thechickflickeffect - Tumblr blog

[thechickflickeffect]

The Titular Chick Flicks

Chick-flicks. The word probably brings a super clear image to your mind, right? Sappy and/or cheesy. Usually romance focused. If you were raised as a girl, it might be something you watch to unwind, it might be something that brings you joy, films you grew up with that make you feel good. If you were raised as a guy, the word might bring a different image to mind. It’s something your mom or your sister would watch and you might turn up your nose at them. They’re typically looked down on by the social majority; sure, it’s fun to watch, but is it art? Is it worth anything?

Well, I think the answer is yes, unabashedly. And I think the insinuation that it isn’t is rooted in thinly veiled (if veiled at all) misogyny.

What is it about any film that features romance/comedy that garners such hatred and passive dismissal when films in the exact same genres that happen to be geared towards male audiences get to exist as whole pieces of work, not boiled down to a subgenre that only came into existence when female audiences began being considered?

What a lot of people don’t consider is that a good majority of romcoms are based on classic literature. Whether they’re based directly off well-known stories or they simply execute famous tropes from them, it’s undeniable that their source materials are the very same novels that we study in high school English classes as the baseline. Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

10 Things I Hate About You and She’s The Man are based off of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night, respectively.

Easy A draws heavy inspiration from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.

Clueless has roots in Jane Austen’s Emma.

You’ve Got Mail and She’s All That were both based off of the golden age musicals She Loves Me and My Fair Lady which were in turn based on the stage plays Parfumerie and Pygmalion.

Cruel Intentions was based off of the French play Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

Each of these movies that often get written off as “just chick flicks” have intelligent roots in some of the most celebrated literature of our culture.

Even those that are not directly based off of existing classic literature still reference them in structure and content. Just as Shakespeare solidified and exemplified the meaning of the tragedy, he did the same for the romantic comedy with comedic plays like Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that are just as trope-laden and fanciful as 27 Dresses or Love Actually.

With that being said, the rise of streaming services and content creation being closer to the consumer has resulted in a sort of “romcom renaissance” in the late 2010’s/early 2020’s and the shameless enjoyment of these movies has become somewhat normalized on the internet (at the very least, it’s easier to find communities of people who enjoy the same things you do without feeling shameful of the genres you enjoy). In the past three years, Set It Up, Palm Springs and Always Be My Maybe are good examples of romantic comedies that have been released and received extremely well by critics, with ratings of above 70% on both critic and audience Rotten Tomatoes (a movie rating site) scores.

I think it’s important to rethink our associations with the phrase “Chick Flick”. Do we turn our noses up at it because we think they suck? Do we embrace them as only relevant when you need a good cry with a tub of ice cream? Or do we see them as pieces of art that teams of people have put a lot of work and thought into to bring entertainment directly to you, with tropes and concepts that trace back through every respected medium of entertainment? It’s up to you to think about.

[thechickflickeffect]

She’s the “Crazy Ex Girlfriend”

What? No, she’s not. From her own lips, “the situation is a lot more nuanced than that”!

How many times have you heard someone lamenting about their “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”? “She was just so crazy, bro. Like, she was actually insane.” It’s a trope for a reason. But those “crazy” exes are people, too, who probably had actually justifiable reasons behind their actions, no matter how seemingly crazy those actions were. Crazy Ex Girlfriend, written by Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna, does an amazing job of deconstructing and humanizing the trope – but, to it’s detriment, it just can’t seem to shake the connotations of its name.

I’m a little ashamed to admit that I was in the camp of people who saw the title and said, “I’m never gonna watch that”. I assumed it would be tacky, I assumed it would be offensive, I assumed it would be overtly misogynistic. At the time, I also assumed that it would be written & produced by men.

There were a lot of assumptions made about this show, by men and women alike. Most women assumed it would be derogatory towards their experience and contribute to the constant societal gaslighting of their experiences – if you create conflict in a relationship, no matter how justified, it’s easy to be labeled as the “crazy ex-girlfriend” forever. Men saw the same thing and let their own connotations of the word affect their perception and justify their desire not to pay it any attention.

