Taylor Swift’s Sexual Revolution

In the fall of 1970, a year after Yale welcomed its first female freshmen and six months after it descended into the vortex of a Black Panther trial and a university-wide strike, Gloria Steinem came to the college to speak. She wasn’t yet a household name—the launch of Ms. magazine was more than a year away—and the gathering was small, in a classroom with a blackboard and nailed-down desks. She wore a dress and spoke nervously behind her curtain of hair and trademark tinted glasses, her people-pleasing impulses not extinguished by the movement she was helping to inaugurate. Midway through her remarks, referring to the common male objection that women’s liberation would mean the end of sex, she said awkwardly, laughing and punching the air with her small fist, “No, there would be more sex and better sex!”

Most of us laughed with her—What did we know?—but a handful of severely attired young women, ranged restlessly against a back wall, hissed. Startled, Steinem looked up, and when her talk was concluded and a few autograph-seekers dispatched, these detractors were the audience members she was most eager to engage. I can still see them surrounding her—the Red Guard of the revolution encircling its insecure spokesperson—and I can hear her asking them, please, to explain their thinking to her, because “I want to learn.”

At the time this scene unfolded, when everything seemed still up for grabs, it might have been easy to imagine that Steinem’s confident critics would carry everything before them. Chroniclers of feminism have made much of the Susan Brownmillers and Andrea Dworkins who came next—some of whom viewed even happy marriages through rape-tinted glasses—and have argued that it was only in the 1990s that feminism turned decidedly sex-positive. Yet on the ground, as opposed to in the feminist academy, so-called women’s liberation—feminism’s unruly offspring—was always, in every ordinary sense, sex-positive. Women’s liberation and the sexual revolution came to prominence together and were intimately connected from the outset, fueled by access to the birth-control pill, the imminent passage of Roe v. Wade, the dismantling of parietal rules, and much else. If your average sexually active 1970s coed was uneasy about anything, it was not the special cases of pornography and prostitution, or the possible pitfalls of marriage, but only what her parents would say if they knew what she was doing, at a time when most young-adult consciences had been formed by rapidly disappearing traditions. There was a lot of secrecy and deceit, in other words, mixed up with the revolutionary rhetoric, but only until the parents, not wanting to be left out, embarked on their own experimenting, transgressing, and divorcing.

Once the genie of fornication was out of the bottle, it was all but impossible to cram it back in. Despite the AIDS epidemic, spasms of evangelical resistance (“True Love Waits”), and residual feminist refusals, acceptance of fornication spread relentlessly across the culture. In little more than a generation, the “more sex and better sex” mantra had prevailed, so decisively that any alternative—especially any idealization of chastity—essentially evaporated. The revolution was over, and it wasn’t the withholding feminists who had triumphed but the rueful wisdom of an earlier generation: “This feminist thing has no future,” an elderly relative joked. “There’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.”

What had shifted, however, as the sexual revolution took women’s real freedom hostage, was a societal consensus as to what constituted acceptable fraternization. Premarital sex, serial fornication, and even casual hookups were rapidly taken for granted, as all the male entitlements that Betty Friedan and her peers had flagged around their suburban kitchen tables, all the inherited assumptions that women would cook, clean, and otherwise service men, were simply extended, carte blanche, to romantic relationships, an arrangement held in place not only by male desire and the overturning of traditional mores (and yes, by female desire as well, another genie difficult to recapture), but also, in my view, by young women’s yearning for acceptance and intimacy, the same people-pleasing impulse on display when Gloria Steinem visited Yale.

Whether this strong marker of femininity is innate or culturally conditioned—Nancy Chodorow argued in The Reproduction of Mothering that because children’s primary caretakers are traditionally female, a girl’s sense of self is formed by a process of identification, whereas growing boys define themselves by difference—there is no denying the high value young women place on consensus. This disposition can be a virtue, but it also renders young women vulnerable to group-think. The conflation of women’s liberation with sexual promiscuity, arguably the most consequential ideological shift of the last century in the West, has been insulated against objections by a female temptation to conform, by a woman’s readiness to surrender herself, which, absent an awareness of the God to whom her allegiance is supremely owed, can end in her exaggerated capitulation to men. It follows that those with, arguably, the most reason to complain about the consequences of the sexual revolution are also those least likely to speak up. If the new regime isn’t working for young women, their default position is to blame themselves. If the prevailing ideology can’t be criticized, then it is best to keep one’s suffering to oneself.

