Invisible Women: the pen is in her hand
Decoding the great female migration to a Taylor Swift concert near you
It is a truth universally acknowledged that I once campaigned for Jane Austen to be on a tenner. Except, like Austen’s much-abused (sorry, J) opening line to Pride & Prejudice, it isn’t quite true. Much as I love Austen, for reasons we’ll get into later, I never suggested her as the person we should have on a banknote. In fact, I didn’t campaign for any particular woman, because the banknotes campaign I ran back in 2013 wasn’t about a specific person. It was about female representation - or more specifically, the widespread lack of it.
Female representation — and misrepresentation — is something that’s been getting me out of bed for about fifteen years now, ever since I picked up the book in my university library that first made me realise my brain was full of men. That I was picturing men every time I heard or read not only supposedly-gender-neutral-but-actually-default male words like “he” or “man” but actual gender neutral words like “doctor”. Or “lawyer”. Or “writer”.
Or “human”.
I’ve written before about growing up in a society that presented me almost exclusively with men. History classes that taught me the history of men (give or take a few queens); English lessons that introduced me to great literature by and about men; science that was presented to me as discovered by men. Outside of school the magazines and films that formed the popular culture of the 90s were not only dominated by men, but by men as heroes. Women on the other hand, when they were represented at all, were firmly in the supporting role. The wife, the girlfriend, the mother. Usually a whiny, jealous, emotionally unhinged, triviality-obsessed, dull wife/girlfriend/mother/supporting role.
Unsurprisingly, I didn’t identify much with “woman” as it was presented to me. I was no supporting player, thank you very much. I wasn’t trivial or jealous or “crazy”. I was smart. I was funny. I was one of the guys — in-so-far as anyone would let me be.
My body’s reputation preceded me
And that was the problem: very visibly, I was not a man. The breasts that appeared all of a sudden around the age of twelve made that rather obvious to everyone around me, not least the older men who I remember following me several times as a young teenager. Once along a deserted beach. Once along a village street. Once — and this one was particularly scary — along a cliff-top. (What can I say, I was a moody teenager and liked to take myself off for solitary walks. I was to learn that this was not necessarily a good idea.)
So there I was caught between my female body and a culture that taught me that no one with said body had done anything worth respecting. My body’s reputation preceded me and if I wanted to be treated like the human I believed I was (smart, interested and, most importantly, interesting — not like other women, because women are famously boring, yes all 3.95 billion of them), I needed to prove that I was not what this treacherous body made me seem. I learned to perform the best version of myself. I was never allowed an off day. I would be sharp, I would be funny, I would be boundless and boundary-less. I would be the “cool girl” — before we even had a word for it.
And then came that moment in the library, where I realised how deeply I’d been incepted. I thought back over the twenty-six years of my life up to that point. How I’d resented my sex, my fellow women, for, in my mind, letting the rest of us down by truly being these boring, trivial, emotionally unstable consumer-bots a misogynist culture taught me they were. How I’d never considered the possibility that rather than my sex being a problem to be got over, the actual problem might be a society that writes off 50% of the global population. I thought about how much time I’d wasted trying to convince people (men) that I was not like other girls.
And then I got angry. Really angry. Not only that this had been done to me, but that it was still being done to young women now. In schools, on tv, in films, in the news media. Everywhere I looked it was still men everywhere.
That was where it started.
I began to read books by women. I’d resisted before, so deeply had I internalised the sexist notion that “great” literature was by men (and I, an intellectual, would only read great literature). And to be fair, those great men of literature really are great. They deserve (for the most part) the respect we give them.
But for all that these men inspired me and expanded my thinking and the beauty I saw in the world, when I started to read women I got something I’d never got from reading men. Because when I read women, what I got back were giddying glimpses of a world that I recognised in my bones but had never seen reflected back at me before. Observations so sharp they caught my breath. I don’t know if this is how men feel reading men; I would hazard a guess that it doesn’t feel quite so like the exquisite sweetness of gulping down cool water after a hike on a hot day, because part of what makes it so refreshing is that it’s been missing.
Simone de Beauvoir once said that men “describe [the world] from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth,” and this is true, except it’s not just men. I had also confused men’s point of view with the absolute truth and simply wondered what was wrong with me that I never felt like I quite “got” whatever I was meant to be getting from these great works. I don’t mean that I didn’t enjoy them or admire the craft of the authors, it was just that the depth of fervent reverence they seemed to inspire in so many people never quite clicked for me. I always felt like I must be missing something. Until I read women and realised that there was nothing wrong with me. I wasn’t missing anything. It was just that what men saw was not what I saw.
“I will not allow books to prove anything.”