All of the marketing for the show, and the theme song itself, seem to lay it out pretty plain. The show follows Rebecca Bunch, who abandons her cushy, very high paying job as a lawyer in New York after she runs into her high school summer camp beau on the street and he waxes on about how much he loves his hometown – West Covina, California. It happens to be where Josh lives – but that’s not why she moved out there. She just needed a new start, right?

No, she definitely followed Josh to his hometown because she was in love with him, a fact that she spends season one denying, though everyone else is aware of it and implies the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend treatment. I mean, she does sound insane, right? That’s insane.

But the show actually does an amazing job of humanizing Rebecca and humanizing the trope that she’s based on. Yes, her actions are insane, but they come from a place of desperation and a need for acceptance. Her father walked out on her and her mother spent the years following taking that anger out on her, criticizing everything she did and making her feel horrible about herself. Romantic love might be the only place Rebecca has ever felt that she could receive that validation she craves from her parents.

In an interview discussing the original conceit of the show, Rachel Bloom (who is one of the showrunners, as well as playing Rebecca) talks of how “we were taught to deify obsession” and that that shines through with Rebecca – she thinks this obsession with her ex, Josh Chan, will provide her with the happiness she seeks, no matter how insane that sounds to the new friends she makes in West Covina.

Rebecca’s journey, and what makes you empathize with Rebecca, is that she’s more than this vague idea of “the crazy ex-girlfriend” – she’s human, she’s real, you could be her if you made a couple different choices in your life. She has to find out who she is, what she wants, and what’s going to make her happy – as opposed to what she’s been told her whole life will make her happy.

While they never shy away from showing her obsession with Josh as what it is – a crazy, dangerous obsession – they manage to make her a sympathetic character, whose actions you can understand, even if you don’t defend them. For example, there is an episode in season one where she plants an absurd amount of money on her boss’s ex-wife to attempt to frame her for a crime. On the surface, this seems like an absolutely insane move that nobody could ever justify. However, the writers show throughout the episode how Rebecca gets to this point. First, her friend tells her and Josh that they’re bad people because he’s still mad at her for something that happened in a previous episode. She then begins to try and prove to this friend that she’s a good person by helping her boss get custody of his daughter. When she succeeds and gets him temporary custody, Greg (the friend) doesn’t care and doubles down on the fact that she only did it to prove she’s a good person. This leads her to plant the money in an attempt to get Daryl (her boss) full custody instead.

Yes, it’s still absolutely bonkers that someone would think of that as the solution and try to follow through on it, but as she explains that her own tumultuous experience with her parents’ divorce probably played a part in her actions, you sympathize with her. You don’t justify the individual wrong thing that she did, but you understand how she got to that point and it doesn’t seem quite so insane anymore.

On a much more serious note of sympathizing with Rebecca, a large portion of season three is dedicated to Rebecca’s suicide attempt and subsequent recovery and diagnosis. When I first realized that this is what they were doing, I was admittedly very hesitant. It’s very hard to include a character being suicidal, especially when they actually attempt to go through with it, without either contributing to the stigma surrounding suicidal thoughts or accidentally creating a farce of it through overdramatization.  

But, once again, Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh Mckenna prove that they’ve put countless hours of thought and effort into making Rebecca’s journey an insightful one, free of stigma or overt judgement. The scene of her actual attempt is realistic – she’s sad and she’s tired and she feels hopeless, torn between two places that feel equally isolating. She makes a decision in the moment that she regrets, coming to a slight lucidity in the haze of the drugs she’s attempted to overdose on to ask for help. The scenes following where her friends (who, it turns out, do not hate her and actively care for her) find out are equally realistic, while still adhering to the slightly satirical tone of the show – Heather retains her abrasive tone, while finding ways to show that she’s there for Rebecca. Valencia makes it about her, starting a social movement for people suffering from depression, until she breaks and admits how scared she was for Rebecca and how much she cares about her. Her motherly best friend, Paula, is there for her without a second thought. Even Josh tries to be there for her, though he also makes it about him – he blames his rejection of her for her suicidal thoughts, which culminates in a beautiful scene where she tells him that it had nothing to do with him. It’s one of the first times we see Rebecca take accountability and shift the blame for anything fully onto herself.