When Taylor Swift was a girl, the apocryphal story goes, she asked her girlfriends to go to the mall with her. They begged off, so she went with her mother instead, only to encounter her friends enjoying themselves without her. She wrote a song about the painful snub and felt better, a lesson that has served her well.

Swift was born in 1989, which means that by the time she was old enough to date, the “more sex and better sex” lie was so embedded in the culture, certain expectations had become the law of the land. But in Swift’s case, when she suffered the predictable consequences, she didn’t blame herself or suffer in silence. She didn’t pretend to be okay but went public with her humiliations, mapping the dark side of the female experience, calling out all of the contemptible male behaviors encouraged by a culture of promiscuity. The refrains of her early songs are sometimes plaintive, even whiney (“Don’t you think I was too young to be messed with / The girl in the dress cried the whole way home”); sometimes they are gleefully vindictive (“And it’s too late for you and your white horse / To catch me now”). Later songs are more sarcastic, manifestly weary of having to call out, yet again, predictable male strategies for moving on (“I know that it’s over / I don’t need your ‘closure’ . . . I know I’m just a wrinkle in your new life / Staying ‘friends’ would iron it out so nice”). In her saddest, most affecting work, Swift’s alter egos are simply heartbroken.

But if male relational delinquency is the explicit target of Swift’s animus, there is another, more slippery adversary with which she shadowboxes in her oeuvre, an opponent so internalized by her generation that she struggles to identify it by name. Submerged in the lyrics of her songs is a dialectic between an ideology that passes itself off as unassailable and the evidence of actual experience. It is the difference between what “they say” and what women actually feel, between what “should be” (“What should be over . . .”) and what is (“. . . burrowed under my skin / In heart-stopping waves of hurt”). Sometimes the tension surfaces as a simple cliché exploded by reality: “They say all’s well that ends well / But I’m in a new hell every time / You double-cross my mind.” Sometimes the breezy prescriptions of the culture are more situationally specific. The bridge in “Right Where You Left Me,” for example, channels the glib, breathless mockery heaped on a young woman who hasn’t been able to move on from the moment when she was dumped:

Did you ever hear about the girl who got frozen?
. . .
She’s still 23 inside her fantasy
How it was supposed to be
Did you hear about the girl who lives in delusion?
Breakups happen every day you don’t have to lose it.

In lyrics like these, Swift mocks the crowd-driven ridicule dished up by the culture, but when the culture’s demands are more high-sounding and sanctimonious—when they are dressed up in psychological or pseudo-religious jargon—they prove harder to shrug off. In “Happiness,” for example, the singer struggles with the expectation that she “reinvent” herself in the aftermath of a breakup, that she give her ex-boyfriend “the green light of forgiveness.” Back and forth she toggles, straining after a silver lining and the possibility of future happiness, only to fall back into “curses and cries,” resentment and grief. The conclusion: “I haven’t met the new me yet.”

Clearly, the sine quanon of the creed imposed on Swift’s generation is a law of radical impermanence, a requirement that everyone continually and uncomplainingly move on from heartbreak, as the reverberating bass line in “Happiness” insists (“Leave it all behind”). But for the woman who, in Swift’s world, has given disproportionately of herself (“I gave it my all / He gave me nothing at all”), is moving on even possible? In song after song, there is an irresistible undertow of remembering, looking back, and second-guessing the way things turned out (“If one thing had been different / Would everything be different today?”). The truth of John Paul II’s assertion that conjugal acts have conjugal meanings is borne out in Swift’s music, in her world of relational loose ends and memories that don’t die. “What died didn’t stay dead / You’re alive, you’re alive in my head,” the refrain of a song about an actual death, is the implicit refrain of all of Swift’s songs about relationships, songs replete with references to hauntings and wakes, cemeteries and unquiet graves.

