On (Not) Letting People Enjoy Things
Taylor Swift, YA fiction, performative males, climate disaster, and the consensual de-intellectualization of the mainstream
Unless you are living under a rock, you are likely aware that Taylor Swift, one of the most rich and powerful people of her age bracket currently alive on planet Earth, just got engaged. “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married,” reads the caption on the Instagram co-post between Swift and fiancé Tyler Kelce — a star football player and a man who once spelled the word squirrel as “squirle.”
Naturally, everyone is being incredibly normal about it.
As someone who has always been somewhat lukewarm on Swift’s music — a take that doesn’t do much to generate engagement on the Internet and, thusly, is rarely expressed — I have, of late, found myself infinitely more interested in the semiotics around Swift, and in particular the vitriol that follows anyone who deigns to (even lightly) critique her. As many on the Internet have had to learn the hard way, outing yourself as anti-Swift is a one-way ticket to harassment and doxxing on an industrial scale, and often of a particularly catty and childlike nature not unlike the kind one might receive in, yes, high school. Your teachers are getting married indeed.
Swift is, of course, a massively popular musician with a fanbase so willing to pay top dollar to see her perform that her recent Eras tour produced a genuine economic boom in multiple American cities. It’s no surprise that she has her defenders, X accounts with Tay-Tay pfps and dedicated YouTubers who sink endless hours into ‘protecting’ Swift from those jealous, misguided, or mean-spirited enough to criticize her.
This is not unique to megastars of Swift’s kind. What is unique is how critiques of Swift, as opposed to those levelled towards similarly popular artists like Drake or The Weeknd or Ed Sheeran or Billie Eilish, seem to be processed as an attack on the fans themselves, a sort of physic wound where anything negative said about Taylor is really meant as a negative comment on her legions of supporters, a way of saying (if not overtly, then suggestively) that they do not matter.
Even a cursory listen to Swift’s output (especially her last few albums, beginning around the Lover era) helps to elucidate this. People who are into Taylor — like, really into Taylor — seem to see her as a sort of Poet Laureate of womanhood, an oracle, someone who gives voice to the commonality of experiences that women have in our modern world. On the whole, her songs and albums are autobiographical, or at least seem autobiographical, and following her love life is really an extension of listening to and caring about her music, given that the two intersect so frequently and so inextricably.
Each carefully publicized and focus-tested element of her life, from high-profile breakups to rumours of her partners’ infidelity to her feuds with other female pop stars, is a part of the broader Taylor Swift Pageant that, provided one is sufficiently invested in it, becomes beyond reproach. To talk about this fandom dismissively, then, is to dismiss the fans themselves — and, ultimately, to dismiss the lived experience of women.
For those not fully entranced by this narrative, its issues are fairly easy to spot. Even if we take for granted that Swift gives voice to the “female experience,” it’s most certainly a specific one: namely white, hetero (with love and respect to the Gaylor community), and perhaps most importantly, filthy stinking rich.
Many, many women are deliberately left out of the Swift fantasy, and yet pointing this out is a surefire way to invite both claims that one has internalized misogyny and a whole lot of misogynistic abuse. That both of these reactions seem to occur simultaneously, and often within sentences of one another, is either not seen as contradictory or not considered enough of a contradiction to matter. The Swiftie is nothing if not loyal, often aggressively so, and woe be to anyone who dares to suggest that, hey, maybe she is a flawed human being, or yeah, maybe she should fly her private jet a little less frequently?
This, however, isn’t an essay about Swifties. There is already plenty of writing on this topic, and observing this phenomenon first-hand is especially easy now that she has once again become the centre of online discourse. What is most intriguing about this pattern, specifically the intensity with which Swift’s mega-fans take it upon themselves to defend her honour, is in how Swift’s songwriting presents an overly simplified, relatively surface-level examination into the lived experiences of women.
We are surely not starving for great, insightful music about the inner lives of women — if anything, there is an overabundance of material with striking depth on this topic, in music as well as in literature and, increasingly, film. Yet so many of us are perfectly happy to take the easy way out.
Put another way: The central tenet of so much backlash towards Taylor Swift’s many “haters” is that they are jealous, or afraid to see a woman succeed, or want to be a “pick-me” girl who allies herself with the dominant patriarchal power structure at the expense of other women. But if so many people are clearly so galvanized by seeing their lives expressed through art, if droves of young women are so moved by these songs that speak to their interiority, why are they content to rally around an artist whose music barely scratches the surface?