Something I was surprised to see them address was the prevalence of misdiagnosis (and overdiagnosis) in mental health services. Rebecca has known her whole life that something is wrong – she doesn’t feel normal, she’s not happy, it’s harder for her to make connections with other people. Throughout her life, she’s been told “it’s just depression”, “it’s just anxiety”, “take this pill”, “do this exercise”, and none of it has worked, but she’s never been able to push past that urge to just throw antidepressants at her problems. This is why she’s so excited at the prospect of being able to get a new, more accurate diagnosis.

She’s aware, as most people are, that a diagnosis won’t magically solve her problems and she’ll have to put in the work to get better. ‘A Diagnosis’ as a song represents the hope and clarity that comes from the promise of knowing that there’s actually something wrong with you and you’re not just a hopeless horrible person. This hope can feel life-changing in the moment.

Rebecca ends the series single, with strong friendships with each of the three beaus she sees throughout the show. She finally finds a passion in songwriting, getting the songs and delusional ‘what if’s out of her head and down on paper instead. She reflects through several reprises of major songs from the show on how she’s gotten to where she is and how she’s gotten to a place where she can actually express herself and get that validation that she craves from herself, as opposed to the external love and support (which it’s important to note that she does also receive from the strong friendships she’s managed to make in West Covina) that she spent seasons one through three chasing.

Rebecca’s story is about humanity and self-love and recovery and you wouldn’t know any of that if you glance at the title of the show and write it off because of your own associations with the term “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”. The situation is a lot more nuanced than that.

[thechickflickeffect]

The Great White Way

♫ They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway, they say there's always magic in the air, on Broadway. ♫

Chances are that you’ve seen a musical. Whether you’re a sucker for the old age classics like Singin’ in the Rain or Oklahoma or you were just forced to sit through your little sister’s 8th grade production of Shrek the Musical, you’re at least familiar with the formula.

The case of musicals feels slightly different than the rest. For the most part, musicals have some sort of respect as long as they’re “the right kind” of musical: you’d be hard pressed to find anybody who would argue with the fact that Hamilton is a hit between demographics. So, why does Hamilton get to be a hit, unapologetically considered a revolutionary piece of art, while the average high school guy would still roll his eyes at the mention of Wicked or Phantom of the Opera, which have been running on Broadway for eighteen and thirty-three years respectively?

I don’t think the answer is really that deep. Hamilton focuses on the founding fathers, a historical group of men, (and this is not to discount Hamilton at all; it was revolutionary both for the musical culture on Broadway and for actors of color, who finally had a role reversal of their white counterparts who could be cast in anything), while Wicked focuses on the strength of a friendship between two women (with some extra commentary on the villainization and othering of both women and people of color) and Phantom focuses on obsession and love.

Most musicals, save the few that are renowned in the public eye, are inherently looked at as a “girl” thing. And when guys do shed the expectation of masculinity and unashamedly embrace their love of theatre, they’re incessantly called “gay” and emasculated by their peers (this is also not to say that there is anything wrong with being gay and into musical theatre; it’s the assumption that you have to be homosexual in order to embrace a love for something seen in the public eye as “feminine” that’s problematic).

This assumption that guys can’t like theatre without being gay is inherently both homophobic and misogynistic. First, the implication that being gay is a bad thing. Second, the implication that anything associated with femininity cannot be enjoyed by somebody secure in their masculinity. This idea is extremely harmful and leads men to be ashamed of both their sexuality and their interests; if I were to get into how toxic masculinity plays into this, we would be here for hours, but the long and short of it is that it harms men just as much as it harms women. Men should be allowed to enjoy things, unabashedly and with enthusiasm, no matter what the root demographic of those things are. Gay men should be allowed to embrace their sexuality, whether that comes from leaning into feminine gender roles or expressing masculinity.

A good example of how musicals get brushed aside is the formerly-NBC show (that has since been acquired by Roku following an unexpected cancellation) Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist. The show follows antisocial coder Zoey Clarke who goes in for an MRI during an earthquake and comes out with the ability to hear the deepest emotions and desires of all her closest friends and family, as well as strangers and coworkers.

I think part of the response to this show is in the marketing. In watching the trailer, you get a pretty clear idea of the show: she goes in for an MRI, she can hear people sing, her best friend is in love with her, shenanigans ensue. Typical musical nonsense. Cue the eyeroll.