Sometimes, as women are expected to do, Swift apologizes for endlessly relitigating the past (“In my defense I have none / For digging up the grave another time”). But her sympathy is always finally with the remembering one: with the girl in “Right Where You Left Me,” for example, who is given the last word in that song, in a slowed-down return to the first person that suggests a strong identification between the bereft sufferer and Swift herself:

Help
I’m still at the restaurant
Still sitting in a corner I haunt
Cross-legged in the dim light
They say, “what a sad sight”
. . .
I’m sure that you got a wife out there
Kids and Christmas but I’m unaware
Cause I’m right where . . .
You left me
You left me no . . .
You left me no choice but to stay here forever

This is the one for whom the new creed doesn’t work and “time won’t fly,” the one who, like Mary in the New Testament, “keeps all these things in her heart.” It is no accident that Swift’s best loved and arguably greatest song is called “All Too Well,” as in, “I remember it all too well.” While the song was already a masterpiece when she wrote it in 2012—a breakup anthem for the ages—ten years later she more than doubled its length, layering in additional memories and details apparently as fresh in her mind as when she experienced them a decade before. The effect of this dramatic expansion on the susceptible female listener—this surfeit of incriminating evidence folded into the song’s quiet, relentless beat—would be difficult to overstate, as Swift drives home for her audience her own watershed loss of innocence, a loss the current culture insists is cause for celebration, but one that Swift herself explicitly mourns.

Even as she moves on to other relationships and breakups, this life-changing experience haunts her music (“I wish I could un-recall / How we almost had it all”). In the last song on her most recent album, seemingly trying to exorcise the relationship’s hold over her once and for all, she ties the suffering it caused her to the development of her art (“And at last / She knew what the agony had been for”) and her relationship with her fans, concluding, “Now and then I re-read the manuscript / But the story isn’t mine anymore.”

If not for her musical gifts, Swift might have been as hamstrung as her peers when it came to confronting the bad actors in her life. (Her music, she said once, is “conveying a message to someone that’s more real than what you had the courage to say in person.”) But her genius for songwriting, combined with a preternatural self-confidence and a willingness to retail her own wounds at a time when most young women were anxiously airbrushing their images on Facebook, not only catapulted her to fame but also made her the face of a #MeToo movement far more relevant to the experience of the average young woman than the self-styled, widely publicized movement that came later. Whereas that later movement focused on extreme cases of acquaintance-rape, Swift’s focus from the beginning was on the conundrum of “soft abuse,” the run-of-the-mill bad behaviors and casual cruelty routinized by the sexual revolution. And as she opened that Pandora’s Box—“despising the shame” and ultimately spinning it into gold—the female yearning for consensus that continues to enable and perpetuate a status quo found a new outlet and reassembled around another consensus, one whose magnetic center is the outspoken, vulnerable figure of Swift herself.

This, in a nutshell, is the dynamic driving Swift’s Eras Tour: consensus-seeking young womanhood coalescing around another young woman’s truth-telling. The concerts are vast exercises in collective remembering and purging, tumultuous occasions of female catharsis, as all those pent-up, proscribed emotions—petulance and rage, disabling anguish and persistent desire—sweep the amphitheaters where Swift performs, in a spectacle of passionate solidarity ratified by the ubiquitous talisman of the friendship bracelet.

Contributing to the delirium is the fact that, given her beauty, talent, and fame, Swift can convincingly deliver lines like, “. . . you lost the one real thing / You’ve ever known,” and “I bet you think about me!” Whereas the official #MeToo movement had to hector everyone to “believe women,” Swift’s belief in herself is the compelling currency of her brand—a transferable currency, which triggers in her female audiences vicarious feelings of vindication, as they revisit their own losses and rethink their uncharitable verdicts on their own worth.

“I am your retribution,” Trump is fond of saying at his rallies. Swift doesn’t need to say it. Her songs, and her fans’ embrace of them, speak for themselves.

