Taylor Swift embodies a brand of femininity that is crafted in the female gaze

Iam convinced Taylor Swift writes her music for me, and me alone. There are times when her lyrics feel so salient, so specific to my life, that I wonder how she knew what I was feeling when I was 15, or when I moved out, or when I was driving through Upstate New York. But wait... I’ve never been to Upstate New York. This is the magic of her music. She sings about her own life so vividly that you’re convinced those things happened to you. You’re able to link them to your own experiences and feel like you’re being understood, like you’re talking to your friend at a sleepover and she says, ‘the same thing happened to me’. It’s never exactly the same, but it’s close enough.

Over the pandemic, as my world got smaller and smaller, I found myself turning to Taylor Swift’s music for comfort. Her two escapist pandemic albums, Folklore and Evermore, came out at just the right times for me, and in a way mirrored my own creative journey with my debut novel. There’s a saying among her fans that there’s a Taylor song for every emotion, and it feels like that’s true.

Emotions aren’t always rational. They’re not always helpful. They aren’t always mature. But that doesn’t mean we don’t feel them intensely, and that they don’t effect our lives in ways we can’t fully understand. There are things I felt when I was 15 that have shaped the course of my life, and I return to those emotions with a kind of nostalgic bemusement. Taylor takes that seriously.

She writes songs that give those emotions entire worlds, so they can be fully felt. In particular, she’s not afraid of taking women’s emotions seriously. By virtue of singing about her own experiences, she speaks to a wider female experience.

It might seem counter-intuitive, but talking deeply about the specificity of your own experiences doesn’t limit the interpretations of your art, but rather expands them. It allows people to compare and contrast their own feelings, or to examine their feelings in a new way. It doesn’t matter if I’ve never been to Upstate New York, if I’ve felt the kind of sadness she’s singing about.

It is this quality that gives her music longevity and continued relevance. She has songs I loved when I was a teenager and love equally now. My appreciation and relationship to them has changed, as I myself grow, but there is a fondness that remains strong.

There have been times in my life when I would have been embarrassed to say that Taylor Swift is my favourite musician. We are taught, from a young age, that femininity is not serious, that the things women like are not serious. And I’m tired of it. In 2022, I’m saying goodbye to internalised misogyny and embracing the things that I enjoy.

Taylor Swift is a female pop star for women primarily, not men. She embodies a particular brand of femininity that is crafted in the female gaze. She may or may not appeal to men, but they’re not her target audience. If she is objectified, it’s on her terms.

She is perhaps one of the most powerful women alive; she has money, fame; she is thin, white. And yet it is clear the way she has battled misogyny in the media. She won her sexual assault case, but the fact that even she could be groped and blamed for it resonated with women everywhere. It asked the question: how much power is enough to isolate you from the way in which society hates women?

Her constant reinvention, her unique eras for each album, can be seen as her responding to the sexism of the music industry. It is an industry that demands women constantly fight for and prove their worth. She has taken that constraint and made it into a marketable brand. Within those constraints, it’s inspiring, hopeful even, to think that this fight is something she’s winning.

This is why her fans support the re-recording of her albums, something that no one in the industry seemed to think was a good idea. The general consensus was that no one would pay money for something they already had; it would be condescending to ask her fans to act as though these albums are new.

The people who said those things fundamentally misunderstood the relationship Taylor Swift has with her fans. They didn’t think about anything I’ve written in this article. Taylor is a commercial success, yes, but through easter eggs in her songs and fan sessions she also has a relationship with her fans outside of the conventional one. It isn’t entirely dictated by the industry.

She’s a public figure who has become a focal point for the specific things women are made to suffer. And because her fans already identify with her life, we identify with her on this as well. It doesn’t matter if the individual suffering is slightly different; we all know misogyny when we see it. We understand why she’s re-recording her albums. We feel like she’s been cheated, so we have been cheated too.

Instead of it being the same thing over again, each re-recorded album feels like revisiting a childhood diary with your friend. It feels like listening to these songs for the first time again. It feels like looking back on your past, and not shying away from who you were.

So in the end, Taylor Swift is writing her music for me. And for all of you. And, importantly, for herself as well.

None of this is Serious by Catherine Prasifka is published by Canongate and available now

A playful touch on the one-piece from & Other Stories. €39, stories.com