But the marketing for this show didn’t even begin to capture the heart of Zoey and her family. The show isn’t just about her musical shenanigans at all: nowhere in the marketing does it mention that the heart of the powers is in her being able to communicate once more with her dying father, who suffers from progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare neurological disease that has him in an almost vegetative state. It’s through these newfound powers that she’s able to know that he’s still processing everything that’s happening around him in a truly heart wrenching rendition of Cyndi Lauper’s True Colors.

Season one ends on Mitch’s final day, showing the Clarkes dealing with his death in one of the most realistic depictions of grief I’ve ever seen, culminating in a haunting rendition of Don Mclean’s American Pie that follows the proceedings of his wake at the Clarke’s house; aside from the beautiful portrayal of grief, this song was incredibly technically impressive, as several departments worked together to make it appear as if time was passing (turning it from day to night, clearing the dinner table between shots, emptying the house as people leave) so that the song could be filmed in one shot.

Season two then continued to deal with the Clarkes coping with Mitch’s death and moving on, going through the ugly phases of grief and honoring his memory. There’s not one episode that I can look at and not find a scene to point to and say “I felt that”, as someone who had recently lost my grandfather (who was like a father to me) when I started watching.

Grief is not the only tough topic that the show has tackled: Zoey helps her boss leave an emotionally manipulative and neglectful marriage. She and her coworker (and brief beau) Simon share the burden of helping each other cope with grief, as his father killed himself earlier in the year. Her neighbor, Mo, struggles with expressing his gender at church (as he is genderfluid and tends to dress femininely and extravagantly so). She helps her father’s caretaker, Howie, see that his deaf daughter is not helpless and can take care of herself. She helps her sister-in-law seek help for the intense post-partum depression she starts suffering from. An episode in season two addresses the dangers of algorithmic bias and the inherent racism in sampling bias for testing tech, which leads into a larger discussion of racism in the workplace.

Everybody that I’ve introduced to this show says the same thing. “It’s not what I expected”. They see the previews, they see what the show is advertised as, and they make assumptions about what it’s going to be. They don’t think a silly little musical show could have the depth and guts that this show does.

But it can.

And it does.

And most musicals do, when given the chance to look at the story and actually analyze the content.

Into the Woods showcases themes of morality and personal choice, analyzing the relationship between “good” and “bad” and how subjective those judgements are. “Witches can be nice. Giants can be good.”

Legally Blonde shows that you do not have to shed femininity to earn respect and, in fact, that femininity can be your strength.

Falsettos addresses how gay men were failed in the AIDS crisis, while addressing familial expectations and internalized homophobia.

Musicals can and do bring meaning to the mundane. To quote the aforementioned silly little musical show, “good music can make you feel things that you can’t express in words”.

[thechickflickeffect]

Jennifer’s Body and the Male Gaze

Megan Fox is a household name – even if you can’t name her entire filmography, every movie she’s ever been in, you’ve probably at least heard of her. Maybe you saw her in the Transformers films. Maybe you just heard your bro talking about how “bangin’ hot” she was back in her prime. Maybe you saw her in Jennifer’s Body and, depending on the demographics you were in, either loved or hated it.

Jennifer’s Body – a chick-flick horror movie marketed to college frat guys and people who enjoyed the movie Juno. Holy mis-advertising Batman?

Alright, so there was some logic behind the advertising choices of this satiric man-eating movie. When the marketing team picked who they would invite to the first screenings of their movie, they wanted to reach out to people who would enjoy watching a movie with Megan Fox in it (because she was extremely objectified and sexualized by the media and this made her well liked among teen and college-aged boys) and people who had enjoyed Diablo Cody’s, the screenwriter of Jennifer’s Body, first movie, Juno, because they assumed they would want to support Cody again.

That doesn’t make the logic good logic. Jennifer’s Body was completely different than Juno, which was a feel-good coming of age comedy about a pregnant teen. Jennifer’s Body was, quite literally, about murder. In regards to the other demographic, the most enjoyment a frat guy would get out of Jennifer’s Body would be watching Amanda Seyfried and Megan Fox make out and having an excuse to fetishize lesbians. They just wanted to watch Megan Fox be hot; they had no interest in watching as she devours and dehumanizes boys, exemplified with the well known cut line (that was included in trailers) of Needy exclaiming that she’s killing people and her responding, “no, I’m killing boys!”.