And yet, despite all of the disheartening testimony gathered up in her music, in the same way that the original Pandora’s Box yielded a spirit of hope at the last, Swift and her fans have not given up on the dream: the dream of finding a good man, marrying him, and having children. Even as a sobering subset of the young female population is throwing in the towel, concluding that, since things aren’t working out, they must be lesbians, or men, in her music as in her life Swift is still hoping against hope, still singing about “rings and cradles,” strollers and “gettin’ married,” unfashionable aspirations for which she was actually criticized in the New York Times. There is something impressive about her tenacity, which hasn’t flagged even as her relational failures have piled up, but it is also uncomfortable to watch, if the definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result. Listened to in this light, the saddest song in her songbook might be the ostensibly upbeat “Begin Again,” about the first act of the infatuation that followed the collapse of her great love (“On Wednesday, in a cafe / I watched it begin again”).

Moreover, though Swift is certainly to be commended for drawing attention to the disproportionate price young women have been paying for everyone’s sexual freedom, it is equally certain that blaming men has taken her only so far. Calling out individual bad behaviors while ignoring the unhealthy ecosystem in which they grow is a case of missing the forest for the trees. Blaming men, in effect, “saves the appearance” of the fornication paradigm, frustrates the possibility of identifying the paradigm’s original design failure, and leaves women, more often than not, in the same vexed situation as before—trying to solve an equation and arrive at a right answer while ignoring, or failing to identify, the grave error in the first step of the proof.

Sometimes, in her music, Swift has seemed to recognize that something deeper must be wrong, something fundamental that deforms men even as it devastates women. In the quiet, affecting coda to the long version of “All Too Well,” she asks the man of her broken dream, “Just between us did the love affair maim you too?” And in “Happiness,” gesturing toward the catechetical vacuum at the heart of the free-love paradigm, she says wistfully, “No one teaches you what to do / when a good man hurts you / And you know you hurt him too.”

In other songs, on other albums, decidedly old-fashioned anxieties have cropped up: trepidation about getting old, for example, and being cast aside for a younger version of herself (“Will you still want me / When I’m nothing new?”), or bitterness over having wasted years in a relationship that went nowhere (“I’m pissed off you let me / Give you all of that youth for free”).

She has wondered, too, in a song like “False God,” whether even apparently successful relationships lived out according to today’s rules may be flirting with real dangers, such as idolatry (“Even if it’s a false god, we’d still worship this love”). Swift knows her Bible. She is conversant with the language and tropes of the Christian story, which she mines in her music (“What if I roll the stone away / they’re gonna crucify me anyway”), but for her the tradition is an aesthetic rather than a theological resource, an archive of useful images rather than literal good news with something trenchant to say about the very problems she bemoans.

When I was young, and suffering the same kind of heartbreak Swift unpacks in her songs, the tradition my generation was rebelling against was still visible in the rearview mirror. To repurpose Swift’s line, it was still alive, still alive in my head, surviving not only in remembered articles of the Christian creed, or in the poetry of George Herbert, which I happened to be reading in the college infirmary at the time I was taking stock of my situation, but also, and perhaps more importantly, in taken-for-granted corollaries of that creed, all-but-unconscious assumptions that made it possible for me to reason my way to the creed’s truth. Above all, it was assumptions about coherence and beatitude—confidence that the universe made sense and human beings were created for happiness—that enabled me to conclude that if I was suffering so much, I was probably doing something very wrong. This was self-blame, certainly, but with the difference that an alternative path—even if one that was already countercultural—still presented itself to me as a viable choice.

