Give Me Back My Girlhood, It Was Mine First

On Taffy Brodesser-Akner's brilliant Taylor Swift story for the NYT, community, and collective cross-generational healing.

Hi hi friends.

Over the past couple years, I’ve done a lot more thinking about community, what I seek from it, what I wish to bring to it, when I feel the sense of it most strongly. Part of that, I would surmise, is a reaction to the pandemic and having so many of our shared experiences ripped from us for a period of time. But also, I think it’s a factor of growing older, and doing so as a single, child-free person—who at the same time very much enjoys spending a lot of time alone.

I am both more discerning about how and where I want to spend my time and keenly aware that it’s imperative I make sure I surround myself with the right kind of energy and people. That I’m never TOO isolated.

When hard and terrible events are happening in the world—and really when are they not?—we seek solace in our communities, sometimes to lean into what is going on and collectively grieve and support one another and sometimes to try to dissociate from it for a moment or twenty.

Obsessively immersing in various forms of pop culture has always been my method of escape, for better or for worse. I’ve never been very good at being into “sort of” into things. If you’ve been reading this newsletter for any period of time, that’s a quite obvious statement. But when I say that I think those obsessions with music, books, TV shows, movies, celebrities, magazines, and the like have saved my life a million times, I’m really not trying to be hyperbolic¹.

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Our culture is often dismissive of fandom, a place where I have found so much love and solace and acceptance. Especially those fandoms largely occupied by girls and women. Even the “good ones” who think they’re not doing so are all too often casually condescending about our likes and loves, or the way in which we like and love. Too much. Too big. Too loud. Too silly. Too too too too too….

Or that because we love a band or a show or glitter, we somehow must be idiots about everything else in the world—”got nothing in our brains”, one might say.

I know I’ve pulled this quote before and I’ll do it again and again. But one Mr. Harry Styles has always understood—and it’s one of the many reasons I love that British Fruit Witch. This is from his Rolling Stone cover story in 2017, ahead of his first solo album’s release.

“Who’s to say that young girls who like pop music – short for popular, right? – have worse musical taste than a 30-year-old hipster guy? That’s not up to you to say. Music is something that’s always changing. There’s no goal posts. Young girls like the Beatles. You gonna tell me they’re not serious? How can you say young girls don’t get it? They’re our future. Our future doctors, lawyers, mothers, presidents, they kind of keep the world going. Teenage-girl fans – they don’t lie. If they like you, they’re there. They don’t act ‘too cool.’ They like you, and they tell you. Which is sick.“

Listen, I’m GenX. I’m battling my own internalized misogyny and body shame and “be a good, nice girl” and all that shit they baked into those of us who grew up in the ‘80s and became teens and young adults in the ‘90s every day. It’s hard.

But there is absolutely no reason to ever be “too cool” for something you love. You do not need to age into apathy.

That’s why it can be so moving to see someone approach and analyze one of those fandoms with the level of brilliance and kindness and respect and understanding that Taffy Brodesser-Akner did in her longform piece on Taylor for last weekend’s NYT Magazine.

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Now, it doesn’t hurt that I’m an OG Swiftie and that being such is a tentpole of my personality—or that Taffy happens to be one of my other favorite writers on the planet. Like, I would kill to have my pen be a fraction as mighty as either of those women.

But you don’t even have to like Taylor Swift to take something away from this magnificently crafted piece that I quite literally sobbed my way through because I felt so goddamn seen.² It is about so much more than Swiftiedom.