Of course the first reviews were going to be bad, coming from the exact opposite demographics of the ones that the movie was intended for. In a recent interview, Diablo Cody recalls laying out how she thought marketing should go and receiving an email in response that simply read, “Megan fox hot”. However, it wasn’t just the first reviews – critics tore this movie apart, with one review from James Berardinelli reading that, “if you're in search for a way to ogle Megan Fox's body, there are a lot better ways to do it than subjecting yourself to this”. Art is subjective and anyone can interpret it how they see fit but reading the reviews after watching several interviews of Cody and Fox discussing the movie and what it meant to them at the time, I couldn’t help but to think that a lot of them just… didn’t get it. A majority of the reviewers seemed to be older males that I would put money down were white and straight.

To put it succinctly, the movie wasn’t for them. Diablo Cody talked in an interview about how the movie became a metaphor for her own experience in Hollywood. Diablo Cody is not her real name; it was a screenname that she took on because it sounded less feminine than “Brook Busey”. She talks at length in the interview about how Needy started to represent her (the real, genuine her, who was allowed to be soft and transparent) and Jennifer represented what she had to be for Hollywood, cutthroat and dark and seeking vengeance.

Megan Fox responded positively to Cody sharing this, adding on her own experiences and elaborating on why Jennifer meant so much to her and why she didn’t hesitate to take the role, saying that when it came to how Hollywood treated her “objectified is like... it’s not the right word, it doesn’t capture what was happening to me at the time, […] you deserve it because of how you talk, because of how you look, because of how you dress, because of the jokes you make”. Cody even talked of how she’d made note of Megan’s experience with Hollywood and sought her out for the role; she said she didn’t know what she would’ve done if Fox hadn’t taken the role, as she can’t imagine anybody else having played Jennifer.

Most people that were raised and socialized as girls (including trans men, especially those who did not realize they were trans until later in life) can relate to these sentiments. Of having to present yourself duplicitously in every aspect of your life, just to be taken seriously. Of being reduced to your body, to how you use your body, to how you carry yourself, even in casual settings. Of being blamed for the way other people treat you because you “deserve it” for the way you talk, the way you behave, the way you look, the gender you were assigned at birth. To quote a saying that Cody herself brought up, “the only difference between a flower and a weed is a judgement”. The judgement was made in 2009 when the movie released that it was a bad movie. The judgement is being constantly reassessed by pop culture and now seems to be changing as young girls are able to revive the movie and feed their own meaning into it.

[thechickflickeffect]

The Rise & Fall of Taylor Swift

Unless you’ve been literally living under a rock for the past decade and a half, you’ve heard of Taylor Swift. You might even have strong opinions about Taylor Swift. A lot of people hear her name now and immediately clam up – they’re not supposed to like her, “she’s a snake, she’s a slut who dated her way through Hollywood and tore down minorities to do it, she’s a closet conservative”.

On the contrary, some people love Taylor, to the extent of idolization. “She’s a saint! The public brutalized her and she didn’t deserve any of the heat she got in the middle of her career. It’s a real shame. The only reason people hate her is because she’s a successful woman.”

The truth is the world isn’t black and white. The answer isn’t quite as easy as “Taylor is the worst celebrity ever” or “Taylor has never done anything wrong in her life”. Not every issue is going to be so far to one side of “good” or “bad” – Taylor’s downfall and rise back to the top is a great example of that.

At the beginning of Taylor’s fame, she was America’s sweetheart – a darling country bumpkin from Pennsylvania who wrote sweet songs that teen girls could relate to. She was universally beloved or, at the very least, nobody had a reason to hate her. There will always be those that sneer at successful young women, waiting on a chance to pounce and say “well, I never really liked her, anyways”, but, for the most part, she found great acclaim with a successful debut album and an even more successful second album, Fearless; so successful, in fact, that Fearless made Taylor Swift the youngest person to ever win Album of the Year at the Grammy awards at just twenty years old, an undoubtedly impressive feat. She held this record for a full ten years, until eighteen-year-old Billie Eilish won the same award just this past year.