But what happens to a generation when real religion is off the table, and the only alternative to the life young people are living looks to them like a life-sentence of “long-suffering propriety,” a “gray” life urged on them by “judgmental creeps” in “empath’s clothing”? What happens when the rebellion of the 1960s has become a tradition all its own, a handed-down, parentally and societally sanctioned status quo? Even more to the point where women are concerned, what happens when certain core Christian teachings about self-sacrifice and expiatory suffering—teachings separated for a long time now from the tradition that made sense of them—persist in the romantic imagination in distorted, dangerous shapes, rogue applications especially seductive to the female sex? “I would’ve died for your sins,” Swift sings on her most recent album, “Instead I just died inside”—an example of the empathy trap, about which I have written elsewhere. Too many young women are being raised in a cult that we might call Christianity without Christ, a perilous contradiction in terms. For Swift and her friends, the cross is still there, but Christ is not on it, which means that the suffering and the self-offering are theirs alone.

Nearly a century ago, in a small classic called The Eternal Woman, Gertrud von le Fort pointed out that the so-called emancipated woman was not actually more masculine in her behavior, as many assumed and feared, but more extravagantly feminine, repeatedly abandoning herself to men to the point of throwing herself away. (“When the woman who no longer gives herself according to [the] divine order ends, the woman who either refuses herself or becomes the slave of man begins.”)

Every culture worthy of the name, recognizing in its women’s gift for self-donation the essential guarantor of its future, has striven, with greatly varying degrees of sensitivity and success, to guard and guide the consequential gift into fruitful channels. Our current culture, by contrast, not only tolerates but actively encourages the gift’s squandering. Rightly horrified by the practice of genital cutting, which mutilates women physically as a way of discouraging their straying, we in the West have our own coming-of-age rituals to answer for. Rather than desensitizing women sexually, our smiled-upon rites of passage oversensitize them emotionally, ushering them into Swift’s world of “calamitous love and insurmountable grief,” an underworld of disabling emotionalism that Jung called the shadow of the feminine and Swift sums up as “all this cryin’ in my room.”

Von le Fort’s larger point is that the fate of a civilization always rests in the hands of its women, because its fate is always bound up with questions of religion—whether it will live by true or false creeds—and it is to women more than men that the sphere of religion has been entrusted. Her book is preoccupied, in other words, with an even more fundamental marker of femininity, one that struggles to express itself even in the very different register of Swift’s music. In a world without God, women haven’t ceased to be zealous for right and wrong. They are still trying to adjudicate morality, but in frustrated, often self-contradictory ways. No longer the angel in the house, or the keeper of religion’s flame, they have been reduced, by the low horizon of the world in which they find themselves, to an ineffectual morality police, demanding behaviors from men that the larger culture, and their own complicit behaviors, disincentivize.

In my own youth, when I surveyed a social landscape that excluded me as long as I didn’t play by its rules, it was clear to me without having heard of von le Fort that change would come only through women, and not the choices of individual women but a female-wide reset, some kind of collective, culture-bending shift in women’s attitudes to men and sex. At the time, in the 1970s, any such shift seemed the stuff of fantasy, or comedy, like the sexual boycott played for laughs in Aristophanes’s play Lysistrata. Whatever solidarity traditional feminism had fostered, women’s liberation had broken apart, pitting women against one another as they competed for sexual attention from men.

Today, however, as the younger generation lives out the consequences of the apostasy of its elders, and relations between the sexes are at an all-time low, who can say what might happen? Contemporary doomsday philosophers are partial to the phrase “nonlinear outcomes,” meaning a process in which many small, seemingly insignificant changes at a certain threshold erupt in apocalyptic outcomes, a description that can surely be applied to positive as well as negative developments. The Eras Tour may not be a decisive development, but it isn’t a negligible one either. Whatever happens to Swift going forward—whether she marries Travis Kelce or finds herself on the heartbreak treadmill again—she has moved the needle for young women, calling out complacencies in ways that might clear the ground for eventual conversions.

Meanwhile, to borrow a line from another song, “I can feel time moving,” and when I read Gertrud von le Fort while contemplating Swift and her sisterhood rocking stadiums around the world, I can’t help but wonder just how momentous the effects could be, if all that impassioned female solidarity—all that zeal for truth-telling and stubborn refusal to give up on love—were mobilized in the service of an unambiguously righteous cause.

Patricia Snow writes from New Haven, Connecticut.

Image by George Walker IV / Associated Press, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.