Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and the power of female mythology
"She's writing her testament": Can women's voices 'take up too much space' in a world dominated by narratives about men?
Last week when Taylor Swift dropped TTPD, my sister, who is my friend in TS discourse, texted me first thing: “Happy Taylor Swift Day! Did you hear she dropped *more songs at 2 am? There are 31 songs!”
“I hope it’s not too much?!” she wrote with an edge of nervousness.
I knew what she meant. Since Swift’s year of total world domination, there has been a sense that she might be getting too big, taking up so much space that it would invite backlash.
Later that morning I had a meeting with one of my university students, who is doing a research project on Lilith, the female figure from Jewish mythology. She said that she was hoping that studying Lilith would help her square her identity as a feminist with her lifelong Torah study. With dismay, she counted off the handful of women she had learned about in her religious studies.
As I talked her through honing in on the question driving her project, she said searchingly: “I guess what I’m asking in my project is, can I find a way to see myself in these texts as a feminist, or just as a woman…given the lack of women in them?”
And, girl.
There’s a question.
I felt a familiar tug in my heart.
I don’t think we realize how much our space is filled up with men’s words and men’s stories—we just take it for granted. I don’t think most men notice this, certainly, but women too—including myself.
Once in a while, something like this will make this snap into place for me, and re-awaken me to the fact that I have been shovel-fed stories by and about men since I was aware of language.
And like my student, I didn’t just hear these stories, I was meant to study them, memorize them, live by them somehow even though my female-shaped life never fit into their narratives.
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In the Bible, women’s voices make up just 1.1 percent of the text. Yes, 1 percent.
Of the 1,426 names in the Bible, only 111 belong to women. Of those, 93 are given speaking parts and only 49 have a name. The Bible does not, uh, pass the Bechdel test.
The utter erasure of women is pretty remarkable really, given that it is very, very long, covers a lot of history, and leaves out the experience of half the population.
But I wasn’t raised studying Torah or the Bible, exactly.
I was raised Mormon, and in addition to some Bible study, we studied a trio of other scriptures by Joseph Smith, including the Book of Mormon. Together, they made a massive brick of scripture that could be used to do bicep curls.
The Book of Mormon, published by Joseph Smith in 1830, gives the Bible a real run for its money in terms of gender parity. Coming in at over 500 pages, the Book of Mormon names only six women in its narrative, not counting Eve, Sarah, and Mary which it borrows from the Bible.
Of the six women in the Book of Mormon alone, only two speak any words at all. TWO.
And what of the other books in this back-breaker of scripture—any more women’s voices there? Alas, no. The rest is a collection of Joseph Smith’s speeches, inner monologues, diatribes to his wife and enemies, some frankly bizarre stuff like translations of Egyptian hieroglyphics that he invented. It’s a curated potpourri of stuff that crossed Smith’s mind that he dictated to a team of clerks who wrote these things down for him. (Smith, though certainly a man of many, many words, was not terribly literate).
Like my student, I was raised carrying around 4 pounds of stories about men, for men—whether they were epic tales or a dude riffing Deep Thoughts. And I wasn’t just meant to know men’s stories; I was mean to internalize them.
And this is of course is just scratching the surface—this isn’t counting the books, movies, music, that we learn in school and those in pop culture that are overwhelmingly written by men and about men (and overwhelmingly white). The history that we learn is dominated by male historical figures. The majority of books assigned in schools, the “Western canon” are still overwhelmingly written by “dead white guys.”
All this was on my mind when I wrapped up my meeting with my student, and I opened my phone to find headlines like this about Swift being “too much” and “inescapable” — and I was not in the mood:
I have to say, given how many stories we hear about men, for men, Swift’s insistence on telling her own story as much as she wants, unapologetically, for herself and anyone who wants to hear it, seems pretty refreshing.
We are in the era of Taylor Swift and Beyoncé domination and I love to see it, not least because they just keep cranking out music, and stories, and images, and movies, for themselves and about themselves.
It feels like a teeny, tiny counterbalance to the man-centric myths that we are surrounded by. A lot of things are “inescapable,” but women’s voices are not one of them.
