Am I not a Swiftie because I was fat?
Her music celebrates girlhood. Not mine, though.
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I think of the Taylor Swift phenomenon how I think about church: There are times it would be nice to be into the whole thing, but something just doesn’t click.
People who find meaning in and enjoy worship services have my envy. All religions at their worst propagate intolerance, guilt and shame, discrimination, conflict, and extremism, and the prototypical Conservative American Church Person is unlikely to be someone I’d consider a good hang, but I’ve yearned to experience the trappings of faith practices at their best: an incomparable fulfilment, community and belonging, and the ineffable sensation of being moved by something beyond yourself.
Tragically, I was raised Roman Catholic. Salma Hayek in “Dogma” said it best:
I want to walk into a church and feel moved, but I understand why I don’t. When it comes to an obscure underground artist you probably don’t know called Taylor Swift1, however, I’ve wondered why her music doesn’t move me despite my existence squarely within her key demographic and despite her ascendance in my adolescence, when she was a white American teenage girl like me. Music is subjective, of course, so it could be that I just … don’t. But when an artist becomes as culturally significant as Taylor2 , who is winning every accolade there is and powering national economies with ticket sales, one wonders: Am I missing something?
I sound very Not Like the Other Girls, I know, but look: I wish she did it for me, if only to have one more reason to DIY a flashy outfit and dance with my friends (two of my favorite things)! And while Taylor is essentially peerless, there are artists on her block whose music I love unreservedly: Ariana Grande, Miley Cyrus3, Dua Lipa, that one Olivia Rodrigo song4. This 2009 track by the lead actress from teen sitcom “iCarly” remains one of my top bops, so I’m in no position to flex snobbish musical taste, OK?
While I certainly don’t hate or even dislike anything about Taylor Swift or her music5 — being loudly anti-Taylor is just as obnoxious as being a foaming at the mouth stan — I’ve been mulling over why I’m meh when so many people are crying, screaming, throwing up about every move she makes. A recent episode of NPR’s Code Switch brought me closer to what I think is the reason.
Taylor has become emblematic of girlhood. The Atlantic dubbed her the architect and figurehead of “the era of the girl” — which also includes things like “hot-girl walks” and “girl dinners,” for all the reasons Rebecca Jennings brilliantly explains — and Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote a sprawling 2023 piece for the New York Times Magazine that brings the reader to a striking coda:
“Taylor Swift, who sings the song of us all, who says all of this better than I ever could. I’ll tell you, I like being a woman OK, but long live being a girl.”
NPR senior editor Leah Donnella expertly teases all this apart on Code Switch:
“[Girlhood is] tied up in our ideas about white femininity specifically […] when people in the U.S. talk about girlhood, they're using it as a shorthand for this sliver of an experience that really only exists for a minority of girls, usually upper-middle-class, thin, pretty white girls.
[Taylor imagines herself in song] as this Juliet-type figure, you know, a Cinderella kind of princess — overlooked, but special, beautiful, someone who could possibly be the subject of romantic interest — that felt utterly unrelatable to me as a Black girl in this very white setting.”
The Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality studied how girls of different ages are perceived by adults, and “adults view Black girls as less innocent and more adult-like than their white peers.” Leah says:
“We've seen that there are also so many other categories for which this is true — class, ethnicity, size and weight. So it's definitely not all white girls or white women who get to be treated as part of this special, protected group, and certainly not all of them all the time.”
If Taylor Swift appeals to so many women partially because they are nostalgic about or celebratory of their girlhood and the parts of themselves they feel are “girlish,” I see why her music doesn’t resonate with me: My girlhood was painful because I was fat, and I don’t really miss it.
I was a big girl from when I hit puberty and was often harassed about it, enjoyed a year-ish of post-Atkins diet weight loss and a boyfriend, and then in my early teens, gained a bunch of weight from a binge eating disorder and no one expressed romantic interest6 in me again until after college, when I lost it. My grandmother tried to pray my weight away, classmates gave me the nickname “Required Ugly Fat Friend,” and it became clear that there was no Juliet, Cinderella, princess-y figure I could become as a fat girl/young woman in the early to mid-aughts.
I was emotionally disconnected from music about falling in love or being in love or having a lover or a love story. I didn’t aspire to such things because they felt outside the realm of possibility. Instead I felt mostly pissed off and sad about how terribly people treated me because of my body and decided that if I couldn’t be a pretty little girlfriend, maybe I could be “cool.” So I made my whole personality about liking early Nirvana7 and Tarantino movies8, because the people who I thought were cool liked those things. I was a valued customer at Hot Topic, if you catch my drift.
There was plenty to celebrate and be grateful for in my girlhood: I had a loving family, great friends, a good education, and the safety and privilege of my middle-class existence. But no one’s singing chart-topping songs called “Nice Delaware Suburb Story (Mikala’s Version).” Girls wanted and aspired to love, boyfriends, beauty, the respect and admiration of other girls — that is what defined and shaped their girlhoods, that is what defined and shaped Taylor’s, and that is what I didn’t have and so I tuned out this music that wasn’t for me or about me. Maybe subconsciously I felt it made a mockery of me.
I’ve been a late bloomer regarding the things I consider most important, and I tend to live in an imagined and perhaps delusional future rather than a romanticized past (neither is great). My girlhood just isn’t my most meaningful Era. What I suspect about Taylor — who is only 11 months younger than me — is that her girlhood isn’t hers, either. Now is. Now, at 34, when she’s a billionaire and the TIME Person of the Year and is more creatively energized than ever and has the highest-grossing tour in history and is dating a sexy jock with a simply unparalleled intellect.