This realisation, that men’s point of view is just that, and not “the absolute truth” is what gave me my enduring love of Austen, who plays with the representation and misrepresentation of women in literature throughout her body of work. Her most overt intervention on the subject comes in Persuasion, (my favourite of her novels), when the protagonist, Anne Elliot, rejects a male character’s reference to “all histories […] all stories, prose and verse […] Songs and proverbs” as evidence of the fickle nature of woman. “Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story,” she retorts. “Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”
Great writers of either sex can capture great human truths that are common to all of us. When it comes to women’s specific experiences, many good men (writers and otherwise) try their best to understand them, and these efforts are both appreciated and much needed. But the truth is that a man can never truly know (and therefore can never truly capture) what it is like to experience the world as a woman. They do not know the myriad, insidious and, importantly, cumulative ways women are alternately patronised, silenced, menaced, diminished, belittled — because we are women. The way we are taught, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said, to “shrink” ourselves, to “make [ourselves] smaller.”
Men can never know how it feels as a woman to be treated the way men treat us: at work, in the street, and in bed. How could they? They have not been shaped by it as we have. They can never truly bodily experience how a lifetime of being treated in the very particular way women are treated so comprehensively shapes the way you move, the way you act. The way you think. And so when a woman captures even just a glimpse of the inner life that you felt was personal to you because you’d never seen it expressed anywhere else before, it feels like magic.
Which brings me to Taylor Swift. Yes, that’s right, the twist you never saw coming: Little Ol’ Her. Although you should have, (yes this is a tortured [yes this too] reference to TTPD) because Swift is arguably this Era’s (I’m not even slightly sorry) most prolific chronicler of the female experience of both loving and hating men in all their maddening, exhilarating, gaslighting, heartbreaking glory.
I came to Taylor Swift a little late, comparatively speaking; it took me a little longer to Shake [it] Off (still not sorry) my internalised misogyny around “great” music compared to “great” literature. Red was the first album of hers I listened to properly and it was like discovering women writers all over again — only with ridiculously catchy beats.
Who (and I’m using the default female here, sorry lads) hasn’t dated the insufferable man with his “indie record that’s much cooler than” whatever your obviously inferior female taste has picked out, or in Taylor’s case, written? Who hasn’t allowed herself to fall for the man who you Knew was Trouble, only for him to take “a step back” as soon as he had you in his web — and then “pretends he doesn’t know that he’s the reason” you’re crying? And which Swiftie hasn’t had to suffer the condescension of people who affect to be entirely above her — or indeed any pop musician with predominantly female fans because, remember, women are trivial and shallow while men are all reading Knausgaard (who himself doesn’t seem to be reading women)?
But it was All Too Well that I couldn’t stop listening to and that I still can’t stop listening to — and to be clear I mean the original one. The ten minute one has some admittedly killer lines (can’t better the one about all his girlfriends staying the same age), but the music production is soapy and bloated (sorry, Becca. Although not really) where the original was a perfect morsel. It was, and I don’t say this lightly, a masterpiece: of storytelling, of songwriting.
Vivid snapshots of the intimate moments that make up a love affair, cut through with the pain of betrayal (“And I forget about you long enough / To forget why I needed to”), not only from the break up itself, but from the revisionist narrative her erstwhile lover is trying, in retrospect, to impose on the relationship: that it was no big thing. While, of course, presenting himself as a noble truth-teller: “And you call me up again just to break me like a promise / So casually cruel in the name of being honest.”
I’ve had relationships like this both before and after I first fell in love with this song. Where a man tries to rewrite history so that he doesn’t have to take responsibility for the pain he’s caused you, where he feigns bewilderment at your grief over the end of something he is now claiming was never something to begin with. As if the hours of baring your souls and making love into the night never happened. As if the problem is not, as Taylor sings, that she “asked for too much” (which in translation means asked for anything), but that you are, as all women are, kinda screwy in the head and made the whole thing up.
As Taylor also knows, it doesn’t help when this man is a much more famous and successful older man; the power imbalance makes it that much harder to fight against the narrative that frames you as a silly little girl. And yet that is exactly what she does: she refuses to accept the false narrative. “It was rare,” she insists, “I was there, I remember it.” Here, Swift has taken the pen for herself.
After reading all this you might assume I was first in line for tickets to her Eras tour, but in fact until last week I wasn’t going. The whole process seemed like way too much faff. Like, sure, I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that, as Meatloaf famously sang about buying tickets for a Taylor Swift concert. And, honestly, while I used to listen to her on repeat, it’s been a while. Not because I like her any less, I’ve just been listening to some other music recently. Bluegrass, hip hop, anything with a big bass that makes me incapable of not dancing. And a lot of Eminem for some reason.
But then a friend (thank you Becca) offered me tickets to Swift’s Wembley concert and so I called Taylor up and was like “I still love you” and she was like “We are never ever ever ever getting back together. Like ever.” And I remembered all over again why I and so many women my age (and older and younger, although let us not forget that Swift is A MILLENNIAL and you can pry her out of our cold dead geriatric millennial hands) are ferociously loyal to this beautiful, talented, absurdly successful megastar. It’s because not only is she reflecting our experiences back to us in perfect flashes of minutely observed exposition, but she is doing so with an honesty that feels so rare in this at once over-exposed and yet over-curated culture.
