Taylor Swift's Relationship to My Daughter
Why It's Important
(This post is a brief diversion from what I intended for this week. I’m on vacation in London with my family so, I wasn’t sure I’d get one up this week. It’s taking every ounce of restraint I can muster to not give you all a run-down of the trip in the way I did last year when we travelled to Athens and Rome. But there is a tie-in to the assault that happened between me and my girlfriend turned wife when we were teenagers. So, a few words about why we decided to take our vacation holiday in London this year.)
It’s 9:54 PM on August 17th and I’m sitting in a London Starbucks. Beside me is a fresh, large coffee americano1 next to my open Macbook. I was fortunate enough to grab a seat at a large table next to the double-door which is propped fully open. There are somewhere between one to two dozen people sitting here with me. Most of us appear to be doing what I’m doing…killing time. Taylor Swift is playing through the Starbucks speakers.
High in the skyline just across the street from me is a large arch partially hidden by an apartment building. The arch is the architectural highpoint of Wembley Stadium, where Taylor Swift is also playing.
But over there it’s happening live. In person.
Standing field-level within Wembley and singing at the top of their lungs are my 21-year-old son, my 48-year-old wife, and most importantly, my 17-year-old daughter and a good friend. We’ve travelled the however many miles it is from Baltimore to Chicago to London so they can see this concert. Oddly, it was easier to get tickets to see Swift in London than it was in North America. And, if you throw in a week’s vacation in London as an excuse, it was in its own way a bit more cost-effective.
I’m sitting in the coffee shop waiting for them because cost-effective doesn’t mean cheap. When my wife asked if I wanted to go to the concert, it seemed the better financial decision to sit this one out. Four tickets were significantly less money than five.
Not attending the concert’s is a decision I regret. I am a big believer in taking opportunity to see the greats among us when we can. Love her or hate her, Taylor Swift is a great of our time. From a popularity perspective, she’s what Michael Jackson was to the 1980s. The Beatles in the 1950s and 60s, Edgar Allen Poe in his time, Beethoven in his, Mozart…
You get my point.
I wish I’d gone.
But I’m glad my daughter and her friend are here to see Swift. Swift is someone worth looking up to. I want her to be like Taylor Swift. It’s not about the fame or success on the world stage.
It’s about self-confidence, self-esteem and who gets to determine her story.
From what I can tell, Swift knows her value as a human. I don’t mean as a star. I mean as a human woman. A person.
Like me.
Like you.
Like anyone else.
In 2013 while in Denver for a performance, Swift posed for a picture with a male radio personality, David Mueller, and his girlfriend. The photo shoot was nothing out of the ordinary for the star. However, as they posed for the picture, Swift felt the hand of a person grab her bum underneath her skirt. In the moment she maintained professional composure and posed for the picture. Soon after, she reported the unwanted contact. Mueller subsequently lost his job, denied the accusation and sued Swift for damages in the amount of $3 Million. Swift counter-sued for a symbolic $1. You can view the picture for yourself here.
Swift was questioned heavily during her testimony at court. She was buffeted with question after question. Her answers were consistent and pointed to the same response.
I don’t know this guy. He grabbed my butt. He doesn’t get to do that.
Over and over again, the complainant’s lawyer asked her a series of questions meant to shift responsibility for the incident from the person who grabbed her bum to Swift herself. She’d have none of it. (You can find her most pointed responses here.) Eventually she summed things up:
“I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later [the case was heard in 2017], and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.”
When confronted with a line of accusatory questioning regarding unwanted physical contact from someone else, she remained the embodiment of calm confidence and self-respect. It’s the kind of confidence I wish for my daughter to have.
It’s the kind of confidence my wife didn’t have when she was dating me. I was laying red flags out everywhere. She didn’t recognize them. And if she had, I’m not sure she’d have had the confidence to respond in her own favor.
I don’t know if we’d be together today if she had. She might have left me. That would mean that she, my son, daughter and her friend wouldn’t be standing at the Taylor Swift concert tonight. But it’s one of those things that wouldn’t matter anyway. Our reality today simply wouldn’t exist and a different one would. One where a young college student would have told her line-crossing boyfriend to pound sand.
Many years later, she developed confidence and did tell me to pound sand. My response was different than she expected, I think. I decided to change. There’s a chance that might have happened when we were dating too. We’ll never know.2
I want my daughter to know that when a person crosses the line, a line she can draw wherever she likes, she can tell him to get lost if she wants to. She has a value that is beyond what even she knows.
As I typed that last sentence, fireworks exploded over Wembley Stadium indicating to me that the show is coming to a close.
So is this post.
Taylor Swift is a superstar of the first order. She’s someone my daughter looks up to. I’m here for it.
In London and at home.
If you’re an American in Europe and just want a regular ol’ cup of joe, you order a coffee americano. It was interesting to me that when I ordered it at this Starbucks, they asked me if I wanted a small or large rather than the “tall,” “grande,” or “venti” we need to order in America. Here in Europe it’s much more likely that the people ordering would recognize what those three Italian words mean. Go figure.
Part of what helped Joy to gain the confidence to be willing to separate from me was a decade-long maturation process. I’d gone through a similar process. If she’d broken up with me when we were dating, I don’t know that I’d have had the maturity to recognize the truth of what she was saying, and change to repair the hurt I was causing.
As a daughter, the reason I had the ability to say “respect me” to men was because of my dad and my brothers. They not only taught me self-respect, they taught me what was appropriate behaviour from other men and what wasn’t. When I was unsure as a teenager, I could always ask them. I remember at the age of 14 being asked out by an 18 yr old in front of my friends and the pressure was to say yes, when I wanted to say no. I didn’t know him! So I said yes but told him he would have to ask my dad, then went home, told my dad I was pressured and my dad said not to worry. When the guy came over, my dad calmly and politely asked him why, as a 18 yr old, he was asking out 14 yr old girls? It was inappropriate and creepy and he needed to stick to his own age. He refused him permission to take me out and to never ask me again. It was such a relief to me because he put the responsibility on the boy, not me.
Taylor learned her self-respect at home. She gets a lot of flack for writing songs about past boyfriends but, hey, maybe their behaviour not only needs to be called out, but needs to be flagged to young women who listen to her music. They need to understand that it isn’t appropriate. I don’t listen to Taylor’s music, but I think she is an awesome force for women.
Parents teach their children by role-modelling or in actual words how respect works. With or without Taylor, girls need to hear that they must be respected and boys need to hear they must respect.
This writing made perfect sense in your ongoing theme.