darling, don't you ever grow up
the endless, 20-year cycle of hating taylor swift for being a girl
I need everybody to understand that I do get nuance and I am a Swiftie who is very aware of all the work Taylor needs to do (she isn’t perfect and yes, eat the rich includes her) and I’m even more aware of the connotations of gender and “girlhood” and how we need to be cautious when discussing these things in order to be trans inclusive and break out of the binary box. Most of this is just a rant born out of frustration for how people nowadays forget where Taylor’s career started and what it used to be like as a fan fifteen years ago when a lot of us were teenagers. Let me be annoyed in peace. And if you don’t like Taylor, maybe just don’t read it! That’s okay too!
If you’ve been following Taylor’s career for the last fifteen plus years, you’ll recognize the very particular cycle we find ourselves in right now: Taylor feels things, writes and puts out an album, gains the love and attention of the public, oversaturates the news cycle due to everyone loving her, does One Thing (or a lot of things, or no things, or someone else does something) and immediately draws an outcry of criticism as a result of both the oversaturation and the One Thing, becomes vilified by the general public, takes a step back believing that she has finally hit the end of her fifteen minutes of fame…and then the process starts over again.
There’s something to be said about how the media turns on women and girls when they become successful, but for Taylor it’s a regular occurrence. And the thing that I find most frustrating as a long time fan is that usually, the general public is quick to forget that this has happened in the past. More than once. People so often forget that history repeats itself. It’s not just because there is a younger generation who doesn’t know what it used to be like as a Taylor fan in the 2000s and 2010s, more often than not, it’s people who are older than me who conveniently forget what it was like back then. Who forget that they were part of the problem.
For those who forgot or weren’t there, allow me to give you a not-so-brief summary of her career. (Feel free to skip this if you remember it all too well.)
Wait, that country girl is kinda sweet…She opened for Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, wow! Oh no, that guy Kanye West totally humiliated her on stage, yikes. But I think the VMAs fiasco with Kanye was her fault actually. Also she’s dating too much. But oh it’s okay because Fearless won Album of the Year and she was the youngest winner of all time! But then she claimed she wrote her own songs, that’s a no-no, cannot be true. Also she’s dating way too much. But Speak Now, her self-written album, sold a million copies and she played a tour with a bunch of cool special guests! But oh no, she tried to do dubstep on her new album, not cool. Also she’s dating way too much. But everybody loves being “22!!!” Oops, never mind, she got too excited about almost winning Album of the Year again, even though the announcer was clearly saying Random Access Memories, not Red. Wait, she officially moved to pop and wrote the actual Album of the Year and brought amazing artists with her on tour again! She’s so silly, why did she bring the Women’s Soccer Team on stage and play “Smelly Cat” with Phoebe, she’s kind of our girl-next-door best friend with a cool girl gang! But wait, she has too many friends and also Kim and Kanye say she’s a liar. How dare she? Thank god we haven’t heard from her in a while. Oh wait, remember a couple years ago when Kim and Kanye said Taylor Swift is the worst? Kanye put a naked bust of her body in his music video and then the internet found proof that Kim and Kanye were actually the liars, not Ms. Swift. Okay, that’s so not cool, and now she’s in a happy relationship with some random actor guy…good for her! And she switched to a respectable alternative folk genre and made music with that guy from The National? Obsessed. But wait hold on, she won Album of the Year again? Wait, she put out another album. Or the same album? Oh she’s being greedy and rerecording her music. But wait actually, it’s kind of fun because now we can relive the 2010s! Wait, she has another new album, and the lead single is all about how annoying she is, that’s kind of brilliant. Nevermind, she thinks she’s fat. But it’s kind of unfair that Ticketmaster crashed her tour sale. But also she should stop being so greedy, she is practically a billionaire. Wait, her show is 3 hours long, that’s kind of insane and impressive. But she started dating Matty Healy…that guy’s an asshole, how dare she? Nevermind, they broke up, she’s cool again. Ooh and now she’s dating a football guy, that’s America’s Sweetheart! Nevermind, she has a private jet. Oooh, she won Album of the Year at the Grammys again!
[and, scene.]
