Taylor Swift makes me feel like a girl

On (Taylor's Version) of gender

I like listening to Taylor Swift because her songs make me feel like a girl. The only other time I feel like a girl is when I'm talking about men with other girls. Listening to Taylor Swift is sort of the equivalent of that.

Growing up, I listened to a lot of Taylor Swift. Her songs were the soundtrack of my white girlhood. Her storytelling shaped the realm of possibility I imagined for my identity and for my future. I assumed my coming of age would mimic hers, meaning my life would revolve around grand romances. It would include the same magic, true love, yearning, conflict, and triumphant endings of the Fearless and Speak Now eras. More girls than would like to admit grew up wholeheartedly expecting this from life.

In the scenes Swift paints, girlhood is enchanting, even in heartbreak and yearning, because everything works out in the end. Most of her endings are happy; if not, they are perfectly cathartic. Her stories end cleanly and smoothly, no threads hanging. Any mess is packaged into a perfectly digestible lesson. In just three minutes, she hand delivers you emotional resolution in a neatly tied gift box. As author and main character, she has complete control over this resolution, the sort of omnipotence reserved for daydreams.

In (Taylor's Version) of the world, there is no economy of desire, or if there is, she is the hub of it. She is not without struggle, but any struggle (other girls, outside forces trying to sabotage true love) is inevitably overcome, and she is stronger for it. If a relationship ends in heartbreak, in her forecasted future she is always the one that got away. There is no reality in which she is rejected, outcast, alien, undesirable. Even in heartbreak, she asserts emotional—and moral—righteousness. She moves forward untainted, maintaining the social-emotional-moral-spiritual purity of a blank canvas—or blank space—ready to fill with a new love guaranteed to be better than the last.

Even the tragic 19-year-old-purity-defiled narrative of "Dear John" does nothing more than affirm Swift's goodness and innocence—and desirability. The song outlines an experience most girls know All Too Well, yet she builds the familiar story around her exceptionalism; “All the girls that you've run dry have tired lifeless eyes 'cause you've burned them out, but I took your matches before fire could catch me,” she sings. Smarter than the other girls who get ruined in their victimhood, in (Taylor’s Version) of the story, her superior wit makes her the exceptional victim—the one whose perpetual victimhood, far from defiling her purity, does nothing more than bolster it.

Swift positions herself as the embodiment of and moral authority on innocence. "You're still an innocent," she later sings on Speak Now; it is a lullaby to Kanye West, absolving him of his sins for his infamous interruption of her VMA win. “Innocent” promises redemption to anyone who has ever lost themselves or strayed off course. The control here is clever, subtle, and seen frequently in her songs. In lullabies of forgiveness, there can be no question who is in the wrong—clearly it's the person who needs forgiving.

Roles are pre-assigned; Swift is casting director. When she gets cast as victim, she also plays the role of generous redeemer. And if she is redeemer, she has omnipotence. Extending beyond her feuds with other celebrities, as casting director, she can rearrange characters and claim the aforementioned moral high ground in every heartbreak narrative as well.

The public took notice; "She's built her career off of playing the victim," the internet echoed years ago. Well, she's good at it—because she embodies a social position, or sexual persona, that allows her to be good at it (read: white, blonde, skinny, conventionally attractive). Her appearance sets her up to benefit from centuries-old constructions of innocence. She has been received as innocent her whole life; when people see you as innocent, you learn to see yourself as innocent. When you are innocent, you are allowed to be a victim. Innocence defines victimhood. The degree to which victim status is responded to or empathized with depends on one's performance of innocence. And Taylor Swift's career has been a successful decade-long performance of innocence.

Speak Now sells an innocent, white girlhood that is everlasting. "Never Grow Up,” a complimentary lullaby on the album, sells eternal innocence as a readily available option—if you simply make the choice to remember and hold close nostalgic comforts from childhood, ones half of her listeners likely never had. In spite of time’s passage, she promises her listeners that remaining innocent is a choice, a mindset, and hardly a social position. She never really has to grow up, so she is never stained or wrinkled by violence, grief, or aging. She is forever innocent. So, girlhood is forever magical.

In (Taylor's Version) of girlhood, you get romance and magic and a never-ending stream of love—a supply precariously dependent on (Taylor's Version) of femininity.

I like listening to Taylor Swift because I can escape into her magical world and pretend that my experience of gender is magical, too. Listening to her songs, you too can enter fantastical girlhood of everlasting innocence, your happy ending inevitable. Time stands still. You can freeze a perfect moment. You never have to grow up. If you never grow up, you never have to grieve. You never have to grieve because time isn't moving on without you. You haven't lost anything yet. Your perfect moment, your perfect love, and your perfect girlhood are waiting just around the corner.

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As fate would have it, I did grow up, and I think I failed at being a girl, or at least I got nowhere close to (Taylor's Version). The closest I can get now is listening to her songs.

When I listen to Taylor Swift, I am playing with a fantasy. It's a kinky gender fantasy. Listening to Taylor Swift is like reading fanfiction about being a girl. It's my silly little escapist pleasure, debatably harmless, or debatably masochistic and keeping an unattainable ideal alive. But isn't kink meant to be a safe place to explore deeply rooted, subconscious desires? Taylor Swift's songs let me explore my desire to be a perfect little girl in the safety of my own solitude.

A lot of women share this kink, which perhaps makes it less of a kink and more just the nature of gender—or gender is one big kink altogether. Gender is a fantasy world, a preexisting work of fiction we don't own the rights for. Yet in the world of fanfiction, anything is legal. You can write whatever you want.

People say kinks can help you resolve something, help you rewrite the past; play creates new worlds. Others counter with the claim that kink can keep you stuck in masochistic trauma reenactment.

Whatever the case, millions of listeners are kinky, and we want our perfect girlhood. We dream dreams of emotional resolution. Taylor Swift hand delivers it. So, we put her songs on repeat, engage with the fantasy, reenact it—and maybe we'll resolve it. We want our happy ending, damn it! It was promised to us.

It was promised to Taylor Swift, too, so she claimed it for herself. None of us can live out Taylor Swift's experience of femininity because her songs are not her real experience. Her songs are loosely inspired fanfiction—her very own kinky gender fantasies, unattainable to her as they are to us. She shares the kink. So, she writes about it and modifies the story to her liking.

If you've been stuck reading one story your whole life, why not write a little fanfiction about it? Take the pen into your own hands and—with some luck and some privilege—you just might become the world's most famous fangirl, an entire globe chanting your words. Isn’t that something?

It’s an admirable accomplishment. My concern is that Taylor Swift's fanfiction is too close to canon. It fits too cleanly into the original fiction; it exists in the same fictional universe. Swift's gender fanfiction is akin to E. L. James writing the Twilight fanfiction that we now know as 50 Shades of Grey; new characters, same gender story. Same story, so it was guaranteed success. People like a familiar story. Swift has gained such a massive global platform because we enjoy her familiar stories in a familiar gender universe. Familiarity soothes the nervous system. Familiar stories get passed down.

We need fresh stories and weird fanfiction. We have too many readers and listeners (calling myself out here) and not enough unhinged, kinky, obsessive writers, or at least not enough globally platformed ones. I’m bored. I want to immerse myself in a new fiction, one I've never read before. Perhaps the best way to do that is by creating one of my own.