Welcome to Pocket-sized Feminism, a column dissecting feminism in our modern age. Pocket-sized for your convenience.
I don’t quite know when the obsession began, but I remember dancing alone in our backyard with my portable CD player to the album Fearless. My childhood memories are all underscored by Taylor Swift. Once my parents clocked on, there was always a square shaped parcel under the Christmas tree with her newest album.
Growing up, I never quite fit in. My parents would say I was gifted and intelligent, but I think I was maybe a tad too annoying. For whatever reason, I was always an outsider to my peer group, relentlessly bullied by the popular girls and their clique-tatorships. My tomboyish nature didn’t help me one bit; I was frequently confused for a boy and schoolyard taunts of ‘les’, ‘lesbo’, and ‘dyke’ followed me around. I didn’t like myself. A natural side effect of being told every day that nobody else does. I began to lose myself, ever so slowly. I was desperate to fit in, to be liked, to be more palatable. No, I hate pink. No, I hate dresses. No, I hate Taylor Swift. I rid myself of her albums with the lyric sheets I praised like gospel, now laid on top of a Lifeline pile. I was empty.
The day I got boobs I was terrified. I was at a sleepover, and I ended up vomiting that night from too much pizza and anxiety. My Mum picked me up and I hid in my room for a week, too scared to go to school. I wasn’t ready for what “womanhood” would bring, whatever that was, because I was raised to think that it was something sexual, girly, flowery – everything I wasn’t. Something bad. Once, when my mum was heavily applying stage makeup to my prepubescent face for a school production of Grease, my hair tied up taut in a high ponytail, I announced that I would never wear makeup.
“You will one day, all women do,” she nonchalantly responded.
I ended up hanging out mostly with boys. It was alright at first. Boys are less drama, or so they say. XBOX chat rooms filled with slurs and hate speech but I’m silent.
“God, women are such cunts.”
“I’m right here,” I half-joke.
“You don’t count.”
I change schools to escape the bullying, and I start playing games alone. It’s better, but my wallflower days are far from over. I spend most of my lunch breaks in the library. The librarians are my best friends, and they even let me request books for the library. I become quite the bookworm and observer. And quite the little feminist, almost. I despise housewives and dedicate myself to becoming a doctor, proving even the boys wrong about girls. I became a very first-wave feminist, if you catch my drift.
But it is at this new school that I meet Jacob. He’s an avid Taylor Swift fan. It was strange to me to meet a guy who liked Taylor Swift, something I had grown to attribute all feminine traits too and further demonise. But he was so secure in himself, and I always admired that. We chat a lot about politics at school and become allies in our very dramatic drama class. When Fearless (Taylor’s Version) rolls around. I give it a listen, at Jacob’s insistence, and I’m immediately taken back to my childhood backyard with my portable CD player. It was slow process, but I stopped fearing dresses, I stopped fearing pink, and I stopped fearing Taylor Swift, and what my love of these things meant to the outside world.
It was earlier this year when I went to The Eras Tour where it all hit me. I was with Jacob, his friend Ana, and my boyfriend, Tom – Melbourne, Night two! And behind us were two little girls. These two little girls screamed the loudest the whole concert and it was during Fearless that I cried. Yes, there was the fangirl of it all – I love Taylor Swift – but it was mostly because of those two girls behind me. They were me and I wanted to turn around and grab them by the shoulders and just tell them never to change themselves, never to hold themselves back, or bend themselves out of shape and beyond recognition because some boy thinks he’s all that or some girl thinks you’re a bit silly. Don’t ever think that you’re too much because this is so beautiful.
I’ve grown to realise that it was never femininity that scared me, or that I didn’t belong to girlhood. It was misogyny, a hatred of all things woman I had internalized and let fester. At the end of the day, feminism is not a one-day process. Like most things, and particularly in achieving social change, it is a continual learning process. Which is why now I’m the vice president of the QUT Swifties club and I’m here, writing for Glass in my Pocket Feminism column. Girlhood belongs to you, and I just wanted you to know, that this is me trying.