Obviously, Taylor is older now, and she’s been in the public eye for nearly twenty years. You would think that people would remember where she came from, how she got her start, who she was as a teenager, but much like in real life, depending on when you meet someone, you may not ever know their past. If you’ve just started to pay attention to Taylor in the recent past, you may know her as someone who’s always been in a long term relationship. As a 30-something rich woman who flies her private jet around, who puts out multiple albums a year and is constantly playing 3 hour shows around the globe. You may know her as Travis Kelce’s girlfriend. Maybe you know her as the friendship bracelet woman. Maybe you just know her as that Millenial who wrote a bunch of songs when you were in high school or college, and you’re confused how she’s even still successful.
This is not the Taylor I know. And it’s not the Taylor that her older fanbase fell in love with. True, we all love her for who she is now and whoever she’ll be in the future (probably), but I think there’s a huge disconnect and misconception because newer fans and the general public weren’t around for her youth and therefore do not know her in the same as the rest of us. Obviously there’s something to be said about parasocial relationships, and Taylor wrote a whole album about the idea that we only know what people choose to show us or what other people say about them, so I’m not here to tell you that I know the True Taylor, but it’s ridiculous to suggest that people who started following her three years ago understand her as well as I do, having studied her like a bug for more than half of my life.
The general public - I should say non-fans here - are so quick to talk about Taylor like they know and understand her, like they see through all her games and recognize what a manipulative, money-hungry bitch she is because she’s rich and skinny and white and she flaunts her relationship with her footballer boyfriend with all her famous friends on TV. They talk about how she’s failing feminism because she’s pushing for an idealized version of girlhood that should not exist and can only exist for white upper-class girls. They say that she’s rude and spoiled and out of touch and uncaring and blah blah blah blah blah.
This isn’t me brushing off legitimate critiques, by the way. She does need to check her privilege more often than not, and I concede that the 34-year-old woman who flies her private jet is not quite the same as the 19-year-old who had yet to win a single Grammy who was publicly humiliated on live TV. And yes, girlhood in itself definitely is a white supremacist construct at its worst. But people are who they are because of their histories, and Taylor’s career, as successful as it has become since the pandemic hit, was not built in the last five years. The reason she has become even more successful now is because she was successful in her youth. And obviously I think there is a balance between “evil money-hungry bitch” and “sweet innocent girl next door” - people are not black and white, and the world is a complex place. We can still appreciate nuance here.
But out of all the things that frustrate me about Taylor’s career and this specific round of criticism, although it’s basically the same as it’s always been just slightly remixed, is when people talk about “girlhood” and Taylor Swift.
There are plenty of articles out there about the rise in “girlhood” in the last year, how gendered talk has become overwhelming over on TikTok especially, how Taylor’s Eras Tour specifically has encouraged this, so I’m not going to try to explain it all to you. I think it’s such a nuanced topic because gender is nuanced. Everyone performs gender differently, and obviously there are all kinds of norms in place that can become harmful if left untended (we’ve all seen Barbie) [That was a joke]. The more we perpetuate stereotypical gender norms and thus the patriarchy, and the more we talk about gender as a binary, the more difficult it is to fight for trans rights and more than that, to be respectful of people who do not fit in the binary. “Girl Dinner” is a funny concept that can definitely be relatable whether you’re a girl or not, but calling it girl dinner - and more importantly, gendering things within the binary on a regular basis without reflecting on why that is - can make a lot of people uncomfortable.
I’m not here to say whether “girlhood” is good or bad. While “girlhood” is inherently gendered, I do think anyone can perform that gender in their own way, and even non-girls can appreciate it and perform it accordingly. (Because it is a performance, particularly for women and older girls.) I think in this modern age, the idea of “girlhood” has become more of an aesthetic and a brand and a synonym for “nostalgia” and “youth” and “innocence,” rather than being an actual age. There’s girlhood - young children who identify as girls and are marketed to as females by toy companies and clothing brands and children’s media - and then there’s “girlhood” - people of varying ages, appropriate or not, who still feel drawn to the GIRL POWER movement of their youth, avoiding old age and reminiscing on the nostalgia of their past.
There’s so much to be said about the sociological differences between GIRL vs WOMAN but I don’t have the energy to go through that right now. But even if there’s an argument to be made that you should be referred to as a woman after a certain age, I think GIRL VS WOMAN also has a lot of implication for gender itself. I’m 28 and I guess I am technically a woman, but I’d rather someone call me a girl than a woman. Unclear why. Just personal preference. I don’t use “girl” to escape responsibility, to act less like an adult, I just prefer that language just like some people prefer to be referred to as they. I hate when people call me ma’am, so sue me! Words mean different things to different people, and while I recognize girlhood is inherently gendered (and leans heavily into the binary), there is room to interpret it in a nonbinary way. Language is so important, but so is context.
