Liya Rechtman October 11, 2011 Media, Music

Tay Tay

(Liya Rechtman)– I don’t get it. Ever since last week when I posted about chilling with a bunch of straight guys (a rarity in my life at times), and listening to T. Swift, I have been mulling over this question: Why do men like Taylor Swift?

I mean, I understand why pre-teen girls identify with her. She beautiful, sexy without being scary-sexual, and all around she’s the perfect princess. She is a feminist’s perfect nightmare of what a pre-teen girl would aspire to be. Her absolute Virgin/Whore dichotomies give the writers at Jezebel and Autostraddle palpitations. Not to mention the common themes of being saved by men, the importance of female youth/beauty, and getting approval from your father.

Despite how idealogically repulsive I find her lyrics, I couldn’t help but feel moved the first time I heard “Fifteen.” Okay, I didn’t fall in love with the football quarter back at my high school, but that’s partially because we didn’t have a football team. In other words, I felt like I really knew the feelings she was talking about. And that’s why she’s famous.

What I didn’t get was why all these straight, otherwise very masculine men, who wouldn’t give Katy Perry OR Lady Gaga and second glance, where going falsetto for "Love Story" I’m really not trying to say that there’s anything wrong with them liking female vocalists, but why does T. Swift catch their attention over anyone else? I don’t know my music that well, and I don’t have the best ear, so I cant really get technical here about the artistic merit of her albums, except to say that it is hotly debated. Here are the other theories I’ve come up with:

1) She’s hot – OK, this makes sense. She’s blond, pretty, and in high resolution.

But so are a lot of other musicians. And anyway, when you’re listening to her on your ipod, you cant actually see her, so I don’t know how this stands up.

2) She perpetuates the “myth of high school” – (h/t E.W.W.) Tay Tay didn’t actually go to high school, she spent those awkward years while we were learning geometry and puberty, well-groomed on a tour bus. This means that her experience with high school is an idealized, televised version, which she has never actually participated in
She knows only the good parts, or, at least, the nostalgia inducing parts. She is able to sing about the concept of a best friend or cute senior boys without having to remember that ketchup spilled on her jeans or those older guys creeping on her because she didn’t know any better (or no one noticing her at all because she still had braces). Now that we’re past all that, we want to look back at high school and remember it as that iconic period of our lives we were supposed to have. Everyone wants to remember first love.

This is a somewhat unique quality of Swift’s. Her contemporaries, namely Miley Cyrus and the Jonas brothers, spend a lot more time onstage in their music videos, singing into mikes. Swift doesn’t do that – she sings to her hairbrush and mirror.

3) They are “the boy on the football team”/ the general “he” – All of T. Swift’s songs are about the hunky (albeit somewhat faceless) guys who swoop her up, drive her in their cars, and deal with her dad on her behalf. They want to be the guy that girls like her look for.

4) The blackface paradigm – (h/t BigGoodisss) That is to say, admiration across otherwise unacceptable social boundaries. The 1800s white performers would apply black theatrical makeup for their shows. It wasn’t acceptable to have black musicians in white venues yet etc, but white culture did (and arguably still does) admire black musical culture and imitate it. They could appropriate elements of another culture while being established as a different group. Similarly, post-teenage men don’t have to acknowledge identifying with the girly-ness of Taylor Swift songs, but listening her music mockingly allows them to culturally identify with girls, without giving up that status claim.

5) She’s easier to deal with than a real girl/musician – Minutes before we got into the car and started playing T. Swift, my friend’s current romantic interest called him. She is a Smithie and a hot mess of an individual. She was crying and worried that he wasn’t being exclusive with her. He consoled her, and told her she was amazing/smart/beautiful/the only one. It was clear, though, that the conversation took a lot out of him. After that, all he wanted to do is let pretty, clean blond lyrics fill him up as he drove around Hadley. This explanation makes the most sense to me. These boys, boys (and girls) in general around our age are still young, inexperienced, wary of a world full of crazy and complicated. Lady Gaga crawling around in white spandex with claws and heels singing ”“I want your leather studded kiss in the sand, I want your love” or Katy Perry “Is this a hickey or a bruise?” is hard for them to adjust to sometimes.

They are asking for a break from their real-life complicated women and real-life, genuine music.

