Swift loves boys at the exclusion of just about everything else, including other girls. Other girls are obstacles; undeserving enemies who steal Taylor’s soulmates with their bewitching good looks and sexual availability. 

This is perhaps her music’s most grating sin: the sex-shaming girl-bashing passed off as outsider insecurity. Boys are angels lit from within with cool hair, fast cars, and eyes that often resemble light sources (stars, sunbeams, etc). These boys never grow beyond metaphor into humanity. If they did, we might have to confront the very idea that Taylor Swift’s entire career is designed to destroy: that teenagers want to have sex.

Certainly, Ms. Swift is among a handful of teenage pop stars who truly practices what she preaches. Taylor’s behavior & imagery is just as wholesome as the apple pie her fans dream of baking for their own Jonas Brother-esque boyfriend. She doesn’t peddle paradoxical mixed messages about sex like the previous generation of teenaged pop stars.

I mean, she’s pretty clear in “Fifteen” — really the only song where Taylor has an actual female friend — that “Abigail gave everything she had to a boy, who changed his mind, and we both cried.”
I’ll spare you the time of listening to the song and watching the video and give it to you straight: Abigail had sex with a boy, and later they broke up. That’s right. No marriage. She gave him all she had.

That’s right. All Abigail had was her hymen.

(via morstanian)

2nd Feb 2012 (2:26 am) - Reblogged from and in the end you begin again