Younger Millenial, Edler Swiftie

a reckoning

my car

I didn’t listen to Taylor Swift in high school, when you’re supposed to listen to Taylor Swift, when she was arguably at the peak of her Taylor Swiftie-ness (though she peaks every several years now, it seems), because I had a boyfriend who thought Taylor Swift was stupid. Actually, my boyfriend thought women were stupid. Like, in general. Myself included.

When I was in high school, 2010-14ish, feminism was going through a rough patch. It wasn’t cool to be a feminist. It was thought of as whiney and shrill and tiresome, all of the adjectives my male teachers and the popular jocks who laughed at me whenever I raised my hand would have used to describe me and, ironically, some of the adjectives that make feminism necessary in the first place. Even my female friends were like, relax with all that, basically.

It was the era of Nicki Minaj and Kim Kardashian. The popular girls wore Ugg boots rolled down to expose the fake shearling, into which they tucked their Victoria’s Secret Pink yoga pants. It was the era of yoga pants.

Taylor Swift was stupid because she had the audacity to date a lot of guys and then sing about how they broke her heart. A heartbroken slut? Not in the 2010s. No such thing. Sluts were evil creatures who roamed the earth, ravenously sucking the good nature from good men who would have been better off if it weren’t for that slut. Taylor Swift was a slut who had the audacity to say that the good men did something wrong.

Portland High School circa 2012 was a place where the history teacher was famous for having relationships with his hot female students. It was a place where my friends got sent home to change on a daily basis because their bra straps were showing or their shorts were too short. Like, they had to walk home, missing class, and come back in a more modest shirt. Or their mom or dad had to leave work to go home, get a shirt from their dresser, probably not the right one, the green one with a stain probably, and bring it to their daughter who was pulled from class to sit in the office like a leper. There may as well have been a sign above their head that read “slut.”

I never got dress-coded, as we called it, and I definitely should have based on their standards. I was a tall, gangly thing that never fit into her clothes. I definitely had exposed bra straps and too-short shorts. After a while I got suspicious, so I intentionally wore a see-through shirt with no undershirt, inviting the demerit. The entirety of my 34B bra (wrong size then and would be for many years until I got the courage to get measured) was visible to everyone in the building, and no one said a thing. Not a word. No one even seemed to notice. Except my boyfriend, of course, who thought I was a slut.

I told this story as an adult to some friends, and they said, “Yeah, Emma, you were probably as scary then as you are now.” I didn’t feel scary. If I was scary, I would have listened to Taylor Swift. If I was scary, I would have told my shitty boyfriend to fuck off.

In my head I am two women: Joan Crawford and Doris Day. I am either the severe brunette cursing the day you were born, or the perky blonde excitedly preparing dinner for when you get home. Joan is the scary one, Doris is the Swiftie.

After I graduated high school and dumped my shitty boyfriend, after I dropped out of college and came back home to nanny and read books, I started listening to Taylor Swift in earnest. I woke up at 6 am every weekday morning to drive over the foggy bridge to South Portland where the kids I nannied lived, and screamed out of the windows of my rickety Mazda 5 to 1989. I wept every morning, and then I took the kids to soccer. I experienced what every Swiftie experiences: utter disbelief at this person’s uncanny ability to say exactly what I’ve been feeling, what I thought only I had been feeling.

There’s also this thing with Taylor: whenever I see the way she talks in interviews, or the way she dances at concerts, I kind of hate her. She has this awkward, bumbling, manic-pixie thing going on that is so 2010. So Doris Day. So everything I, a Joan Crawford who takes things seriously, was taught to hate. Don’t make a fool of yourself. Don’t act all cute. You’re a woman. But what if I was given the permission to be Doris in high school? What if I hadn’t been cast as Joan before even knowing who Joan and Doris were? What if had been allowed to be awkward, and silly, and boy crazy, and emotional, and girly? That’s the thing about Taylor: she’s girly. Deep down in my bones, I’m a girl. I’m 12 years old and I want to play with my friends and ride my scooter. I want to paint my nails and watch movies and I’m still figuring out what to do with my hair. I want to have sleepovers. I want to talk about what we’re going to be when we grow up. I want to imagine growing up as a distant, unknown thing that will never happen to me.

My writing is, at its best, a Taylor Swift song.