I have a confession to make… I was one of those terrible, sexist, monsters who hated Taylor Swift. Of course, I had no grudge against her when I was a kid. I blasted “Love Story” and “22” and “Back to December” as much as any 11 year old girl. However, the switch came when I went to high school (“Shake It Off” being in the height of its popularity), and I found my views on things that are targeted towards teen girls as “shallow” and “repetitive,” even, “useless.” Of course, now I know that it was the sexist ideals that I was being subjected to, how I desperately wanted to be “not like other girls” so that I could prove to myself that I was superior to them, that I was worth something. That, too, goes hand-in-hand with my struggles with mental illness for a very long time. It was what I called her victim mentality that made me upset with her, how in “Look What You Made Me Do” she blames it all on the people who hurt her, not trying to take any responsibility for herself (yes, a very bad opinion to have, but I did have it). I publicly declared my hatred for her numerous times, citing all of her failed relationships as proof that she was a bad person and content to think myself above all the people that liked her. I did grow up, and I became less likely to trash her and more likely to just forget she and her music existed. Pop was never really my favorite genre after all.
And then a switch flipped in me.
It was only last semester that I happened across the song “exile” from her new album “folklore” and I was shocked to find out that it was a Taylor Swift song. It went against all my previous assumptions about her; it felt like a song made for me. The gentle piano, the mournful lyrics, the pain in her voice when she sang, everything about the song had all of the things I look for in my music (meaning, pain, but most importantly, heart). It was a song that felt like a poem, and I suddenly yearned for more, finding wonder and sorrow in “seven” and melancholy, but hopeful, resignation in “the 1.” I found words I’ve been trying to find inside myself for years inside “this is me trying” and “the lakes.” I found myself in her music, something I hadn’t been able to do before. Her old music, the pop albums weren’t made for me, but this one was and it feels terrible to know that for so long we’ve had the same experiences, the same feelings inside ourselves, and I’ve shamed her for them just because she put them all in top 40 baiting beats.
When “evermore” was released, I was ecstatic, so glad to know that Swift was running with the same beat of the last album. The soft alternative folk-pop feel with poetic lyrics and so much love and pain poured into each song. (And “no body, no crime” which is basically a more harsh and modern rewrite of “Before He Cheats” by Carrie Underwood and one of the best revenge songs I’ve heard in a long time.) “marjorie,” “champagne problems,” “tolerate it,” “willow,” “evermore,” all of these songs spoke to me in ways I had never imagined a Taylor Swift song could, ways I was told they would never because she was only skin deep. But how is “champagne problems,” one of the best songs of 2020 (in my opinion) skin deep? What about a woman acknowledging her grief and acceptance is skin deep? What about the song “happiness,” a song about her constant change and feelings of being in between, her fight to not victimize herself and accuse him, her struggle to accept that she can be happy without the person who made her happy is skin deep? There is only one answer: they’re not. It is the people who accuse her of being skin deep that are.
I bought merch; I told all my friends; I played her music on repeat in the car, and I even wrote this article in attempt to purge myself of the guilt I feel for hating this woman for so long, this human being with feelings and emotions and full of poetry, just because she chose to express it in a way that I was told by men was wrong. Because internalized misogyny got in the way of me hearing her voice every time. And while, no, I don’t really like her old pop stuff (I’m much more of an alternative, soft indie pop person myself), I don’t have the same excuse this time. I can’t pretend that I didn’t listen to her music anymore just because I didn’t like it. Because I do, “folklore” and “evermore” have just about everything I look for in my music.
At some point of our lives, we have to realize that we’ve been wrong, that we’ve been taught wrong. And that might come from someone feeling slightly uncomfortable with Harry Styles’ pearls or, in my case, realizing that I was complicit in Taylor Swift’s antagonization. But it’s not our fault for having been taught these things, it’s what we choose to do from then on: challenge these ideas or ignore the voice in the back of your head screaming that they’re wrong.
And I beg you to challenge them. It will be hard, but it just might be the difference between personal growth and intolerance. Internalized misogyny took years of music and friendships from me. Don’t let it take the same from you.