The Sexist Dreams of Little Girls

(Taylor Swift’s “un-feminist” song and video, Mine)

Doesn’t everyone love a good love story? Maybe not.

At the feminist blog Feministing, commenter Chloe recently confessed that she enjoys listening to Taylor Swift’s music now and then, even if it’s what she calls “an un-feminist guilty pleasure.”

What exactly makes Swift’s music “un-feminist”? Why, it’s the misogynist love-story lyrics, of course. Specifically, the lyrics to Swift’s newest hit, Mine, are scary stuff. They’re full of dangerous woman-hating, man-loving nonsense — at least according to the 18-year-old blogger Jamie Kieles whom Chloe quotes:

This song is rife with freaky-deaky, weirdo language that frames Swift as someone perpetually under the ownership, or at least care, of a male authority. The lyrics describe her as not a woman, but as a “careless man’s careful daughter” that her new boyfriend has “made a rebel of.” This is problematic to me, in the sense that it implies a transfer of her ownership from one man to another. I think it’s weird in this song that she doesn’t seem to have any sense of her own identity away from the love interest, or her father.

As a woman who considers the most important parts of her identity those of being someone’s daughter, someone’s wife, and someone’s mother, and as a mom of a 15-year-old girl who is fairly certain that Taylor Swift walks on water, I have spent some time pondering the question of this particular country star’s popularity …

At Inside Catholic, you can read the rest of my column on Why Taylor Swift Matters.