Preliminary phase of experiment in online social interaction

[koganbot]

Another installment in this (possibly short-lived) experiment I'm conducting where I try to address people nicely who have misapprehensions about Taylor Swift songs.

Here, someone named Arianna applauds Claire Danes and her portrayal of fifteen-year-old Angela Chase in the excellent but short-lived '90s TV show My So-Called Life, then imagines Claire/Angela in other settings, including this:

"2) Claire Danes in a Taylor Swift song:

Some dude puts unwanted sexual pressure on Claire Danes. She smacks him."

So I posted this on Arianna's comment thread:

Hey Ariana.* Not sure what point you're making with number 2. Are you saying that this is what Claire Danes would do if she were playing Taylor or are you saying that this is what Angela Chase would have done instead of what Taylor and the other girls in Taylor's songs did? The thing is, the sexual attention in Taylor Swift songs has always been wanted, though often with ambivalence, Taylor or one or another of her friends wanting the sexual attention but not always knowing how far she wants to take it, and then having complicatedly ambivalent feelings about the romance after it's over, usually. Which may well have been what would have happened with Angela in relation to Jordan, except the show didn't air long enough for the scriptwriters to start working that out. Maybe some of the boys in Taylor's songs should've been smacked early, before things really got going, but I don't see how that would have been better for the songs (you then wouldn't have had Taylor's great responses to getting cheated on or to her or her friends getting dumped), or that Angela would have behaved differently from how Taylor and crew did behave.

[And Dave posted his own response on his Tumblr.]

*EDIT: I misspelled her name when I addressed her.

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

See, now this is a much more appropriate response than my HEAD EXPLODED bit. (One issue is that I haven't seen "My So-Called Life" yet so I could really only point out that Taylor's non-smacking reaction was already quite good, and that I don't see what would have been gained by smacking.)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

it's a very very long time since i watched this ep of MSCL, but iirc part of the point of CD's response was that it was out of character and unexpected: which makes for good drama in context but is not necessarily helpful as regards one-size-fits-all templates for sexual politics

[koganbot]

Wait, what episode are we talking about? In episode one Rayanne, not Angela, does something confrontational when some louts hit on her, I forget if it's smacking or what, and the guys respond aggressively and the cops come and take Rayanne and Angela home and Angela tries to explain The Diary Of Anne Frank to the cop ("you see, Anne was trapped in that attic, but she was free," or some such thing).

There's a later episode where I vaguely recall Angela pushing Jordan away - does she smack him? - but not because she doesn't want the sexual pressure, which she very much does want, but because she doesn't want the relationship to be merely sexual.* The upshot of this is that Jordan comes to understand a Shakespeare sonnet.

*"Sex" here doesn't have to mean intercourse; I think it was making out that was at issue in that episode.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i think i am confusing it with stuff in terminator3

[koganbot]

One issue is that I haven't seen "My So-Called Life" yet

Hulu! You should blog each episode. Episode one, the pilot episode, is probably in my top ten of things I've seen on TV.

There's also a box of all nineteen episodes that you could probably get through Netflix (Hulu has something that says "subscribe." Does that mean you have to pay for some episodes?)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

It'll probably be our next series -- we've been meaning to watch it for a couple of years now.

[koganbot]

Other than your saying "HEAD EXPLODED," your response was fine. So was the "HEAD EXPLODED" part, actually, if you're addressing us and not Ariana.

[koganbot]

The experiment continues. Arianna replied:

I can't claim to know Taylor Swift songs in any depth, but from the little I've seen and heard, she seems to resent sexually available girls her own age that wear short skirts or whatever. And in her song world, dudes trick girls into sex ("15"), and the whole style is just kinda lame and wimpy, especially as compared to a powerful, smart character like Angela.

My name is spelled with two ns, btw.

And I replied to Arianna:

Arianna - Sorry I misspelled your name. Did it better this time.

There are zero songs in which Taylor resents sexually available girls her own age. In "Fifteen" the girl is her best friend. In a lot of worlds guys trick girls into sex, and guys trick guys into sex, and girls trick guys into sex, and girls trick girls into sex. Not all guys do this, and not all girls. But in a lot of these worlds girls pay a higher price, probably including the towns where Taylor grew up in. This isn't fair but it's often the truth. It's what Taylor said in "Tied Together With A Smile." In "Breathe" she sang, "I see your face in my mind as I drive away/'Cause none of us thought it was gonna end that way/People are people and sometimes we change our minds/But it's killing me to see you go after all this time." So in that song the change isn't a con job, it's just that the people involved don't know themselves, and their minds change. But often when that happens it feels like you've been tricked, anyway. In "Fifteen" she said the boy changed his mind. That's not the same as saying the guy lied. When I first heard "Fifteen," I thought "She's being hard on the guy," but then when I heard "Breathe" I thought, "No, this is more nuanced than I'd thought." In "The Way That You Loved Me," she's got the perfect, attentive, sensitive boyfriend who makes a great effort to treat her well, but she's about to throw him over because she's still in love with her previous boyfriend, the one she would get into screaming fights with at 2 AM, and that's the way she really likes it. So it's as if she took "You Belong With Me" and turned it inside out. Her songs view her world from different angles, without making a single view the one and only.

Her very first single, which is the very first song on her very first album, has her out with a guy on a back road late at night, at the very least making out, and the guy is on the make and feeding her a line and she lets him know she doesn't believe him, but she wants to be there anyway, keeps it up the whole summer long. This is complex stuff, and she wrote the song when she was fifteen.

I doubt that Taylor disdains girls in short skirts, since she's not averse to wearing short skirts (or forgetting the skirt) herself, as in this picture. Or wearing trashy low-cut glitter dresses like this (and note the song she's singing; this is how she was opening her sets in early '07, at 17, when her audience was still overwhelmingly country, and she liked toying with them).

You think Taylor's whole style is just kinda lame and wimpy. I think Taylor is a powerful, smart person who puts complexity and ambivalence into her songs. Now, wouldn't you rather that I was right and you were wrong? What would you gain by wanting to believe otherwise?

the ballad of Abigail and That Dude

[petronia.livejournal.com]

In that Rolling Stone interview (was it) she mentioned that this was in fact an ongoing drama where the guy had thereafter decided he'd been wrong and had with the collusion of Taylor made massive romantic gesture to get Abigail back (like writing her name with roses on a field or something like that) and that she, Taylor, was now prepping herself for picking up the pieces afterward, whichever way Abigail decides to go.