Girlhood in media is being pushed later and later. Thirty-year-olds are in their “girlhood era” - meaning, they’re embracing…being childish? Leaning into things from their youth? Wearing more stereotypical feminine, girly clothes? We talk about “girlhood” like it’s this magical place, where older women can live their childhood fantasies of playing dress-up and being princesses and having fewer responsibilities. And in a lot of ways, I do think this aesthetic of “girlhood” is primarily by, for, and about White Upperclass Allocishetero Women and their experience as young girls. It’s advertised as rainbows and unicorns and friendship bracelets and going away to camp for the summer and painting your nails with glitter and listening to mainstream pop girl music and braiding your hair and falling in love.
It’s about how people look and feel when they’re at a Taylor Swift concert. Or at least, that’s what it seems like.
Whether you were lucky enough to attend Eras or you saw it in theaters, chances are you know about the Taylor Swift concert phenomenon. For years, people have used Taylor’s shows as an excuse to dress up, to be “girlie,” and to live their princess fantasies. And sure, this has become a bit of a religion. It’s an act of worship in some ways, probably in part to please the god herself at her own show, but I think people nowadays dress up for Taylor shows as an act of worshipping themselves and their friends. The heart of stereotypical “girlhood” seems to be looking like a pretty princess with your best friends and pining after the dream that someone will romance you. You dress up to go to the show because you can get ready with your friends and take pictures with your friends and dance and look cute with your friends. It’s not like all the people attending are thinking, “Okay, how can I execute girlhood in this moment?” It’s a group of people thinking, “how can I have fun with my friends and also let some of my inner child free while I’m dancing to the songs of my youth?” And also sometimes, “how can I look really fucking hot?”
But Taylor’s shows are not strictly for Women and Girls. People of all genders and races and backgrounds dress up for her concerts. This is why it’s so annoying to limit Taylor’s fanbase to “teenage girls” or embracing “girlhood” because I’d argue that a big portion of fans do not fit in the stereotypical gender mold that the media would have you believe. “Girlhood” looks like a lot of different things to different people, and even if we’re conditioned to see it as one thing, I think it has become so gendered and binary that we fail to see how it could be more than that. Why can’t a male fan embrace “girlhood” at an Eras show? What does that even look like? Is it more feminist to limit “girlhood” to real girls? Is it more feminist to eliminate the concept of “girlhood” all together? Maybe I’m not really the person to ask.
What people may not know if they’re new to the fandom or weren’t paying attention in the 2010s is that the original reason people dressed up to go to Taylor concerts wasn’t to post ten different photos on their Instagram. The reason you dressed up for a Taylor show was because she used to pick people out of the crowd to meet her after the show, and if you dressed up in a memorable way, you were more likely to be found by her staff. It’s about looking cute, sure, but it’s also about being passionate and ridiculous and clever and fun. It’s dressing up like a life-sized milkshake. It’s dressing up like a pegacorn. It’s dressing up like her music videos. It’s making light up signs. It’s wearing an insane amount of glow-sticks. It’s about dressing up like a pun. And yes, it was to try for meet and greet, but it was also just fun. It made going to a concert an event. You can turn one night, and back then it was one hour and a half show, into something truly special because you dressed up for it with your best friends or your family or your partner.
People like to put the entire world of blame on Taylor’s shoulders. And while she’s sometimes responsible - yes, she flies her jet a lot and is probably contributing to climate change in some ways - I think people forget she is just one person. One person with a lot of influence, sure, but not everything is as calculated as she or the internet leads you to believe. Which is to say, all this “girlhood” she’s responsible for isn’t all her fault. And I don’t necessarily think she was masterminding it.
For the entire span of this woman’s career, people have vilified her for being a girl. Now she’s grown into womanhood, but when she was coming up, she was constantly belittled and criticized for her girlhood. She was criticized for dating too much, for trying too hard to be liked, for being too excited about getting awards. Hell, for being too excited just going to award shows. She had her credibility questioned at every turn, and for years people argued that she did not write her own material, that she was a bad performer, that she had no talent, that she was trying too hard. And above all, she was criticized for writing about and singing about her feelings. Her career was built on it. (It’s ironic because the thing that people tore her down for is literally the thing that made her one of if not the most successful woman of her generation.) The girl was too emotional, and people hated her for it.