One can elicit a similar level of vitriolic backlash, if desired, by critiquing young adult fiction, typically abbreviated in online circles as “YA.” The genre itself — if it can properly be called a genre, as books for young adults span many traditional genres like romance, thriller, mystery, and comedy — is a relatively new one, coinciding with the popularization of “teenage” as a distinct category of adolescence between childhood and adulthood.
In the post-war era, social stratification and increased wealth meant that families could afford for their children to stay in school longer, to study, and to get married later in life, rather than the (until-then common) standard that children would begin to earn a wage for their family early on in their lives, either working for their family in shops or on farms or, as was the norm in the 19th century, in factories. The invention of the teenager precipitated a whole lot of concepts that have since become old hat but are, relatively speaking, new on the scene, including youth culture and teen angst.
There is no winning in this world for the cynic, nor for the optimist whose bright outlook includes the possibility that we might actually be owed something better.
Among them is the idea of art being classified (and thus, suitable) for this particular age group, the young adult — and thus the mid-20th century saw the publication of many of what we now consider the archetypical young adult novels, including The Catcher in the Rye (1951), A Wrinkle in Time (1962), and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. (1970). These novels are typically taught in middle- or high-school classrooms, generally in an effort to get young people excited about reading by introducing novels with subject matter and complexity of prose suited to their age groups.
I’m gonna preface this next part by saying that I think many of these novels (obviously) have literary merit. I am not going to go out on a limb and say that The Catcher in the Rye is not a quality work of writing, or that Judy Blume is a hack. These books have a lot of value, but that value is precisely because they are written with young people in mind. It is a key element of the work — they cater to a specific audience for which a fostered love of reading can make a significant difference in the future direction and arc of their lives, but with the understanding that that love may not exist yet. They are not, generally, works written for dedicated adult readers.
Yet in 2023, it was reported that 55 percent of consumers of young adult literature were over the age of 18. In the event that an adult purchased a young adult book, they were purchasing it for their own reading pleasure a full 78 percent of the time. YA novels are big business in the era of BookTok and, in accordance with the statistics of readership over the past few decades, they are overwhelmingly aimed at a female book-buying public. Virtually every few months there is a new YA series released that women are encouraged to get excited about, most of which feature fantastical or dystopian worlds with simple, accessible language and formulaic, recycled plot-lines.
Like Swifties, YA fiction devotees (the non-young adults among them) get very, very angry when criticism is levelled against their reading habits. For a time it seemed there was an almost clocklike regularity to the cycle of a notable author or cultural critic pointing out the shame in fewer adults reading serious, complex literature, and the subsequent fuming backlash that would inevitably result. The reaction is the same as the reaction to Taylor because the root is the same: YA fiction readers bristle at the implication that they are intellectually incurious for reading books at a lower level of complexity or books that are, at their core, aimed at those just getting used to reading full books.
And, well… shouldn’t they be?
Both of these debates are inevitably and inextricably wrapped up in discussions around misogyny, the overwhelming maleness of the literary canon, and they often feature an imagined male figure shaking his head disapprovingly when he learns that modern adults no longer spend their leisure time reading Joyce or listening to Wagner. And there is a bit of irony, to be fair, in this criticism when it is levelled by men, who on average read much less than women do. If the choice is between reading uncomplicated, fun novels for young people and not reading at all, I would prefer the former, and indeed this is pretty much the reality as it currently stands.
However, when YA book readers respond to these critiques, they tend to sidestep the question of why they aren’t reading serious literature. The typical response I’ve observed is that YA fiction really is as valid and intellectually robust as fiction meant for adults — much as Swifties will tell you with a straight face that her music contains a similar level of depth and nuance as an equivalent album from an artist like Lorde, Björk, Mitski, Brandi Carlisle, Lana del Rey, SZA, PJ Harvey, Solange, Joanna Newsom, Kacey Musgraves, FKA twigs, Jenny Hval, Lucinda Williams, Katie Crutchfield, Janelle Monaé, or even Olivia Rodrigo.
But look, real talk: it just doesn’t. Listening to Taylor Swift and reading Suzanne Collins is all well and good, but there is something of value lost when more and more adults refuse to engage with art made with an adult audience in mind — more so when clinging to the artifacts of our youth is seen as a badge of honour against that most cardinal of sins: pretension.
