I wanted to write a piece about Taylor Swift and her re-recording of Red as a timeless, ageless nostalgic remembrance of first love and heartbreak. This piece would be a reflective look back on love and relationships, and of how much I’ve grown since I first heard the album. When I woke up that Friday morning, a feeling similar to Christmas morning, I snatched up my earphones, plugged them in and pressed play, as I read texts from my best friend about how amazing the album was. I was flooded with this weird combination of feelings, a bittersweet flashback of being fifteen, never having been in love, fantasising about future relationships and heartbreaks with innocence and naivety, and also the crushing realisation that I do finally understand, I finally do relate, and it’s painful. I could still write this piece. Red remains Swift’s most personal, intimate album, a visceral and gut-wrenching portrayal of losing someone you love and of loving someone who doesn’t love you back. But it was when I reached the 10 minute version of ‘All Too Well’ that I realised this wasn’t the piece that I needed to write.
Taylor Swift’s decision to re-record her catalog has an economic advantage for her, of course, but, more importantly, it’s a symbolic decision to exert control over her own life, career, her creativity, and her art. At 16, Swift signed a six album contract with Big Machine Records, exchanging the ownership of the masters (the initial sound recording) of these contractual albums for upfront cash. The controversy extends further: Big Machine Records was acquired by Scooter Braun and his company in 2019, including the masters to all of Swifts’ six albums, amounting to 80% of Big Machine’s revenue at the time. As of November 2020, Braun reportedly sold Swift’s masters rights to a private firm, owned by the Disney estate, for around $300 million. Swift maintains that throughout the process she was never asked if she wished to purchase her own masters, and was never consulted throughout the sale process. Her vocal opposition is trailblazing, and brings forward conversations about artists’ rights to their own work. I think it’s also testament to Swift’s maturation, her understanding of the importance of agency in women’s lives, and an acute recognition of exploitation rife in the music industry.
However in re-recording her work, Swift has gained something else: perspective. Reflecting on a relationship after the feelings have long since left brings clarity and understanding that was clouded before. This version of Red is imbued with the same pain and heartbreak and loss, but also maturity, wisdom, knowledge, and a very different kind of anger. It has become a more nuanced and layered album. Swift shines a light on her short (but not so sweet) relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal back in 2010, when he was 30 and she was 20 years old. Of course, we’ve always known this album was about this relationship. But this time around there is more bite.
Accompanying the album, Swift wrote and directed the short film ‘All Too Well’, a visual exploration of the extended version of the anchor song ‘All Too Well’ and her relationship with Gyllenhaal. It stars 19 year old Sadie Sink as ‘Her’ (or Swift) and 30 year old Dylan O’Brien as ‘Him’ (or Gyllenhaal). It’s a beautiful film, depicting the tumultuous nature of their relationship and break-up. But what struck me was how stark the age gap was. It was jarring to watch someone so obviously young and naive and innocent with a very visibly older man.
And this got me thinking about Swift and Gyllenhaal – I never remembered their age gap being that obvious. To be honest, I didn’t even think much of the age gap at all when I was fifteen. But I looked back at pictures of the two of them together and she looked so young, she was so young.
So what is it about stark age gaps, often between a young woman and an older man, that seem to elicit no response from society? Why is it deemed normal, in fact, for a man to always date someone younger, and abnormal, a topic of discussion, when they date someone their own age, or, godforbid, older?
What is it about age gaps that are so problematic, people often ask. Surely a relationship between two consenting adults is fine, and it’s none of our business to pry or make judgements. The fact is, it’s often not about the individuals involved per se, but about the power imbalance that age gaps inherently engender. And, of course, just because something is legal doesn’t mean that it is morally right. Though men would like to believe that it’s just because younger women are “more attractive” that they often pursue them, it’s in fact the fact that younger women are less experienced, more naive, less opinionated (or less confident and assured in exerting their opinions) that they are thus, easier to impress and manipulate than older women. Confidence grows with age and experience.Situations that you might have put up with at twenty for lack of knowing better, you won’t at thirty or forty. Even at twenty-four, I can see that I’m not the same person as I was at eighteen, even though I thought I knew everything.