We live in a world where you can be a man who is a convicted rapist and run for president and have libraries named after you.
We live in a world where you can be a man who is a recorded sex predator who is not literate, and still have tomes dedicated to recording your every word. (In 2004 the Mormon Church undertook a project to put every utterance from Smith—from journal entries to boring old court testimonies—between book covers. They have made TWENTY-SEVEN volumes.)1
In that context, the idea that 31 songs might be “too much” feels like a joke.
My favorite review of TTPD is from Ann Powers for NPR, where she describes Swift as “pop’s leading writer of autofiction,” and notes that this autobiographical bent isn’t just confessional, Swift is writing her own mythos: “her songs are her new testaments.” Which sounds a bit grand. But also, that’s the point.
“For Swift, the best revenge is her pen,” writes Powers. “Using autobiography as a sword of justice is a move as ancient as the women saints who smote abusive fathers and priests in the name of an early Christian Jesus; in our own time, just among women, it's been made by confessional poets like Sylvia Plath, memoirists like Maya Angelou.”
I’m not saying that Swift is on par with these poets—I don’t think she is. But she sure as heck understands the power of the pen. And if her ambitions are to write herself into greatness, it’s working.
Beyoncé, for her part, seems to be treating greatness less as an ambition and more like a duty at this point. And since the very confessional and vulnerable Lemonade visual album (which is more artistic than anything Swift has done to date, imo—as is Cowboy Carter), it’s satisfying to see her leaving her ingenue youth behind and getting more revolutionary and innovative and weird as she goes. Most women don’t get to have a career in the spotlight for this long.
Both women launched billion-dollar world-tours last year and crowned them with blockbuster films of themselves, creating their own iconography in real time.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of room to critique both of these artists too. Debate the quality of their work, critique their politics, the particular brand of their feminism or lack thereof—all of it. Beyonce is being called out for her silence on political matters, especially as her film premiered in Israel. Claims about Swift’s White Feminism and relationship with the very problematic and frankly icky Matty Healy only seem to get worse on TTPD.
But criticisms that they are TOO MUCH and taking up too much space feel tired and gendered. I don’t want to hear about people feeling “fatigue” about the most successful women in the world because they are winning too much.
These two could write 500 songs each about their heartbreak and their petty enemies or their breakfast and we would still have about a bajillion entries to go before we approach anything like the number of male myths and “myths” and mediocre Deep Thoughts that women and girls have been spoon fed since, apparently, the time of Christ.
A couple weeks ago my partner and I were on a walk with one of our good friends who is male, and he told us that his wife was mad at him because he had never heard of “The Bell Jar,” the beloved and iconic, semi-autobiographical novel by Sylvia Plath.
Have you guys ever heard of it? Our friend asked. “Yes, of course!” I said. But my male partner had a blank look on his face. “Wait, you two don’t know what that is?” I asked incredulously. I felt my eyes start to go black.
Something in my brain started to glitch as the hundreds of thousands of pages of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Steinbeck and Franzen that I’d been force fed flashed through my mind. An image of Phillip Roth’s father shitting himself, from a book that I was obligated to read in grad school, lives rent-free in my mind ffs.
But men don’t know women’s stories. Would I rather that they read Sylvia Plath? Yes.
But I can live with it for now if they know TTPD and what “Becky with the good hair” refers to—because, if nothing else, they just can’t escape it.
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MATRIARCHY REPORT is written by Lane Anderson and Allison Lichter.
Lane Anderson is a writer, journalist, and Clinical Associate Professor at NYU who has won several journalism awards for her writing on inequality and family social issues. She has an MFA from Columbia University. She was raised in Utah and lives in New York City with her partner and young daughter.
Allison Lichter works at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York where she’s an associate dean. She has been a writer, producer and editor for radio and print, covering the arts, politics, and the workplace. She was born and raised in Queens, and lives in Brooklyn with her partner and daughter
But do they come in pink?
Spot on! So good! Thank you for writing this!
Loved this perspective. Thanks for helping me to see why I was also worried it was too much, it’s just that we are conditioned to only be a small voice.