Channeling Female Rage
Aka Who’s Afraid of Little Ole Me?
I consider myself to be a misogynist in recovery. I used to spend a lot of time putting down other women until I finally realized that pitting women against each other is one of the main tools that The Patriarchy uses to keep us from achieving our full power.
Case in point: I used to be a person that complained about Taylor Swift because I thought she played the victim card too much.
This was an opinion I formed mostly from overhearing what other people said about her without knowing anything about the artist myself. Looking back in a current light, I see that Taylor’s stance always was that if she was mistreated, it wasn’t her duty to stay silent about it. We saw her as self-victimizing because women are not supposed to speak up when people mistreat us. It’s yet another tool of The Patriarchy to make us look like complainers when we say that someone did something wrong to us. We get called liars or manipulators. Lately I’m seeing a lot of hateful comments on my skater girl friends’ socials coming from men whenever my friends try to point out the unwanted treatment we get from men at skate parks. One friend was called “whore” when she politely declined unsolicited advice.
Taylor Swift’s new song “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me” is the perfect encapsulation of what happens to women who try to stand in their power:
“'Cause you lured me
And you hurt me
And you taught me
You caged me and then you called me crazy”
Living in The Patriarchy is a constant double-bind. There’s no winning for women who try to speak up about abuse while men who have been so-called “canceled” still have successful comedy tours and Netflix specials. I often wonder how many more successful women we would have in entertainment-or any field- if they hadn’t been driven out when they tried to stand in their power. I saw most of the successful women in music leave eventually and I don’t think that is a coincidence:
“I was tame, I was gentle 'til the circus life made me mean
"Don't you worry, folks, we took out all her teeth"”
We don’t start off having claws but trying to climb a corporate ladder as a woman most often means that you need to learn to bare your teeth which are eventually ripped out by the very people who you’ve been supporting for your entire career. I greatly admire Taylor Swift for continuing to climb that ladder despite the hate continually thrown her way because I know what it is to be a pioneer in music and how many people work to cut you down.
“I wanna snarl and show you just how disturbed this has made me
You wouldn't last an hour in the asylum where they raised me”
This is the anthem for our time disguised as a pop jam. Women are realizing how broken we’ve been by this system and we’re starting to show our rage. By being a living example, Taylor Swift is giving us the permission to do it.