Monday, March 1, 2021

Captain's Log, Day 32: Ginny & Georgia & Taylor

 

 Date: March 1, 2021

Time of post: 9:09 PM

Quarantine Day: 341

Last Song I Listened To: “The Man" by Taylor Swift

Last Person I Communicated With: I talked to my parents at dinner

Last Thing I Ate: leftover cherry/whipped cream birthday cake

Last Thing I Read: an article about Taylor Swift

Current Mood: really peeved

One Thing I’ve Accomplished Today: I answered a lot of student emails

One Thing I Want To Accomplish Today: a ChLA abstract, because I’ve committed to that now lol

One Reason I’m Stressed Today: I need to write a letter of intent so I can keep my instructor job, and I really hate those

One Reason I’m Happy Today: tbh, my earlier happiness has been replaced by frustration


Dear Apocalypsers,

Taylor Swift.

My life keeps coming back to her these days.

I can’t help that her life and her fight and her growth mirrors so much of what I’m naturally drawn to study.

And here we go again.

Today, Taylor Swift tweeted about a line in the new Netflix show Ginny & Georgia: “Hey Ginny & Georgia, 2010 called and it wants its lazy, deeply sexist joke back. How about we stop degrading hard working women by defining this horse shit as FuNnY. Also, [Netflix] after Miss Americana this outfit doesn’t look cute on you [broken heart emoji] Happy Women’s History Month I guess.” The “lazy deeply sexist joke” Taylor’s referring to is the line, “What do you care? You go through men faster than Taylor Swift.”


Please. Am I 14 reading a Tiger Beat headline again? Talk about stale material.

So, of course, the entire Internet had to weigh in on this.

A lot of people were not happy and accused Taylor of “playing the victim.” (It was Alanna Bennett who tweeted that, and she’s since deleted that tweet.)

Emily Jashinsky and Madeline Osburn wrote an article for The Federalist about how she “needs to calm down” (a pun on her song “You Need to Calm Down”). Osburn said, “It’s very on-brand for Swift, who often plays the victim card, but especially when it comes to misogyny,” and, later, “It almost seems lazy of Swift to get those sweet fan retweets by going for the low-hanging fruit like responding to a bad joke as sexist.”

Ashley Reese wrote an article for Jezebel called “Ginny Miller isn’t real,” and that headline is the crux of her article. According to Reese, “Ginny is a character riddled with flaws and might not always say the nicest, most charitable thing” and “maybe people’s time would be better spent getting upset about a line uttered by a real person instead of a fake one.” To support her point, Reese resonded to another tweet with, “[The line] was uttered by a fictional character who, in an earlier episode, said someone wasn’t Asian enough bc their favorite food was cheeseburgers. I don’t think this character is intended to be the moral arbiter of the show.”

I specifically chose examples of articles by women for two reasons: 1) women were making up a lot of the critique on my timeline and 2) these full-fledged, written and published articles, fall into the exact narrative that she tweeted about. To Emily Jashinsky and Madeline Osburn, I have to ask, “Why do you get to tell Taylor Swift how she should feel about a comment that was made about her?” and “At what point did Taylor tell her fans to do anything?” To Ashley Reese, I ask, “So if an unreliable fictional character says something, and it’s never revisited as problematic, does that mean it’s okay and we should ignore?” Didn’t the last 4 years prove that a lot of people can’t decipher what’s true or not?

I ranted about all this to a friend who said it best: “It’s easier to blame Taylor and want her to ‘be the bigger person,’ [but] women shouldn’t have to always be ‘better.’ They should be able to express pain just as much as they are allowed to express happiness.”

I have been and probably always be self-conscious about my weight. And if society continued to make fun of that exact thing that I was most insecure about for 10 years, I, too, would be hurt and mad and call them out on it. Clearly, how society interprets her dating life is something that’s a sensitive topic for Taylor. She’s talked about it at length. And this tweet was pretty heated. If you remember the tweets she sent out about Trump, they were strongly worded, but the tone was even, her words carefully chosen. Today’s tweet had some sass and fire to it.


And, honestly, good. Twitter is a cesspool. People say stuff on there in the heat of the moment every minute of the day. There are celebs whose entire Twitter persona is being snide and bitchy. The reaction I saw to Taylor’s tweet today just proves that there are a lot of people who still want her to be America's sweetheart.

