Tiger Beatdown

Readers! Have any of you been adolescents? (Probably yes.) Specifically, have you been adolescent  girls? (Probably sometimes. It’s complicated!) Well, super. Because now, we’re going to conduct a brief pop quiz on the adolescent female experience, and trust, and who exactly will fuck you over and how. Specifically, when you think of the wilds of female adolescence, and the young ladies who are capable of causing the most damage therein — when you, as a wee tween, are choosing who to trust and who not to trust — which of the below do you choose? Which one is going to hurt you the worst, and on purpose?

(A) The sulky, eyelinery girl who already smokes cigarettes at age twelve, smokes pot and drinks beer, drinks that beer either in the company of her parents who know about it or figures she can get away with it because they never pay enough attention to her to find out, and lashes out sometimes, mostly at adult authority figures, because something is going on with her life and it’s just not good.

(B) The chick with the tragic wire-frame glasses who looks like her parents still dress her and is really into The Dragonriders of Pern, who occasionally tries to come up with a stinging comeback when she’s being picked on but who’s too awkward and divorced from social norms to pull off anything convincing.

(C) A perfectly normal, wholesome, well-behaved young lady who’s involved with many normal, wholesome, character-building extracurricular activities and always has a smile for everyone and never gets involved with any of the troubles or bad decisions that plague other girls and just, really, seems so nice.

As we all know, Option C IS THE MOST DANGEROUS GIRL ON EARTH. In adolescence, no-one is normal. That’s why it’s adolescence, for fuck’s sake. The girl who can pull off “normal” the most convincingly is usually the girl who’s best at lying. And all too often, she is The Smiler. The Smiler is nice. The Smiler is pretty. The Smiler is popular, but not too popular; she’s just normal folks, you know? The Smiler is good in school and her teachers love her, but she’s not the valedictorian. The Smiler is in show choir and is cast in all the theater productions, and she makes sure of her position by purposefully fucking with people’s heads and making them cry during auditions with “helpful advice” about how nobody likes them and they should leave to make people happy, but she’s smiling. (Actual true story.) The Smiler is a respected youth group leader, a pillar of her community, and she tells the girl who’s been abused by her boyfriend that it wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t presented herself so provocatively, but she promises that Jesus can make it better, and she’s smiling. (Also actual true story.) Sometimes, the Smiler is so good at what she does that the Smiler is your friend: Talk to the Smiler! Hang out with the Smiler! The Smiler only wants to help! Tell the Smiler your troubles — your many secret troubles that no-one knows about because you’d prefer to keep them private! But surely you can trust the Smiler? Except that two weeks later, everybody somehow knows a distorted Grand Guignol disastrous version of exactly what you told the Smiler, and your life is effectively over until college. (I was home-schooled.)

And sometimes, a girl wins a Grammy or several with songs and/or a personal brand that would appear to be the exact musical equivalent of a Smiler. Let’s talk about that with the exciting and lovely Amanda Hess of TBD, just ONE. MORE. TIME!

ILLUSTRATION: She seems sweet!

(Continued)

Which isn’t to condemn Swift totally, or to say that her much-publicized dating life or much-published feelings are entirely artificial. It’s just hard to believe that the most important emotional moments in Taylor Swift’s life line up, so very closely, with the most important moments in her tabloid narrative.

You know what I love? Intimate lady writing, especially when it’s all about girls going unfiltered and getting Some Serious Feelings off their chests. You know what I don’t love? That one Taylor Swift album. It’s not just that the album is named after a song about stealing someone’s husband, and contains another song about how boyfriend-stealing sluts are God’s most hated children, or that the song where she snarls over and over again into the microphone about her undying thirst for revenge is directly followed by a song about her superior powers of compassion and forgiveness. It’s not just that it contains a song called “Never Grow Up,” although it’s good to know that’s part of the official mission statement. It’s not just that Swift is working in a genre which relies on lyrical ingenuity, self-awareness, and the ability to push familiar emotional states past the point of cliche and to the point of containing new insight about how emotion itself works, and just doesn’t seem to deliver on any of the above, like a professional meteorologist who never gives you the temperature  or the forecast but can only say that it’s cold in winter and often damp on days when it happens to be raining. It’s a lot of reasons. Some are here. And if I enjoyed her lyrics, I’m willing to admit, none of them would really matter.

You know who is frequently called upon to make their sexual practices more in line with someone else’s personal idea of What Feminism Means For Us All? Why, the porn ladies and gentlemen, that is who! And whilst you were all preparing to yell at Don this weekend (oh, like you thought he WOULDN’T end up with the secretary; “boring yet somehow deeply unlikable” is how Mad Men spells W-I-F-E) I was learning a whole bunch of stuff about condoms, porn, and California. Enjoy!