Antithetical Dream Girl - The Taylor Swift Report
Taylor Swift was the biggest artist of 2024. What does her ongoing reign tell us about the enticements and pitfalls of adult girlhood?
In the summer of 2019, the year that Taylor Swift released her album Lover, Josephine Pryde came down with a stomach bug. In between throwing up compulsively, unable to keep anything else in, she resorted to chewing gum. At the time, Lover was everywhere, and the artist found herself chewing in the rhythm of the album’s bubbly tunes, the songs resonating within her otherwise empty body. Pryde later repeated the process, chewing one piece per track, sticking the resulting pieces onto driftwood and then casting them in bronze. Wholly removed from Swift’s twee aesthetics, the eighteen resulting sculptures attest to a trenchant omnipresence that just might be the most interesting aspect about Swift’s stardom: her songs so ubiquitous as to be visceral, her persona so unobtrusively all-pervasive as to be viral. In 2024, a year of boundary-pushing mainstream pop, Swift was definitely not the most talked-about artist. She was, however, the most-streamed artist in the world, and her two-year-long Eras Tour, a 149-show spectacle that that came to a close in December of last year, ranks as the highest-grossing concert tour of all time.
Swift has released four albums since 2019, but Lover, with its pastel clouds and hot pink glitter hearts, has come to define the style of the Eras Tour. Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince, the tour’s opening track, is one of many songs in which Swift evokes a forbidden high school romance (“they whisper in the hallway, she’s a bad, bad girl”). Ahead of her concerts, literal girls and adult girlies passed by swapping hand-crafted bracelets in an act that evoked the exchange of friendship jewelry at a sleepover rather than the trading of Kandi at an EDM rave. When asked to describe the appeal of experiencing the Eras Tour, and of being a Swift fan in general, a word that fans propose most frequently is one that has obtained a dominant position in popular culture in recent years: Girlhood.
The term girl has been used to describe adult women for many decades now, its popularity far exceeding that of boy for adult men. In the past few years, however, girl’s ubiquity in online lingo has exploded, and, as (pre)teen fashion became a thing of the past, girl culture found a second life in popular aesthetics coated in femme teenage nostalgia. Girl rituals of accumulation and exchange have been adapted by adult women in search of escapism, healing and companionship. The women going out to buy themselves emotional support Barbies proclaim that they are healing their inner child, the collectors swapping Sonny Angels say they form strong bonds over their shared love of the tiny cherub dolls. In times of crisis and alienation, Girl is light and soothingly inconsequential – as weightless as the faux pearls on an Eras Tour bracelet and as Barbie’s impossibly tiny plastic shoes bound to eventually get lost in the ether.
As traditional markers of adulthood – buying a home, starting a family – have become less coveted and attainable, lingering with the simple joys of one’s adolescence is more attractive than ever. Girl is pre-reproductive and proto-domestic, she does what she does not for male validation, but for the camaraderie of other girls that get it.1 The bonds forged between girls and the little gestures that sustain them may seem somewhat bewildering to outside onlookers. As science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin remarks in her essay Space Crone, girls, much like the titular crones, can instill a particular sense of disquiet within men because they do not fit into their logic of conquest. In Sofia Coppola’s Sad Girl classic “The Virgin Suicides”, the narrator thus describes the Lisbon sisters as “countries we couldn't name.” The inner workings of girlhood are raw and arcane, but growing up a girl under patriarchy means that a good part of the mainstream culture targeted at one’s demographic aims to subjugate this idle mystique.
In her 2002 book Girls. Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory, gender theorist Catherine Driscoll describes how much of “circulation of cultural forms for and about girls” is marked by the constitution of girls “as daughters, (…) future heterosexual partners and mothers,” and operates within a circular logic of “properly conditioning women to repeat this constitution.” This conditioning might be the reason why, in anticipation of the self-adornment and household shopping and home-making that will one day be expected of them, popular culture targeted at girls is closely linked to commerce and the impetus to please. In the French anarchist collective Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, Girl serves as a metaphor for the ultimate victim of late stage capitalism. Tiqqun’s Young-Girl is a “model citizen as redefined by consumer society,” a stranger to her own desires who “no longer has any intimacy with herself except as value, and whose every activity, in every detail, is directed to self-valorization.” Tiqqun argue that the Young-Girl is not a gendered concept, but the metaphor relies heavily on the reductive understanding of girlhood so often reflected in popular culture.
As Dena Yago writes about the portrayal of then-teenage girl Billie Eilish in the 2021 documentary The World’s A Little Blurry, “she seems to exist solely in relation to her associations and references.” Yago sees Eilish and the fandom around her as emblematic for what she dubs the “vibe economy,” a type of consumer lifestyle that centers around “collective identification, (…) mood-making or participatory moments,” rather than individual curation. Swift, too, is a master of crafting opportunities for participation through self-reference, planting encoded messages about forthcoming releases and romances past through nail polish colours and cryptic graffiti in the backgrounds of music videos. Considering the alienation brought about by contemporary forms of curating and branding the self, it is remarkable, yet unsurprising, that thousands excitedly band together to hunt for the easter eggs nestled within Swifts visual output, and find joy in purchasing the same sparkly pink cowboy hat in front of the Eras Tour gates as everyone else.
When Time Magazine named Taylor Swift Person of the Year in 2023, the publication called Taylor Swift „the last monoculture left in our stratified world.“ In its reasoning for choosing Swift, Time explained that its Person Of The Year tradition is rooted in the Great Man theory of history, which in turn is based on the belief that history is shaped by powerful men and their grand, world-shaking actions. It is precisely this approach to (hi)story that Ursula K. Le Guin questions in her seminal Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, advocating for a storytelling that emphasizes containment and community rather than conflicts fought by lone heroes. And it is the kind of storytelling that Time, too, proclaimed to challenge by electing Swift, “for building a world of her own that made a place for so many, for spinning her story into a global legend, for bringing joy to a society desperately in need of it.”