I recently finished reading a book that I bought on a visit to New York City’s fantastic Tenement Museum last summer, a compilation of Yiddish-language letters to the editor written by Jewish immigrants to the city in the early 20th century. A Bintel Brief, the advice column of the Yiddish-language newspaper The Forward, is still in publication online, and has published hundreds (if not thousands) of letters from regular folk, dealing with the difficulties relevant to their era: letters from the 1910s and 1920s were primarily about how to keep the old faith alive in a strange, new place, while letters from the 1960s were focused more around solving conflicts with young relatives who had rejected the “old” ways of their parents. It’s a fascinating read that I recommend.
Its relevance to this discussion is in the shockingly high quality of prose from nearly every writer who submitted a letter to the Brief. Granted, they may have cherry picked the best ones for the compilation I read, but it’s still a remarkable illustration of the level of literary knowledge and skill that even the least-educated in society were expected to have at the turn of the 20th century. Contrast this with the crisis in universities today where AI tools are deemed preferable to writing a simple essay — or, occasionally, even to assigning one.
One ought to keep in mind that, even for the poorest and most “low class” Americans of this era, one of the primary forms of entertainment was reading, and not just reading but complex reading. Anyone who has read any Mark Twain or Louisa May Alcott lately knows that even the simplest novels of the time required a level of literacy that nowadays seems to be, at best, a niche. Scaled back even further, Americans during the time of Lincoln were expected to be politically informed enough to listen willingly to his sometimes hour-plus speeches, purely out of interest in engaging with a democratic and fair election. I hardly need to point out the current stage of electoral politics in the United States for my point to be made.
I have also been reading Umberto Eco’s debut novel The Name of the Rose, a charming detective story set among Benedictine monks in the Middle Ages, and which sold enough copies on its release in 1980 to be considered by many a literary “event.” I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s a ‘challenging’ read, but it’s a serious, adult book that is deliberately paced, with characters often going on multi-page tangents about scripture, architecture, science, and philosophy — not something you would expect to make such a big splash nowadays, but popular enough less than 50 years ago that it hastily resulted in a film adaptation with a poorly-cast Sean Connery at the helm.
Today, if you were to recommend Eco to most YA fans (most readers, honestly, if Goodreads reviews are to be believed), they would dismiss it as “boring” — or, worse, as “pretentious.”
What is it about the threat of seeming pretentious that strikes fear into the hearts of so many? Why are we so afraid of appearing literate to others?
The recent trend of parodying “performative males” is a particularly glaring example thereof: one San Fransisco-based group even hosted a competition where men dressed in their best ‘performative’ costumes, carrying books by bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Judith Butler. The idea behind the meme is that men are “pretending” to read books in order to attract women, implicitly under false pretences. What this betrays is a society wherein genuine interest in reading — for pleasure, for personal fulfillment, for self-improvement for its own sake — must be fake, or at least on some level for the benefit of others.
You see this occasionally in online screeds against people reading on the bus or at a bar for ‘attention.’ There is no believable world where someone is reading a book for the sheer enjoyment of it. Surely someone is pulling your leg.
This may seem like making a mountain out of a molehill, and I’ll grant that the phenomenon of men using the symbology of feminism to present a safe, approachable version of themselves is certainly a proven fact at this point. What’s unfortunate in the mass proliferation of this meme is that reading as a hobby — already an activity that is heavily gendered — becomes something taboo and politically charged in its own right. If we admit that masculinity and maleness as it exists in our society today is a dangerous and oppressive force, degrading men who elect to seek out feminist literature, even under non-ideal pretences, is a counterproductive distraction.
The solution to our society’s readership crisis — where, mind you, school-aged children are finding it harder and harder to gain literacy skills once seen as basic and foundational — is not to further ostracize those who try to maintain a love for the written word.
Broadly, this preoccupation with not coming off as pretentious, or reading the wrong books in front of the wrong people, or being the “pick-me girl” or the “performative male,” is really about fear — namely, the fear of seeming or feeling stupid. But if you successfully lower the bar such that any criticism of reading books or listening to music made (often explicitly) for teenagers is essentially tantamount to a bourgeois, intellectually fascistic mindset, then you essentially cocoon people in their comfort zones, assuring them that their incuriosity and unwillingness to challenge themselves is good, actually.