She was accepting the VMA (an MTV music video award) for Best Female Music Video, which one of her lead singles You Belong With Me won, when the domino effect of her downfall began. In the middle of her acceptance speech, Kanye West ran up on the stage and interrupted her, inserting that “Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time”. (Later, when Beyonce was awarded Video of the Year, she very kindly invited Taylor up onto the stage to finish her speech, in lieu of Beyonce giving her own speech.)

At the time, this was a huge bumble on Kanye’s part. The media framed it as disrespectful and uncalled for, and Beyonce and Taylor both came out of it looking better for how gracefully they handled his blunder. We have to skip forward a couple years to see why this would be marked the beginning of Taylor’s downfall.

Post-VMAs incident, Taylor enjoyed three more successful albums within her target audience. She managed to successfully make the switch from country to pop with one album that was a mix of her traditional sound and the pop transition (Red) and the album immediately following showed a full successful transition to pop (1989). She made jokes about the incident and it endeared the public to her quite a bit, and, eventually, she even fostered a pseudo-friendship with Kanye; it seemed like her only issues now were related to the outpouring of people who disliked her simply because she dated too much or wrote songs about her breakups. These are complaints that, while widespread, problematic, and explicitly misogynistic, she pokes fun at and satirizes in songs such as Blank Space and Shake It Off (and eventually in The Man, but that song doesn’t come until after her era of rebranding).

In this downtime, some valid criticisms of Taylor came out. Specifically referring to the Shake It Off music video, she was widely accused of white feminism and using black bodies and trends (specifically twerking) to make herself look better. A lot of people began to think she was a “closet conservative” due to her refusal to address these criticisms and her refusal to speak on anything political. She’s since opened up about her fear of speaking politically, after watching one of the bands she most admired and loved growing up (The Chicks, formerly known as The Dixie Chicks) get exiled from the country music community for speaking out against Bush and the Iraq war. She had to be careful if she wanted to maintain a career. She has not, however, addressed the cultural appropriation allegations.

She was on shaky ground with a lot of people who had the same tired criticisms of her music, like “it’s all about boys” or criticisms about herself like that she was a serial dater, but her fanbase was strong and she was thriving after her fourth album, 1989, made a successful transition from country music to pop music.

It was in February of 2016 that the world turned against her. Kanye West dropped his song Famous that included a line directly referencing Taylor - “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex. Why? I made that bitch famous”. Swift spoke out about the obvious misogyny of the line and how much she objected specifically to being called a “bitch”, and Kanye insisted that he had called for approval of the line – Taylor confirmed that he had called her, but that it was not for approval of the song; instead, it was to ask her to launch the song on her own twitter, an offer that she refused. She also warned him about releasing a song with such a directly misogynist tone, though she did approve the beginning of the line – the part that says “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex”, even remarking that she was relieved that he wasn’t calling her, “like that stupid dumb bitch” and that she’d need to think about it.

Among the responses to the line and Taylor’s outspokenness about the use of the word ‘bitch’, Kanye’s wife, Kim Kardashian, posted videos of the phone call on her Snapchat that framed it as if Taylor had approved everything and was now just picking a fight to play the victim. Criticisms about the mystery of Taylor’s political views and her relationship with race resurfaced, many claiming that she was lying to play the white victim to Kanye’s “intimidating black man”. The hashtag “TaylorSwiftisOverParty” trended worldwide on Twitter. She insisted many times that her issue wasn’t with the line itself, but the way that Kanye twisted the narrative and lied to her, in not giving her the full line, in not playing the song for her, in not informing her the phone call was being recorded; she famously ended her response to Kim’s videos with “I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative, one that I have never asked to be part of, since 2009”, referencing their history and the lack of respect she faced from Kanye from day one.

It was revealed recently, in March 2020, when the full video of the phone call leaked, that Taylor never lied. Kanye never played her the song. He never ran the full line, with the use of the word ‘bitch’ in it, by her. She insinuated many times that it wasn’t the most comfortable thing in the world for her, but reiterated that his artistic process was his own and she couldn’t fault him for writing about his experience. There was no agreement. There was no explicit consent, and there was definitely not consent for the full line or the sexualization of her figure in the music video for the song. But this information took four years to come out and, at the time, Taylor’s reputation was already destroyed. America’s Sweetheart was already torn down into the image of a ‘snake’ – slimy and sneaky and twisting the narrative to villainize a black man, no matter how twisted the narrative already was.

