Who Cares What these Men Did?

This is mostly about Taylor Swift.

When I was eighteen I cried at a party because I thought I’d be single forever, an idea which now fills me with a thrilling sense of possibility but which at the time made me cartoonishly sad. I was nineteen when Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die came out, and at first I fell into the trap of dismissing her because of her persona, but eventually I heard Miley Cyrus’s cover of “Summertime Sadness” and thought, okay, this is pretty good. For a couple of years it felt pretty amazing to listen to Lana because she sang about men doing fucked up things to her, but because those things came in hand with other things, things that felt good, she let it happen or even sort of liked it. She sang about how she found some power in letting men fuck her, about how men hurt her in a way that she confused for love — he hit me and it felt like a kiss. 

Lana’s lyrics are all imagery, no intimacy. Even the sacrificial, confessional “it’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you” bears an excess of melodrama that takes it out of the realm of honesty and places it squarely in the heart of performance. Lana is impenetrable. She inhabits the persona; she takes refuge in it. Lana Del Rey is not who Lizzie Grant is; it is what she does. 

I have been thinking about Lana because I think about Lana basically every time I think about Taylor Swift, and I’ve been thinking about Taylor Swift, because, well, you know why. She’s re-recording the majority of her albums. She made a short film out of a ten-minute song. She’s supposedly “wrecking” Jake Gyllenhaal and “ending his career.”

On Twitter I’ve seen a lot of women relating to Taylor’s particular heartbreak, reflecting on ways in which men take advantage of women who are younger than them, build up false hope, crush their hearts. This is true. This happens. I have experienced, at the hands of men I’ve been romantically involved with, treatment in a range that spans from the cursorily idiotic to the unspeakably cruel. 

This is what Taylor Swift counts on: that we have all gone through this, that we can fill the blanks of her lyrics with our own experience. She gives us precious little to actually relate to; specificity eschewed in favor of platitudes like “love’s a ruthless game” (ok! thanks!) and “that’s what happened: you” (that is a lot of credit to give to a supposed piece of shit). 

We are expected to believe that the petty list of misbehaviors — he kept her scarf, he told her she was too young — and generic weeping — “maybe this thing was a masterpiece 'til you tore it all up” — amount to some sort of catharsis, that she’s exacting some sort of revenge, that he’s not “getting away with it,” that we are validated in our own inability to let go of resentments because look, she’s doing it too, and she is THRIVING.

I’m not buying it.

In the context of romantic relationships, I am simply not interested in what men do or don’t do, or in whether they get away with it, and I am really not interested in revenge. If someone is really living their life in a way that harms others they’ll get theirs from the universe in ways more painful and thoroughly devastating than we can even imagine, much less carry out ourselves. 

I’m thinking about Lana Del Rey again now because when Norman Fucking Rockwell came out I told my friend Kyle that I was tired of Lana’s schtick — I get it, you’re really into men and they keep fucking you over — which is also how I would describe Taylor’s schtick. I understand 99% of art is born out of heartbreak, but I think there’s a difference between singing about what someone else did and singing about what you did, the difference being that the latter is much more difficult to do and also potentially much more revelatory.

When you boil it down there are basically three ways someone can break your heart: they can leave you for someone else, they can pretend you don’t exist, or they can do both in combination. There are, however, likely hundreds of ways someone can explore their own heartbreak. Hundreds of new ways to feel, new conclusions to come to, new things to discover. Who cares what these men did? Tell me about you, Taylor.