Taylor is not trying to look good for us, she’s not editing her best self for display. She is displaying her passion, pain, and a level of delicious pettiness that a more careful artist might try to hide. She is not afraid to tell us when she has been hurt not only by men, but also by us. She is not afraid to be messy and she is not afraid to be angry. And we love her for it. OK, maybe you don’t, but here’s why you’re wrong.
Alongside her more recent albums, in the run-up to seeing her at Wembley I’ve been revisiting her earlier work. It’s not my favourite (some bangers notwithstanding), but when placed alongside her more mature work it makes me appreciate her even more — in many ways for the very reasons that I like it less.
Like many of us, in her younger years, Swift’s lyrics present something of a cool girl / not like other girls persona. You Belong With Me is a classic of the genre, where Taylor sings about the nameless girlfriend of a male friend who “doesn’t get [his] humour like [she does]”, a cheerleader who “wears short skirts” and “heels”, while Taylor wears “t shirts” and “sneakers” and sits “on the bleachers” listening “to the kind of music [the girlfriend] doesn't like” — perhaps an indie record that’s much cooler than hers?
In this context, it’s even more satisfying to witness her incisively identifying and exploding the misogynistic tropes that trap women, from our craziness (“there's nothin' like a mad woman / What a shame she went mad / No one likes a mad woman / You made her like that”) to our pathological envy (“I get drunk on jealousy”), to the double standards, whether sexual (“They'd say I played the field before I found someone to commit to”) or otherwise (“Don't like your tilted stage”) that bind us, and how even if you do everything right none of it matters anyway (“They're burning all the witches, even if you aren't one /They got their pitchforks and proof, their receipts and reasons”). “So,” sings Taylor, “light me up.”
I said earlier in this (increasingly long) essay that Persuasion is my favourite Austen novel. I love all her writing, and while (as with Swift) I am less keen on the juvenilia, I also appreciate it for how it informs our reading of her later work. I have delighted in tracing the development of her thinking on female (mis)representation through her novels, in awe at how she smuggled radical thinking on women’s roles into her comic novels with such a light touch that it goes all but unnoticed.
In Persuasion, though, no one could miss her message. This, Austen’s last complete novel, is the author at her most mature and clear in her thinking, at her most penetrating in her dissection of enforced gender roles. It is the novel that is most tantalising in what more this genius of a woman might have gifted to us had she not died so young.
Despite writing about the 18th century marriage market, Austen herself never married (which is arguably why we have any novels from her at all). Based on her mentions of pregnancy and childbirth in her letters, she seems to have been very happy with her life choices — but that hasn’t prevented people from trying desperately to fix what they clearly perceive as a sad failing.
We can’t know why, but…it doesn’t seem unreasonable to think she chose to depart from the expected female script in order to preserve her freedom to write her own.
It would be inaccurate to tie Swift too closely to Austen since Swift’s writing is more clearly autobiographical and so the public’s fascination with her own love life is in no small part a feature rather than a bug of her creative process. And yet there are striking parallels between the two women and their position in our cultural lives. They both deliver acute insights into the relationships and power dynamics between the sexes. They both excel at deftly capturing the traps society sets for women. They are both adored by an army of predominantly female fans — and (not unrelatedly) they are both ostentatiously despised by a certain type of man and cool girl. And millions of people around the world are obsessed with their love lives.
The big difference between Austen and Swift, however, is the Era (Look What You Made Me Do) in which they were each born. For Austen to be able to create she had to reject the traditional happy ending she wrote for her heroines. We know only of one minor flirtation, and one accepted proposal that lasted all of one night before Austen decided to call it off — we can’t know why, but considering what she wrote about marriage and childbirth in her letters, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to think she chose to depart from the expected female script in order to preserve her freedom to write her own.
In the 21st century, however, while a woman may still not be able to have it all, she can, perhaps, have some of everything. So the question is, what — and who — will Swift choose? We have become invested in Taylor’s journey over the past eighteen years as we’ve listened to her sing to us about bouncing from predatory older men (been there), to cads (been there), to safe but ultimately unsatisfying saps (been there), back to cads (yep, went there again too) and most recently, to her American Beefcake. Long-time GFPs will know I settled down with one of my own so, if you’re reading Taylor, as one ex-cool-girl to another, I can thoroughly recommend ending the story here. All we ask is that you keep that pen in your hand. And I guess we’ll see what we can do about all the bitching and moaning.
Thank you for this -- such great insight about why so many of us geriatric millennials (I'm actually a Gen X cusper) wanted so badly to be the different-than-all-the-other-girls-cool-girl. Just another symptom of the colonial-religious-patriarchy we've been steeped in. Even, in my case, at an all-girls' high school! (Why weren't we reading more women???)
I hadn't paid much attention to Taylor Swift except that she seemed to have a head for business, until I listened to her Folklore album on a whim during the pandemic and was blown away by the maturity of her lyrics. My two young girls are obsessed with her, and I couldn't be more delighted.
Thank you for this excellent essay! I agree that when I was younger I thought that women weren’t funny, made worse music than men, etc. TV shows with a female protagonist were only for women, but male protagonists were for everyone. I love Taylor, and must read more Austen!