Taylor went into hiding for a year. Nobody outside of her closest friends and family saw her. Nobody heard from her. It seemed that she had been successfully “cancelled”. So, what then? Obviously, she didn’t disappear forever.

Taylor’s “Reputation”

She wrote “reputation.”. The experience of how the public treated her was objectively traumatizing, especially considering that we know now she wasn’t even in the wrong. In her Netflix documentary, Miss Americana, she said, “#TaylorSwiftisOverParty was the number one trend on Twitter worldwide. You know how many people have to be tweeting that they hate you for that to happen?”

After deleting all of her previous social media posts (which her remaining fans definitely took note of), she came back with just three glitchy videos of snakes, a reference to the emoji many people who hated her spammed after Kim posted the videos of her & Kanye’s phone call.

She took back her reputation, quite literally, with the album reputation. Many of the songs reference the situation that sent her into hiding, but there’s a theme of love underneath that. Songs like “Look What You Made Me Do” and “I Did Something Bad” are directly contrasted with the sweet love stories of songs like “Delicate”, “New Year’s Day”, and “Call It What You Want”, showing how she was affected by the events of 2016, but also that, over her isolation, she met her partner (who she has been dating now since 2017) and fell in a true, sweet kind of love that’s actually lasted and, between the two, she’s gained a confidence that shows in her music still today.

In all honesty, when I started writing this article, I expected it to be a simple one – talk about my loose perception of how the media has treated her and how her music is still good, regardless of how many men she’s dated and maybe talk about the history of “writing what you know” in music – in essence, that she’s not doing anything different by ‘being a serial dater and writing breakup songs about all her boyfriends’ and that the disdain the media had for her was purely misogyny, but it obviously turned into more than that.

In researching, I realized that I had also made so many surface level judgements about Taylor and the Kanye situation (I distinctly remember the day #TaylorSwiftisOverParty trended on Twitter and I remember not really caring, because I had grown out of my “Taylor Phase” of enjoying her music in my youth) and that really illustrated how easy it is to consume a false narrative and make judgements off of it.

Is it fair to say that what happened to Taylor Swift is purely misogyny? Maybe not, there were certainly other factors – most notably her silence on political issues and the fact that she’s still not addressed cultural appropriation accusations from her 1989 era, but it would be extremely careless to say that a man with the same amount of talent, passion, work ethic, and the same scandals would have been treated the same by both other celebrities that should respect them and the general public.

The “New Taylor”

And if there’s anything to be said about the industry and the general public, it’s that it never really changes. After everything Taylor went through, new stars pop up that have the same caliber she did at young ages and we start to see the exact same things.

Olivia Rodrigo, who was a breakout star on the Disney+ series High School Musical: The Musical: The Series and has since started releasing her own music (to great acclaim), has started to receive what I’ve coined “The Taylor Swift Treatment” – at first, everybody loved her and praised her music, she was a breakout star and people were obsessed with her and her first two singles “driver’s license” and “good 4 u”. Then, more and more bitter people started to come out of the woodworks, mostly on Twitter, harshly criticizing her live performances, posting clips of her slightly out of breath (and still hitting the notes) with comments about her breath control, her lyrics, her voice, her choreography.

It’s important to note that “good 4 u”, which is the song she is performing in most of the clips, is very hard to perform. The notes are a little all over the place and the pacing of it is irregular – it’s a song she wrote in quarantine, likely in multiple takes and likely with no intentions of performing it live – she was likely not expecting it to blow up the way it did. That said, the rest of the performance sounds fine and her energy is spectacular.

The fact is, if this was a popular male celebrity, he would be allowed to make mistakes – he would be allowed to be a little breathless, he would be allowed to be nervous for his first ever live performance and sound a little off at the end, he would be allowed to not be perfect at all times. I’ve watched clips from Harry Styles concerts – does he always sound perfect? No. Does he get half the crap that young women like Olivia Rodrigo get when they’re slightly off key for less than 20 seconds of a live performance? Absolutely not.