Arguably the only reason Taylor has leaned so heavily into the aesthetic and concept of “girlhood” is because her girlhood has been criticized for her whole life. She’s a huge “let me do this out of spite” person, and so for all the people who told her to stop, she said, “I will actually just do this more!” She’s not afraid to be herself, even though she’s been punished for it for years. And quite frankly, a lot of the things she gravitates towards are girly. Because she’s a girl. (Shocking, I know.) Maybe part of why she’s reliving the eras of her past is because she couldn’t fully appreciate them at the time due to, uh being critiqued and groomed and gaslighted as a teen. Maybe she’s revisiting her youth because she was manipulated by older men in the industry and wants to reclaim it for herself. Maybe she’s actually still just that eight year old girl who wants to fit in at school and play guitar and write songs. (Aren’t we all?)
And for all the times she’s tried to step out of it, to be the woman she is, to act mature or be more of an adult, people still manage to associate her with girlhood. Believe it or not, Taylor Swift did not set out to make a friendship bracelet empire when she started the Eras Tour. She just happens to have a lot of passionate fans who love friendship and jewelry and dressing up. For her entire career, people have perceived her in the most rudimentary of ways, without trying to understand her or appreciate why she does certain things. People can’t appreciate satire (“Blank Space”) and they constantly try to understand her through the lens of other people (her fans, her boyfriends, her music performances, other peoples’ opinions of her), and in the end they misunderstand her. They see what they want to see, and apparently, all they see is the same teenage girl they saw sixteen years ago. People see Taylor Swift as the embodiment of girlhood because they won’t allow her to grow into a woman. Why is it “girlhood” to put on a fancy dress and play pretend? Why is it “girlhood” to write about your honest feelings, even if and especially if those feelings involve romantic love? Why is it “girlhood” to reminisce on your youth? Why is it “girlhood” to categorize and celebrate the seasons of your life?
Somehow people don’t throw “boyhood” onto someone like Ed Sheeran, who is arguably the best male counterpart for Taylor. (I love Ed, this is not a dig on Ed.) He had his own version of Eras on his recent tour, playing an extended set with cuts from all of his albums. Each of his albums has a distinct era of its own. He grew up around the same time she did, he worked hard to write his own music and build his career from the bottom. He writes authentic and honest songs about his own feelings and life experience. Hell, he even writes about romance! And yet people don’t run around criticizing him in the same way. Is this because he’s not as successful as Taylor, not as rich? Is this because the general public doesn’t talk about him as much as they talk about her? Or because Ed’s not in the public eye as much as Taylor? Is this because he doesn’t put on a performance the same way Taylor does? If that’s the case, then how come people cannot separate the performance from Taylor? Or is this because Taylor’s whole career is a performance of “girlhood?”
In many ways, girlhood is a performance, if only because all genders are performance. We choose to express ourselves through gender, and just because you are performing a more mainstream gender, it doesn’t mean it isn’t a performance. And yes, Taylor herself is incredibly good at performing a stereotypical feminine gender. (The girl loves her fluffy dresses.) But I think people fail to recognize that the person Taylor is on stage (or in her music) is not quite the person she is in real life. For as much as the general public loves to say, “Just because you’re a diehard fan, you don’t know the real Taylor,” they don’t seem to recognize that the person who dresses up on stage and is vilified in the media is also not the Real Taylor. Someone like Lady Gaga has an easily identifiable persona on stage when she wears a meat dress or puts on a performance at the VMAs - maybe because Stefani actively chose to create GaGa for separation on stage, or maybe because GaGa is just incredibly unhinged. For as much as Taylor is herself when she performs, and she often performs songs that are incredibly personal to her life and her story, she is still performing.
“So, let me tell you my secret little dream for this evening. These are songs that I have written about my life, or things that I felt at one point in time. Whether I was a teenager, in my 20s, or a couple years ago. But after tonight, when you hear these songs out and about in the world, my dream is that you’re gonna think about tonight, and the memories we made here together.”