When Taffy writes that being a woman is OK but being a girl is the best, I feel a little defensive of womanhood, especially when we’re talking about incredibly impressive womanhood. Like, Taffy, hello, you are at peak creative and professional success at 48!9 I know being young is awesome because everything is simple and new and full of glittery feelings, but being a grown-up can be kickass too, right? Right??? If the Swiftie ethos is “Our greatest joys lie in our youths,” where does that leave a girl like me?
While I don’t connect with Taylor Swift’s music because I first heard it when it had nothing to offer me and I haven’t shaken that feeling, I’ve had moments of appreciation for her: When she decried Republican ghoul Marsha Blackburn in 2018, against her team and father’s wishes; when she spoke honestly in her “Miss Americana” documentary about feeling triggered to starve herself after media scrutiny of her body; and when she put “FAT” on the scale in the “Anti-Hero” video.
The vociferous, sanctimonious, and misguided criticism of that artistic choice led her to edit the word out of the video. A woman who came of age with the media saying she looked pregnant if her stomach wasn’t flat, who then developed an eating disorder, depicted how that made her feel in an attempt to be genuine about an emotion besides “in love with or mad at a man” and people were so irate that the most popular songwriter in millions of women’s lifetimes walked it back and stifled herself.
That’s a real shame, because while Taylor Swift’s music can’t capture the nuances of adolescence on behalf of every girl in the world — nor should it have to — she illustrated what is a universal experience for many of them: feeling fat, even if you’re not. Feeling ashamed of your body, all the time.
I wonder how I would have felt about that video if I saw it when I was a girl. I think it would have made me a convert.
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Who some people worship as a religious figure at this point, it must be said.
This week,
rounded up some of the pieces published about Taylor since Sunday. The biggest names on this platform are writing Taylor pieces. Everyone’s writing Taylor pieces. Your mom probably has a Taylor piece. Send it my way.Pick one, they all sound the same. But I like it!
Sexual, maybe, but only secretly.
This was when I was trying so very hard to be Not Like the Other Girls, forgive me.
I met Taffy once, in the bathroom line at her book reading. She was so nice. Taffy, please, don’t be mad at me for any of this.
"My girlhood just isn’t my most meaningful Era. What I suspect about Taylor — who is only 11 months younger than me — is that her girlhood isn’t hers, either." I think this is spot-on. What I see (as someone who knows very little, couldn't name more than one song, but DOES watch football and therefore has had Taylor thrust into my consciousness) is that she's re-inventing the girlhood she wishes she had and using the longing for the one she didn't as fodder for the rewriting of that experience. Case in point: dating America's most popular football player. Every time I see her in the box I imagine her girlhood fantasy of being a cheerleader dating the BMOC. America's prom king and queen. Also, "squirle." Can't explain it, but that has my heart exploding with joy and affection. #crazy
I am not even a Swiftie but your thoughts got under my skin and I felt compelled to defend her!! Saying that Taylor Swift's music is a celebration of girlhood completely misses the mark.
I was very much NOT a fan, like you, until 2020 when a friend sent me "Invisible String" and I found it very sweet and inoffensive. I binged the rest of folklore and was delighted. I felt a similar fondness for evermore. I enjoyed midnights (but am offended/baffled that it won album of the year). I have not gone back and listened to any of her work prior to folklore. I don't feel like I'm missing out. I find "Love Story" jarring and pandering. You can say that song is a celebration of girlhood - that's fine. But the magic of Taylor is her ability to reflect on her life and make meaning out of her past.
I'll quote Taffy from her appearance on The Daily (have you listened to this episode? would love to hear your take): "She has these songs that sound like amazing pop songs. She is a songwriting savant. But at some point, if you surround yourself with the music enough, you start to understand what she is doing, which is she is telling the story of girlhood into womanhood. Hmm. And in her songs, I see it. I see her in real time cataloging the experiences of what it means to grow up...
yes, they seem like only love songs. What a great trick that you could write about business betrayal and friendship betrayal in a love song. But then when you land on what is unique about a woman, a girl, a female experience, it's that we tend to And I know I am speaking in a highly subjective way. We tend to take all of that to heart in the same way. You know, times that I've been betrayed in business hurt as much as the times I've been cheated on by boyfriends.
It all lives in the same place. And finally, I don't know why it took so long for somebody to understand that we needed songs about these things. These are the full range of a woman's experience of, of any person's experience. And she channeled it."
As Michael says, "So from early on, from the very beginning, what Taylor Swift is up to is processing the very personal pain of girlhood through her music. It's very biographical. And what you're saying is really distinct about it is that it makes no attempt to glamorize or pretend that these were wonderful times. It's a real admission of just kind of the awfulness of being alive...
What you have clearly just demonstrated is that the Taylor Swift project of internalizing pain and turning it into music has the effect that you're describing on tens of millions of people. It makes them see a anew, a lot of the pain in their lives to look at squarely in the face and to try to better understand it and to have a catharsis around it."
Taffy ends by saying, "Everyone is singing that same lyric and it was something different for everybody. But in that moment, I knew what Taylor Swift has known all along, which is that this emotion is universal. We, the more detail you give, the more I will find myself in it. The more you trust me as a listener and let me into your life, the more I will find myself the way you have rendered a life. And I will be so grateful for the rest of my life to have been able to sing that and to be able to have some sort of catharsis around it. Clearly it wasn't enough. 'cause here I am crying on The Daily, all great art is the art that sees you."
FWIW I was overweight and uncool growing up but I think that's a nonsequitur when discussing the appeal of TS. You don't have to date celebrities and be rail-thin to appreciate her storytelling.