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1

BunniesAreNom on October 13, 2011 at 9:26 am
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I agree that TSWIFT perpetuates the desirability of the passive “victim-female” and thus I do not consider a her a positive role model for young girls OR boys looking for an artist whose image is rooted in reality. However, I would like to dispute the opinion that Taytay does not understand highschool. As a young girl she was a non-popular, frequently bullied loner. She was intensely involved in her music and in observing the world, qualities of passion that are rather admirable in a teenage star. Wikipedia offers this interesting nibblet on her early creative impulses:

“When Swift was in fourth grade, she won a national poetry contest with a three-page poem, “Monster in My Closet”. At the age of ten, a computer repairman showed her how to play three chords on a guitar, sparking her interest in learning the instrument. Afterwards, Swift wrote her first song, “Lucky You”.When Swift was 12, she devoted an entire summer to writing a 350-page novel, which remains unpublished.She began writing songs regularly and used it as an outlet to help her with her pain from not fitting in at school. Swift was a victim of bullying, and spent her time writing songs to express her emotions.She also started performing at local karaoke contests, festivals, and fairs.”

Maybe as a 20-year old she doesn’t offer the most illuminating insight on existentiality, but she performs “country-pop”, which is a rather limiting genre. Her music isn’t all that awesome (meaning it is catchy but not ground-breakingly deep or innovative), but let us remember that she wrote a novel when she was in 9th grade–there must be more to this woodland sprite than meets the ear.
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  Anonymous on May 14, 2012 at 10:12 pm
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  LOL – the fact that many straight guys like the anti-feminism of Taylor Swift’s music and image kind of shows that feminism doesn’t turn guys on, and that the majority of guys would still prefer to marry passive, “victim” females, despite 40 years of feminist theory and indoctrination. If you think that Swift is not a good model for young girls, then what kind of role model would you think is good? A powerful female like Hilary Clinton? Elena Kagan? These women are powerful, with a lot of positive qualities sure, but how many guys would want to have a relationship with them? Guys tend to prefer to marry down, not up or even equally. Men may not want their partners to be dumb, but if a woman’s intelligence is higher than the man’s, or if her income is too much higher, they tend to be intimidated rather than attracted. At the same time the highly intelligent, high-income, powerful alpha males who would theoretically not be as intimidated curiously tend to prefer marrying young and pretty “trophy wives” rather than these high-income, highly intelligent women.
  
  In other words, if you disparage Swift as a female role model and promote ones which you deem more active, powerful, and pro-feminist, you are indirectly encouraging behavior in young girls which will make significantly lower their chances of being attractive to men. The pool of men who would be willing to have a relationship with them shrinks dramatically. You might call this independence and empowerment, fine, but this is at the cost of being less likely to marry, have children and a family. Is every girl ready to take this risk? I’m not sure most would readily do so if given a free choice. I have no problem with the existence of 45-year-old spinsters who are independent, intelligent, rich but lonely – the question is whether such an existence is every girl’s true desire. You can’t have everything.
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ConstantLy on October 24, 2011 at 11:21 pm
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I think that for Taylor Swifts image and demographic it’s pretty important that her girl-next-door vibe is played up so people can identify with her. For this reason I find myself very skeptical of the influence of any source supporting her image that way.

Moreover, in the article I talk specifically about her lack of high school experience. Yes, she may have written a novel when she was 12, and a poem when she was 8, but by the time she was 16, she had an album out and was being home schooled. She writes specifically a lot about the years of high school that she didn’t have as if she actually experienced them. http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/25874555

As for country pop as a genre, Im not saying that she’s not a worthwhile listen. I’ve been jamming out to the T. Swift since I wrote this article to weeks ago (much to my neighbor’s dismay…) It’s not any one aspect that I object to (well… the blatantly anti-feminist ideology…) but as an artist, its really the whole package and the silent/alternative demographic that I was most interested in.
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I have a dream | SheBomb on February 8, 2012 at 1:22 am
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[…] spent the last two weeks engrossed in Freud. Freud, for me, is kind of like Taylor Swift. I took Tay Tay on as an exercise in understanding the male athletes’ worldview. I didn’t expect to get her stuck […]
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The Irresistibility of Carly Rae Jepsen | SheBomb on May 14, 2012 at 3:51 pm
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[…] back in October, ConstantLy wrote about straight men and their fascination with Taylor Swift. Her theories apply to CRJ as well: The 1800s white performers would apply black theatrical makeup […]

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