I do not have the time nor the enthusiasm to write about the rest of your text.
So what is the excuse of Taylor Swift(or whoever writes her songs) for the movie and lyrics of “You belong with me”?
Miley C. is another cup of tea (definitely not my cup of tea) and she is on the other side of the above mentioned dichotomy. Her acts are so oversexualised that I wonder… why?

But I suppose the logic here is “Gaga can do it, so can I”. But Gaga is not under 18, so I am just…. confused. When sexuality was mistaken with cheap imitation and sexism?

Ahahahaha! Best comment ever.

@Sady: How DARE you malign the Godess Amos!

You might be interested to note that Miley Cyrus is (was?) the exception to this. If you listen to that double Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus album that came out a couple of years ago, there are all kinds of songs about how “everybody makes mistakes; everybody has those days; nobody’s perfect” and “life’s what you make it, so let’s make it rock”. The last song on the Hannah disc is actually an anthem to her “true friend” and about how “true friends will go to the ends of the earth till they find the things you need” and “you pull me aside when something ain’t right; talk with me now and into the night till it’s alright again”, and I think there is another song on there that references the same thing (although it’s more of a friend-break-up-song).

Anyway sorry to fill up so much space, but I thought you might find that interesting! ^^

I am a Swift fan, but I don’t think that overly influences my interpretation of her music – I’m also a Britney Spears and Katy Perry fan, but songs like “3″ and “Hot and Cold” are some of the grossest, most misogynistic things I’ve ever heard. So my liking an artist’s music and image doesn’t mean I automatically approve of the messages in their work.

That said, I continue to be extremely confused and frustrated by these portrayals of Taylor Swift as an abstinence-pushing, Christian mafia virgin. I have never once, in all of the time I have listened to her music and watched her interviews, seen her reference God or “good morals” or keeping your virginity to be pure or anything like that.

“Abigail gave everything she had to a boy who changed his mind” – I honestly have no idea where you got the idea that this was talking about losing her virginity. This exactly describes a high school relationship I had where I built my fantasies and dreams around a boy who told me he loved me, but just as easily as he had “fallen in love”, he fell away from me. We didn’t have sex and we didn’t need to. Is this not kind of a near universal first break-up sentiment, when someone breaks your heart? And please note the other lyrics Brad quoted because those are the same ones I think of when I read these negative critiques of Swift as supporting the patriarchy; I tend to view her as quite the opposite.

Anyway, I understand how you could read the virginity aspect into it, but Taylor Swift is not a Christian artist, she is pop-country. (Nearly?) every one of her songs is about falling hopelessly in love with a boy – and either how great it feels in the moment, or how dumb you feel when it ends and you realize you had built your life around him. Because of this I find it very difficult to interpret “Fifteen” as a moral crusader anthem and much easier to see it as an expression of that stage of growing up where you learn you can’t trust everyone, and you can’t always bank on your life turning out exactly the way you imagined, because sometimes there are bigger things for you out there than you dreamed.

And Ginmar and Adrianna – I don’t think that Brad’s points are invalidated by virtue of his gender or post length. I feel like I’m pretty up-to-date in the blog-o-sphere re: mansplaining, and I didn’t read any of that into his post at all. Maybe I am mistaken by virtue of the fact that I agree with him. But I really would be interested to have some people respond to these criticisms because I haven’t seen anyone do so yet.

I just wonder why there are so few bits of pop culture about teenagers doing all these other things – it seems like every representation of high school life revolves around sex and crushes, if a bit darker drugs and alcohol. That’s especially true for representations of teenage girls – rarely do we see portrayals of friendship deeper than relationships with the opposite gender, or of competitiveness in sports or other competitions, or of girls who are rebellious and nonconformist in ways other than their looks. That’s not to say that relationships aren’t serious issues for a lot of people, but I guess I’m annoyed when they’re seen as the ONLY issues.