If you listen to her during her “Lover” Eras Tour speech, you’ll hear her say that even though she wrote a lot of these songs about her experiences, they no longer belong to her. She has outgrown many of them, and a lot of the truths she once wrote about no longer apply to her now. And even more than that, there’s a huge potion of her discography that is fiction. While folklore and evermore are known for their fictitious love triangles and made-up murders, I think people fail to remember “Love Story” was her first big hit.
People are so quick to believe that all of Taylor’s songs are True Stories. For as often as people yell about Taylor being manipulative and calculating, they always seem to ignore the possibility that she can impart her Real Experiences into Fake Scenarios. The heart of Taylor Swift is not autobiographical in plot, it is autobiographical in spirit. It’s about the feeling, not the truth. And sure, I guess the spirit is “girlhood” in some ways, seeing as her early work was written when she was a girl and not yet a “woman,” but just because she puts on fancy dresses on stage and pretends she’s a princess, it doesn’t mean we can simplify her entire career or catalogue to just GIRLHOOD.
But also, why do people keep acting like that’s such a bad thing? Why is it so horrible that Taylor’s gender expression is frilly dresses and painted nails and braids and sparkles? Yes, the woman is clearly very cishetero, but it’s not like she’s pushing for all the women and girls at her shows to submit to their husbands and become stay at home trophy wives and give up on feminism. (We cannot deny her most feminist lyric to date, “In your life, you'll do things greater than dating the boy on the football team.”) [That is a joke.] And while we can definitely criticize Taylor’s feminism for not being intersectional enough, she’s done a lot of work over the years to evolve. (Remember when she used to talk about how she wasn’t a feminist at all? Dark times.) Embodying “girlhood” is not necessarily the same as being a terf, even though it can sometimes turn into that if you are, like, actually a terf.
I think the reason why so many women now are embracing “girlhood” as an aesthetic is because they didn’t get to have the girlhood that is portrayed in media, because there are things they wanted to do when they were a kid that they didn’t get to do. Some of us didn’t get to be our most authentic self as kids. Some of us were like the girl in Sleepover who had a self-proclaimed love of brownies and didn’t usually get the guy. Some of us were the invisible girl who got sat on. Some of us felt left out at school and didn’t get invited to parties and had a hard time making friends. Some of us are on the spectrum. Some of us didn’t grow up with a lot of money to buy pretty dresses and paint our nails.
A lot of people argue that the reason they can’t connect with Taylor is because they didn’t have the picture-perfect-girlhood like 34-year-old Taylor had, but they don’t realize that Taylor’s girlhood was full of struggles just like anybody else. She was bullied. She had an eating disorder. She struggled to make and keep friends. I don’t know if anybody had a perfect childhood, no matter how rich or skinny they are as an adult. And I don’t want to minimize the struggles of others - the BIPOC and lower class and disabled children who definitely have a harder time than a white girl who grew up with rich parents - but one person’s suffering does not negate the suffering of someone else. And a lot of people are so caught up on her current success and persona and career that they fail to recognize where she came from and how she became the person she is today.
This rise in “girlhood” is also probably because a lot of people around Taylor’s age are orbiting their Saturn Return. Which is a lot of astronomy bullshit for revisiting their youth. (Saturn returns to the same spot in the sky every 28ish years, so if you’re in your late twenties, the energies might be similar to when you were little. Supposedly.) The point here is not the astronomy per say, but the fact that when you’re late twenties and early thirties, you are unraveling a lot of shit. It’s a season of life where you’re trying to work through all the stuff that happened to you as a kid that is affecting your adult life. It involves a lot of reflection and looking back and wishing you could be a little kid again. You’re seeing your younger self in a different light and probably feeling a lot of compassion towards them. You want to love them the way nobody else did at that age.
The rise in “girlhood” might also be because we’re watching the early 2000s come back around. I’m watching young girls embrace the fashions that my generation was criticized for - low rise jeans and butterfly clips and crop tops and baggy pants and big chunky sneakers - and all I can think is that when I was in grade school, we were fed “girlhood” on a silver plater. Whether that was a brilliant marketing tactic or just coincidence (with capitalism, nothing is coincidence), my nostalgia for my youth looks like a lot of pink. Since I was so young, all I can remember is the intense dichotomy of the gender binary when it came to media and music and toys. I spent a lot of my youth feeling like I couldn’t enjoy pink because it was so girly. I didn’t want to be a girl, I wanted to wear blue. And so many of the girls I knew hated how the world was throwing girlhood in our faces, so we turned to tomboyism and pretended like we were too good for Lisa Frank. Is that internalized misogyny or is that just frustration at not being able to present our genders in the most authentically comfortable way? (Probably a little of both!)