The legend that Swift tells is decisively Girl. Unable to obtain the master recording rights for her first six albums, the singer has been releasing them anew, creating further allure by adding bonus tracks “from the vault” that were purportedly written at the time of the album’s original recording, but didn’t make the cut. In her extended (10-minute!) version of All Too Well, Swift twists a song that she previously released as a cozily reminiscent breakup ballad into a scorching takedown of an age-gap relationship. “You said if we had been closer in age maybe it would have been fine, and that made me want to die”, she belts, and later goes in for the kill with the revelation that “I get older, but your lovers stay my age.” Age also plays a central role in the vault release Nothing New: “How long will it be cute, all this crying in my room, when you can’t blame it on my youth and roll your eyes with affection,“ Swift sings in this song drenched in awareness of the value that patriarchy places on girls’ youth, a slowly waning attribute over which they possess no agency.
In performing these songs alongside other hits from her early career at the Eras Tour, Swift, now in her mid-30s, became a medium for the voice of her younger self. In a recently-published 76-page Taylor Swift fan fiction, former prepubescent fashion blogger sensation Tavi Gevinson, herself an adult girl, still adorning the pages with Rookie Mag-style doodles, describes Swift as an embodiment of “the adolescent as defined by psychologist G. Stanley Hall (…) – always looking either back or forward.” For Swift, as for many others, taking on the role of Adult Girl is a means to reflect on the troubling expectations one is faced with when playing it, and to take back control over the script. But mimicry always bears the risk of toppling into cliché, especially when the role one takes on is as misunderstood as Girl. And so, just like popular Girl discourse all too often topples into regressive millennial nostalgia and the self-infantilization of girl math and girl hobbies and women be shopping, Swift’s persona tends to plummet into Young-Girl territory.
If there is one thing keeping Swift from transgressive pop star greatness, it is her obsession with maintaining a tightly controlled image and reaching perfection by majority standards. Like many teenage girl celebrities, she was wronged by the public in her early stardom, shamed for her dating history and branded a snake in the feud that ensued after Kanye West’s interruption of her speech at the Video Music Awards. Perhaps this is why, despite her immense power and influence, she still often appears caught in a loop of self-justification, seeking approval from an audience that both adores and scrutinizes her every move. Referring to the many times Swift addresses relationship power imbalances in her songwriting in an essay for Spike magazine, Kristian Vistrup Madsen writes: “She’s trapped in an unequal exchange by her own indulgence, and she knows it.” It’s a sentence that could have been taken straight out of Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials.
The 2020 documentary Miss Americana accompanies the recording of Lover, but in a genius PR coup, it simultaneously chronicles Swift’s coming out as a feminist and a Democrat. “You have to forgive me for this,” Swift pleads with her father, who sees her political positioning as a threat to his daughter's safety, and in the next sequence she posts an Instagram caption in which she speaks out against Republican senatorial candidate Marsha Blackburn and in favor of tolerance and equality. Miss Americana posits Swift’s political turn as the story of a girl speaking up against her well-meaning, but overbearing parents who just want to protect their little girl. This textbook Disney Channel story arc not only markets Lover as an anthology of empowerment anthems,2 it also heightens the stakes of Swift’s political turn, justifying her previous silence and positing her final decision to speak out as a heroic act.
Miss Americana’s narrative builds on the public perception of Swift as a girl, still figuring things out for herself, still in the process of finding her voice. And as B.A. Parker and Leah Donnella point out on a Swift-focused episode of their podcast Code Switch, besides Swift’s conscious aesthetic choices and songwriting talents, a factor that contributes considerably to this perception is her whiteness. A 2017 Georgetown Law study finds that girls of color are often wrongfully perceived as less innocent and more precocious than their white peers, a harmful stereotype rooted in colonial practices of dehumanizing the Other and classifying her as less worthy of protection. Girl, like everything else, is a social construct, and the leniency and protection inherent to this construct is not granted to every girl, adult or otherwise. If the Great Man is temporarily replaced,3 it is merely with the Great (white) Young-Girl, granted that she remains the model citizen as described by Tiqqun.
Taylor Swift has mastered a particular mode of narrating girlhood. Within the confines of the mainstream, the Eras Tour has created a space for genuine emotional connection between audience members, come as they may at an exceptionally high ticket price point. And the girly aesthetics that have dominated popular culture in recent years, thanks to Swift and many others, have brought about a discourse that is genuinely exciting. Conversations are centering about the girl-coded experience of navigating digital spaces, the subversive potential of cuteness and the trivialization of emotions traditionally coded as female. There are stories to be told about girlhood that go beyond the frictionless comfort of nostalgia. Right now might be the perfect time to reimagine adult girlhood in new ways, by centering those who have been excluded from it due to their race and gender, and embracing the weirdness and the uncompromising openness inherent to female youth.
This sentiment was reflected in girl dinner, a 2023-coined term for the previously unnamed act of having a scrumptious, if at times scarcely sustaining, solo meal, pieced together out of several little bites that require little to no preparation, its form ranging from feral nibbles to carefully assembled one-person charcuterie boards. Girl dinner was a solitary activity, but it was closely linked to vicarious online consumption, held with a myriad of virtual co-diners in mind.
In Miss Americana, the recording processes of the two somewhat political songs on Lover are portrayed as pivotal moments in Swift’s journey: On The Man, she confesses that “I’m so sick of running as fast as I can, wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man”, while in the anti-hater anthem You Need to Calm Down, she reminds homophobes everywhere that “shade never made anybody less gay.”
In 2024, the Person of the Year title went back to Donald Trump, who Time already awarded in 2016.