I’m not blaming Taylor Swift for writing what she enjoys, and her melodies are quite catchy; my criticism is directed towards an industry that centers almost exclusively on the topics of sex and love, which ignores huge chunks of how we construct our identity. Even if Swift’s songs talk about one’s growth as an artist, must she contrast this with relationships with the opposite sex, as if they’re two separate paths? Are they really either-or choices? Can we not be all these things, and more? I think that there is a substantial part of adolescence and all the confusion and alienation and depth at that age that has been neglected, and Swift doesn’t exactly help that (though I don’t demand that she does, it’s the big picture that she belongs to that I am frustrated about).

And isn’t it a bit non-feminist to remove this girl’s “everything” of anything not resembling the loss of virginity? I mean, yeah, that likely happened, but I guess I think there are other things that define even a world so teenage, like time, devotion, your standard high school fumbling toward love? In my high school experience, that shit was huge, it enveloped every conscious step toward another person, every attempt at connection. There was the distinct feeling that our actions inside this house would not let us get out alive. Which is why I don’t think Swift is so much promoting a healthy fear of sex as much as she’s examining an unhealthy fear of and submission to everything.

But hey, I guess regardless of my problems with the way you are contextualizing some lyrics about a person (who is real, but it’s not like she was anything but her hymen–which, to clarify, is the identity you’ve limited her to through your interpretation, not anything actually in Taylor Swift’s song), it’s totally possible to read it that way. The initial Bitch blog, however, really distorts “Fifteen” into something that it is not unless you live in the inverted universe, which I understand, I commute there occasionally. You conflate the “I realized some bigger dreams of mine” with sex, suggesting that Swift had bigger dreams than giving up her vagina to some guy who wouldn’t satisfy her as much as God, when the actual line informs that she decided not to marry a dude right after high school and instead carved out a life/artistic pursuit for herself. I am looking for where she tells “girls stories about how being too sexual will make them broken hollow sluts who can never succeed at life” but perhaps that lyric was cut from my Wal-Mart edition of Fearless and y’all went to Best Buy, or something.

Yes, there are songs on this record like “Love Story” and “You Belong with Me” which arc on gender dynamics that are abominable but existing. It’s why I really dislike her at first blush. But, what do you know, by actually engaging with her music, songs like “Fifteen” and “White Horse” reveal themselves as the wider lenses of these themes, “Fifteen” disassembling this destructive desire for someone who probably isn’t worth all this dogged contrast with her and someone who could be Abigail (although the “laughing at all the girls” line is unconscionable), and “White Horse” knowingly undoing all of the “prince” and “princess” tropes in “Love Story” because Taylor Swift knows it’s all horseshit and to presume less of her is a somewhat shitty thing to do. Why doesn’t she do this in every song? Because, I don’t know, I think Taylor Swift likes to explore these issues through complex narrative instead of surface-level dismissal?

Also, all the linked article’s consistent need to contrast Swift with Beyonce ignores the latter’s incredible devotion to existing gender disparities in her lyrics, not to mention how, just as Swift, her boys tend to bear halos (this, incidentally, is something Alex Macpherson noticed, not me). “Single Ladies” invokes marriage as a sort of purchase, the chorus informing that you should have bought me when you had the chance, and it disguises its support of a pretty goddamn patriarchal institution as female empowerment, which I think might be a real feminist’s nightmare.

Others have said more exact and succinct things on the topic. For one, girlboymusic, who really gets to the heart of the problem with the madonna/whore critique (“so, you’re criticizing Taylor Swift for perpetuating a virgin/whore dichotomy and projecting her rigid values upon other women by…classifying her according to a virgin/whore dichotomy and projecting your rigid values upon her? Yeah. Good job.”). There’s also some particularly on-the-money comments in the Taylor Swift thread on ILM (Ex. from kingkongvsgodzilla: “Man, my first impression was that 15 was warning people against adolescent sex specifically as an extension of adolescent infatuation. There isn’t anything anti-feminist about that”). I’ve just been simmering over this article for days. Prior to reading this blog, I didn’t know you started up the choir, Sady. And it’s really alarming to me that someone whose writing I respect so much would endorse this lazy criticism posing as feminist thought.