I do agree that some context would have been beneficial or some way to direct the fans' energy to something productive. The way some of the fans responded by harassing Antonia Gentry on her social media was uncalled for and rude. But there are a whole lot of other things we need to discuss about that. Like, how much responsibility to celebs need to take for their fans? On one hand, Taylor Swift does have a lot of power and should use it responsibly—you know not inciting domestic terrorism, speaking up about important social and political issues, supporting other artists—but on the other hand, she can't (and shouldn’t have to) dictate what her 80 million+ followers do. There needs to be more media literacy taught for sure, and it's certainly not Taylor Swift's job to teach it.

I obviously have a lot of thoughts on this matter, and it’s not just because I have loved Taylor Swift’s music for over a decade.


I think about my friend who teaches 6th grade. Those students are 11 or 12 now, which is right around the age I was when Fearless first came out in 2008. With Taylor re-releasing that album in April, she’s opening her music to a whole new fanbase, and they already think of her as "the girl who dates a lot of guys.” To have the same narrative from a decade ag come back around for a new generation is so awful—for Taylor and for women in general. If society can keep shaming the most successful woman in music, what does that mean they can do to any woman?

I know that a lot of this comes from deeply ingrained misogyny and a fear of successful women, but the much of the response today has been frightening. I know people are concerned for the actresses in the show who are facing backlash for something they, in reality, had very little control over. They’re screaming “context!” because Ginny said this as a mean comment to her mother, who’s, from what I’ve read, flighty and dysfunctional. But I’d also like to scream “context!” right back at them. The context that this is a real woman’s life that society has been making fun of and exaggerating for over a decade. The fact that Ginny means it as an insult makes it even worse, because it means that the line was meant to be shameful and that we are still shaming Taylor after all this time. And she should be allowed to be angry about that. She’s a human being, and we as fans or journalists or Twitter trolls don’t get to tell her how she should feel about jokes made at her expense.

As the day’s worn on, there’s been some tonal shift in my timeline. Jemima Skelley reminded us that “Taylor Swift literally didn’t report her sexual assault to the police so that it wouldn’t further this narrative of her being some kind of serial dater and victim and now in 2021 people are saying she has no right to fight back ?????????”

Another fan responded to Reese’s article, saying, “Fictional character or not but as long as people can watch that crap, it can influence people's mind. If you don't call out that show, they will think it's okay and that's called tolerating.” (And after listening to evermore’s “tolerate it,” we know that we do not tolerate that which we do not deserve!)

As one popular fan account pointed out, “taylor swift was 18 when those jokes started and she’s 31 now btw pls don’t tell her she is overreacting when she’s standing up for all female artists—those yet to come and those who face similar jokes daily.”

Another reminded us of what Taylor’s actions for equality have done in the past: “Taylor Swift got Apple to spend millions paying the entire music industry for three months because she wrote a strongly worded Tumblr post. I do not for the life of me understand why in 2021 any person, place or thing thinks they can come for her and expect to succeed.”

This situation is, frankly, ridiculous. I don’t know why it’s being blown up. Except that it’s Taylor Swift. And everything she does is scrutinized. And by writing this, I know I’m dragging out a conversation that should have ended with some “yassss queen” retweets. But I’m not so much concerned with what Taylor Swift tweeted as I am with how everyone else exploded. We want her to be better than the average person. We want her to pour her heart and soul and secrets into her music. We want to know every deal about she is or isn’t allegedly sleeping with or has slept with or might want to sleep with. But we don’t want her to react to any of that. It doesn’t make sense.

I'm not saying that Taylor Swift is infallible. I'm not saying that I don't have biases because I'm a fan. But I recognize that we're both humans and are capable of being better. And, as a human, she should be offered the space to tweet that she's mad or hurt by a comment made about her if she's angry or hurt by it. And we should let her do that. Because, I don't know if you've noticed, but when Taylor Swift tweets, the whole world listens, for better or for worse. 

And I want to point out that she, at no point, called out Antonia Gentry or even the show’s writers. She went to Netflix, the company who greenlighted the show. The things that people are bad about—that she “should have known” or “doesn’t know the context” or is “looking for attention”—all deal with assumptions about her motives and not the actual, tangible tweet. And the actual tweet is maybe the most important thing, because it’s a woman asking to be treated like a human being for once in her career.

But, hey, as long as she’s surprise-dropping albums every few months, right?

 


May the odds be ever in our favor,

Katie

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