If it’s really the pick-me girls and the performative males who are the oppressors, if the YA readers and Taylor Swift fangirls and Bluey watchers (the massively popular animated show for… toddlers) are the less empowered, why are they always the ones being platformed? Why are we always hearing their side of the story? Is the solution to coddle instead of challenge?
My lede being sufficiently buried by this point, I’ll get to a phenomenon I think brings these threads together coherently, if a little inelegantly. If you’ve ever been on Twitter or Reddit or any of the other mega-sites that pass for Internet forums these days, you’ll likely have seen someone critiquing someone’s preferred media in a way they find distasteful — and that inevitable response, that familiar appeal to reason, that desperate request to “let people enjoy things.”
As others have pointed out, there is a false equivalency at the heart of Let People Enjoy Things, as it exists as a worldview, a raison d’être. If I’m expected to let you enjoy something, surely it’s fair to expect you to let me critique something? We cling so desperately to our interests, to our fandoms, and are so bitter at the suggestion that we deserve any better than what we get. Our standards sink lower and yet we insist we are satisfied, to the point of lashing out at any implication otherwise.
Everything is zero sum. Any argument that Barbie, a film that performed spectacularly at last year’s box office and inspired seemingly endless cycles of discourse, might’ve been a better movie is met with instant dismissal; it’s contextualized as a fundamental inability to understand and empathize with the people who loved the movie, who thought it fulfilled every one of its promises and was exactly the feminist mission statement it was purported to be (give or take a full car commercial therein).
And of course, once Greta Gerwig was denied a Best Director nod and Margot Robbie a shot at Best Actress, the knives came out once again, indiscriminate as ever, cutting anyone who got too close. Those critiquing Barbie from a feminist perspective and those dismissing it as girly fluff, despite being diametric opposites, are conflated and crushed under the weight of the inexorable Status Quo.
There is no winning in this world for the cynic, nor for the optimist whose bright outlook includes the possibility that we might actually be owed something better — in our media, in our politics, in our authority figures, in our personal relationships. Many seem to have a knee-jerk rejection to the notion that a better world is possible, and worth taking steps towards creating, even if this means levelling some criticism towards the world we do have, towards the middling, intellectually unchallenging fare that we are increasingly expected to lap up in an endless iterative loop.
More often than not, the response one gets is that one is not sufficiently appreciative. In short: you ought to be happy with what you’ve got. You ought to be thankful. But this argument offers diminishing returns because there’s a mistake at its core, ultimately the same mistake inherent to the inert politicizing we call “centrism”: things are not staying the same. They are getting worse, and fast.
Perhaps all of this talk about reading habits and books for teenagers is a distraction from more serious concerns: the looming fascist coup d’état happening south of the border in slow motion, or better yet the climate catastrophe whose immensity we cannot yet fully comprehend.
But our habit to protect our peace at the expense of change and growth — which, mind you, is always difficult — also helps to explain why we have been so unwilling to take significant measures in reducing our carbon emissions, or why we actively participate in a political system that more and more of us are openly willing to admit does not work.
On a certain level, most people seem to have an understanding that things are… not great. Yet actually taking the steps to ameliorate this is treated as a ludicrous suggestion. And maybe that’s just human nature — after all, humanity didn’t rally together during the COVID-19 pandemic in quite the heroic way one might’ve hoped, and we’re currently in the process of reintroducing diseases once thought eradicated because of people’s conviction that vaccines cause autism.
Perhaps we are just selfish to the core and, realizing on some level that this whole social experiment is hanging by a thin thread, we have chosen to cut our losses. Perhaps we can see the writing on the wall, and our social circles have shrunk and tightened to match. Every man for himself and all that.
Whether or not this is true, I choose to believe it isn’t because I have to — because I can’t imagine choosing to continue living in a world that is essentially doomed, because on some level I have to believe that we are capable of more and of better, knowing all too well that there is a limit to the effectiveness of a placebo. & so I continue to read novels on the bus, & I continue to consciously disengage from stories of lavish celebrity weddings, & I continue to hope that we as a global community realize that things need to change and that we are actually the ones responsible for that change. I do this not out of concern for the perception of others, but for my own well-being.
I may be right, and I may not be right. But I cannot think of another way to live, other than to persist.
–X