Furthermore, young women often want to be perceived as mature, and to gain the respect and wisdom that we are taught comes with age. Under patriarchy, to be chosen by a man is the highest achievement for a woman. As a younger woman, to be chosen by an older man, one who has financial security, independence, wisdom, or at least seems to, isn’t only flattering, it’s the recognition that you yourself are mature, worthy and deserving. And what young woman doesn’t want to be taken seriously. However, equally this feeds into the myth that girls mature faster than boys. We don’t. We’re held to a higher standard, made accountable for our actions much earlier than boys, and our supposed maturity is part of the justification older men use to pursue relationships with us. As much as you may feel mature at eighteen, nineteen, twenty, you aren’t. And older men wanting to pursue these relationships know that.
“The kind of radiance you only have at 17” Swift sings in ‘Nothing New’ alongside Phoebe Bridgers, in an additional track added to the re-release, are lyrics which recognise youthfulness as the ultimate desirable trait, and that time and aging result in a kind of diminishing for women. Men’s fascination with younger women promotes a more insidious aspect of patriarchy: paedophile culture. A term coined by Alicen Grey in 2015, in an article response for Feminist Current, refers to the phenomenon of women’s beauty and attractiveness being closely linked with childlike attributes: short, thin and delicate, hairless, baby-soft skin.
A study into online dating and desirability found out that: “The average woman’s desirability drops from the time she is 18 until she is 60. For men, desirability peaks around 50 and then declines.” The data reinforces the stereotype that only the youngest women, those who have just become “legal”, are the most desirable. In the graphs below, from the book Dataclysm, we can see that women are primarily attracted to those that are the same or a similar age to them. For men, however, regardless of their age, they are consistently attracted to twenty year olds, the oldest age they are attracted to being twenty-four.
But why?
How can a woman, a girl really, reach their peak at eighteen, or twenty even, fresh out of adolescence, childhood even. It’s worrying that women’s attractiveness is so synonymous with youth, and not even ‘youth’ because youth is subjective, but proximity to childhood. Equating childish youth with beauty is a slippery slope: it’s resulted in a deep cultural conditioning where the appearance of body hair on a woman is disgusting, where periods are repulsive, passivity is desired, and virginity, or proximity to virginity, is praised. A culture where, under the biological falsehood of ‘fertility’, men justify their attraction and pursuit of younger women as natural and devalue women as they get older. It’s a culture where women aren’t allowed to age as men are, where a quick Google search will show questions like: can a 40 year old woman be attractive? (As if attractiveness can be pinpointed, as if it has anything to do with age). A culture where we reduce women to their appearance forcing women to continually be obsessed with looking more youthful: spending hundreds of pounds on anti-ageing creams, nipping and tucking their bodies and faces, under-going labiaplasty and hymenoplasty, to be considered attractive in the eyes of an impossible, unattainable, childlike ideal.
This is not to say that everybody who is involved in a relationship with a significant age gap is being manipulated and exploited or is doing the manipulating and exploiting, albeit a lot of men do and a lot of women or (or vice versa, of course). Often it is subtle or subconscious. But in a world built on hierarchies and inequality, it’s important to recognise and to question why an older man would want to pursue a woman barely out of her teens. Men’s attraction to younger women is “a microcosmic representation of patriarchy’s most prevalent perversions” surmises Alicen Grey. As Amia Srinivasan argues in her book The Right to Sex, whilst people are entitled to their preferences, and nobody has a right to be desired, it’s important that we interrogate the underlying political reasonings behind what we collectively find desirable, and also the political implications of a desirability hierarchy.
Edited by Charlotte Lewis ( Editor-in-Chief)
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