While many of Taylor’s fans grew up with her, and I know a huge portion of her fanbase is made of Millenials and elder Gen Z, she has garnered a lot of young fans during these recent eras. With older fans reliving their girlhood and reminiscing on the past and the younger fans who are currently living their girlhood and discovering the early 2000s, it’s almost like we’re all variations on the same “girlhood.” We didn’t know any better back then, but the younger generation doesn’t know any better now. Maybe we’re all just stuck in a timeloop.
People fail to understand that my girlhood was Taylor, and not Woman Taylor who is a successful billionaire businesswoman, but actual Girl Taylor who was sixteen and trying to find her place in this world. When I was thirteen, I played “Invisible” on repeat while trying to fall asleep because if someone as pretty as Taylor could struggle with getting a boy to like her, then maybe I didn’t feel so bad about myself. I built core memories around the Fearless album because all my friends and I used to play it at school and at parties and in the car, and it won the Album of the Year a few months before I turned fifteen. I was watching Taylor on my computer screen as she navigated being a teenage girl right along with us. Speak Now was a huge part of my life when I was in high school, and it reminds me of my hometown and my old best friend, and I watched Taylor just start to become an adult while still being treated like a kid by the media. I’m not putting a 13 on my hand because it’s cool, I’m doing it because I’m honoring who Taylor and I both were when we were young together. I’m not dressing up to match reputation era because I’m edgy and I want to look hot, I’m doing it because Taylor and I both had a really hard time in 2016/2017 and she helped me get through it with her music.
And isn’t that what this younger generation is doing now? At the start of Taylor’s career, the media liked to yell about how all her fans were teenage girls. And yes, that was true then, and now many of those teenage girls are in their thirties. But it’s still true to this day. Young girls loved Taylor Swift then, and they love her now and they will love her way into the future. I watched so many little girls dancing like crazy at the movie theater last fall and at tour all last summer. And why is that? It’s because Taylor created a safe space where it’s okay to be a teenage girl. It’s okay to be someone who is on the outside. It’s okay to put on a performance, to wear what makes you feel good, to not be ashamed of your feelings. She celebrates being weird and different, being criticized and standing up to bullies. She has built a community of people who all connect over our own vulnerabilities.
The reason I have spent so much of my life dedicated to Taylor and her career is in part because she does feel like a friend of mine, but more than that, it’s because I have been able to find myself in her music. People act like Taylor is the devil, but I’ve only ever known her as the girl who felt the same things I did. And it doesn’t matter if she’s as talented as The Beatles (she is) or if she writes as well as Joni Mitchell (she does) because she makes me feel things. More than that, she has shown me that vulnerability is nothing to be ashamed of. Sharing your feelings is brave (some might even say fearless…) and it’s more important to speak now (sorry, I had to) than to sit in silence with all the things you could’ve said. Unfortunately, sometimes you do actually need to just shake it off.
So often people want “girls” - and I mean that literally but also in a more gender-neutral phrase (like “dudes”) - to shrink themselves. They expect us to shut up, to comply, to make ourselves more palatable for the men of society in power. The “girlhood” epidemic is not about Being a Girl™️ - or at least it shouldn’t be - it’s about taking back the power that was stolen from us, from the people on the outside. It’s about allowing ourselves to be who we want to be, to embrace our vulnerability and our feelings, to sing at the top of our lungs without shame and dance like nobody’s watching and unmask the version of ourselves that we locked away at a young age so we can be safe in a world that does not want us to be who we are.
And yeah, we need to be careful with gendered language and I think there’s a lot of work that needs to be done in regards to feminism and intersectionality, and by all means, Taylor needs to be held accountable as much as anybody else…but people keep pushing girlhood onto Taylor and her fans and then scolding them for being exactly who they are, and it’s the same thing that has been happening to us for fifteen years. The news cycle has always claimed that Taylor fans are teenage girls, even when we haven’t been teenage girls for a very long time, but then when we act like teenage girls suddenly it’s a bad thing. What is the truth! Sometimes people just want to have fun at a concert. Sometimes people find extreme joy in Taylor Swift’s music. What about that?