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How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Taylor Swift

Image via Jezebel.
Image via Jezebel.

In the not-so-distant past, I mocked Taylor Swift way more than any adult should ever mock a teenage girl they have never met. In my defense, she was an aw-shucks princess who equated a woman with her hymen and slut shamed a brunette version of herself. So she kind of had it coming. But that was circa-2009 Taylor Swift—the Taylor Swift whose ideas about high school all seemed to come from watching reruns of Beverly Hills 90210 on the Soap network. Then John Mayer started holding her hand on the cover of US Weekly and, suddenly, there were no more songs about floppy-haired boys asking for permission to marry her. Now there were songs about assholes, or, more specifically, assholes in fedoras. So Taylor Swift ditched the peasant blouse for short shorts and stopped being America’s perfect country princess. In the process, she became something much more useful. She became our nation’s batshit crazy spirit guide.

People assume that everyone listens to Taylor Swift because her songs are so ridiculously catchy—and yes they are. Anyone who can listen to Red without repeating a song is probably a sociopath who shouldn’t breed. But the real reason she’s so popular is that she taps into the part of your brain that is perpetually stuck at some junior high dance in 1995. It’s the part of your brain that makes you read old text messages months after the relationship ended because you enjoy torturing yourself with this digital cutting ritual. It’s the part of your brain that makes you sleep with the guy who told you, while you were breaking up, that you shouldn’t be angry with him because he always bought you such good take-out. Listening to Taylor Swift’s over-the-top romanticism doesn’t make you feel insane; it makes you feel as though you are part of a really large club that just happens to be kind of crazy. You can even use her catalog as a barometer of how bad the breakup is going. If you stick to Red, you’ll probably be fine, but if you find yourself listening to Fearless, it may be time to admit that you’re not very good at having a vagina.

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New Yorker to Women: Drop Dead

Image Credit: Bloomsbury USA
Image Credit: Bloomsbury USA

Do you know what I often expect to find after reading a graphic depiction of domestic violence? Uxoricidal comedy. Because living women can be such a burden, but dead wives, on the other hand… They’re simply a hoot.

Last week’s New Yorker featured a story about the innovative techniques currently used to fight domestic violence—with detailed descriptions of a woman who was stalked, raped, brutally beaten, and ultimately shot to death in front of her child. And then the very same issue also included this charming anecdote in James Wood’s featured critical essay “Sins of the Father”:

Almost twenty years ago, George Steiner suggested in these pages that doing philosophy was incompatible with domestic life. Speaking of the troubled French thinker Louis Althusser, Steiner proposed that sometimes it might be necessary for a philosopher to strangle his wife.

Are you laughing yet? Because Althusser did, in fact, strangle his wife. Wood has quite a gift with that sardonic humor, doesn’t he?

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Your Elbows Are Slutty

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Image via Salon

Single? You may have never guessed that the answer to finding a husband is simple: just cover those skanky knees of yours because if there’s one thing men hate, it’s exposed joints. Or so says Lauren Shields, erstwhile blogger and soon-to-be-author of The Modesty Experiment—the latest in the subgenre of experimental memoir (i.e., the bastard child of Ryan Seacrest and Elizabeth Wurtzel). The Modesty Experiment is a rather bland title, so I’m hoping it includes a peppier subtitle like, “Sluts die alone!” or “Love your body by pretending it doesn’t exist!” Both would be fitting because Shields appears to believe that women’s body issues can all be solved if women just pretend they don’t have bodies. Who knew it was that simple! I guess we can all get rid of our therapists now and spend all that saved money on cardigans! In order to achieve this liberation, women simply need to follow an extremely labor intensive and time consuming dress code.

Oh wait, we’re already doing that…

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Weekly Girl Crushes: Uterine Edition

 

Image Credit: W.W. Norton
Image Credit: W.W. Norton

Girl Walks into a Bar … Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle by Rachel Dratch

Landing a featured role on Saturday Night Live is apparently WAY simpler than finding a suitable mate in NYC. To which I say, indeed. Rachel Dratch is mostly known for her Debbie Downer character and her infamous exit from the original cast of 30 Rock, so you might buy this book thinking it’s another Bossypants or Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?. But no. It’s a pregnancy memoir wrapped in a dating memoir surrounded by snark—so much delightful snark. When she enters the house of horrors world of over-thirties dating in NYC, she notes that friends are always telling her to watch out for red flags, which in normal cities usually refer to the simple no-nos of dating—like a man who wears a wedding ring, has a bed temper, or under tips. But in our fair city, she dates a man who may totally be a cannibal. And cannibalism is, admittedly, kind of a nonnegotiable. And then, in the ultimate dating urban legend, she meets a normal human male at a bar—only to discover that he, of course, lives in northern California. After disregarding the first rule of dating (i.e., that long-distance relationships will destroy your soul and make you THAT girl who is always crying on the B train at 8 AM), Dratch coughs up the airfare … and ends up pregnant. After a few months of dating someone who doesn’t live in the same time zone, she’s knocked up in her mid-forties. There are like four female urban legends in there. During the course of her pregnancy, she laments the fact that baby books are all written for women in “normal” cohabitating relationships. One book suggests that husbands should take their pregnant wives to see “the new Anne Hathaway flick.” There are so many problems with that sentence—the least of which being the fact that the latest Anne Hathaway flick was Les Miserables. Once Dratch gives birth to her son, she becomes the least annoying attachment parent ever, by which I mean the only attachment parent I have ever heard of who didn’t make me rethink sexual reproduction altogether. While this story may sound like an Anne Hathaway flick circa 2005, the book doesn’t have a tidy ending. But it does have a hopeful ending. And it offers women throughout the five boroughs an excellent piece of dating advice: if you want a committed relationship in NYC, find someone who doesn’t live here. Continue reading “Weekly Girl Crushes: Uterine Edition”

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One and Done

 

Image credit: Lauren Sandler
Image Credit: Lauren Sandler

Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott: what do all of these female writers have in common besides a predilection for neurosis and high collars? They didn’t have children. While many of these women married late, didn’t marry at all, or were, in Woolf’s case, not overly fond of sperm, the primary reason they resisted the maternal path was because being a female writer in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries was really hard. Being a mother and writer was well near impossible.

In the intervening years, things have changed—slightly. Although many female business leaders, financial analysts, and Supreme Court justices remain childless, it’s not uncommon to run into a female writer juggling a MacBook and a BabyBjörn. But as Lauren Sandler, author of One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child, points out, you’ll usually find that the BabyBjörn is built for one—and only one. In a recent piece in The Atlantic, Sandler notes that Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, Margaret Atwood and Ellen Willis are all renowned contemporary authors and are all the mothers of one. Continue reading “One and Done”