Taylor Swift and Anti-Gay Bullying

Taylor Swift. Lots of people love her. Others can’t stand her. At Duke, I was surprised to find guys in my freshman dorm listening to her while they sat in the hallway [an aside: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with guys listening to Taylor Swift…or any other artist. And I recognize that my “surprise” might imply some sort of gender binary and norm…but I think it’s more a reflection of the masculinity construct that existed at my high school/in my home community]. Me? I sometimes listen to her when I’m doing work. Which is what I was doing before deciding to write this post.

There’s probably a lot that I, as a feminist and member of the LGBTQA community, could criticize about her songs. As an outspoken member of both of those communities, there’s a lot to criticize about a lot of songs by a lot of artists. And I could probably find things she does well, too. But right now, I only want to be critical about one thing, and that is a line in “Picture to Burn.”

“State the obvious, I didn’t get my perfect fantasy/I realized you love yourself more than you could ever love me/So go and tell your friends that I’m obsessive and crazy/That’s fine, I’ll tell mine you’re gay”

I was surprised when I first listened to the song and heard those words. In the context in which those words are presented, I can come up with two scenarios for the characters in her song.

1) Her ex-boyfriend is gay and she’s going to out him in revenge. I obviously don’t have to explain to the readers of the blog why outing someone is inappropriate and incredibly hurtful. In this case, though, the song justifies her outing her ex-boyfriend, sending the message that it's okay (at least under some circumstances) to out someone.

2) She’s going to spread an untrue rumor to hurt him. This scenario implies that being gay is “bad” (cause, um, you typically don’t spread nice/flattering rumors about people you don’t like/your ex-boyfriend). It perpetuates the negative connotation of being gay. More than that though, it normalizes anti-gay bullying of non gay-identified people [aside #2: I don’t think anti-gay bullying of anyone is okay…gay-identified or not. I chose to highlight the non-gay-identified part, though, because in this scenario her ex-boyfriend isn’t actually gay]. Anti-gay bullying doesn't just hurt LGBT-identified individuals. It doesn't just hurt individuals who are silently questioning their sexuality. Nor does it solely affect individuals who have gay friends or family. The fact of the matter is that being called gay or another homophobic slur is the worst insult an elementary school-, middle school-, or high school-aged kid can be called. A 2005 survey by GLSEN found that the second most frequent reason kids are bullied is because of actual or perceived sexual orientation and gender identity. Even if peers don't actually think that another student is gay, homophobic language is still likely to be used to degrade another student. Last April, 11-year-old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover commit suicide after being bullied with anti-gay slurs for months. The point is: anti-gay bullying is harmful to anybody who bullies target, it is pervasive, and it hurts.

A third possibility: Maybe I’m way over analyzing this all (it’s been known to happen).

I don’t know that I have anything really intelligent to say about it, other than "this is bad" (which doesn't count as "really intelligent" in my book). And maybe nobody else listens to her so you don’t really care about what she says in her songs (though I would argue that as a community we need to take issue with it even if she isn't the most played song on your ipod because pop culture themes penetrate the rest of society).

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this, though, is that when I went to look up the lyrics to confirm what I heard (I’ve been known to hear weird things that don’t exist), I saw that a few websites list different lyrics that exclude the gay line. Is this indicative of a “clean” version? Which then seemingly admits that she understood why what she says in that line is problematic. Yet she still included them.

Thoughts?

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Real life lesbians faring better than their TV counterparts

gAy D (H) D

This is more of a random assortment of ideas that were too small to be a full blog post yet something that I really wanted to share.

Well first tangent is a moment of disbelief, a moment of awesome, is because of Henrietta Lacks’ contribution to science. Ms Henrietta lacks should probably have here name sewn in on the AIDS quilt. Her flesh literally is responsible for advancements in AIDS research. This prodigal woman died in 1951 of cervical cancer. Before she died, this black woman from the south had a biopsy of her cervical cancer tumor taken without her consent. Her cells are still alive, well actually they are by all scientific and medical standpoints, immortal. Now referred to as the HeLa cell line, they were the birth of the modern biotechnology industry with over 60,000 scientific papers published due to research on her cells. Companies have been producing , growing, and selling Ms. Lacks' flesh in high volume to laboratories for such research. The life cycle of HIV was studied in death with HeLa cell lines. Well that's enough on Henrietta - click here and here for more info.

I have to say I there have been a lot of LGBT coverage in the media lately. From Clair Bennett’s "it's complicated" lesbian-ish relationship with her roommate Gretchen on Heroes; the premier of RuPaul's Drag Race season 2; the Super Bowl ad for Mancrunch that was pulled (read more here and here), to President Obama’s State of the Union declaration to end Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (read more here). On a side note, the last novel I read was the latest installment to the Stardoc series by S. L. Viehl (read her blog).

Third tangent: the series could be described as Grey's Anatomy/ER in space crossed with super cheesy romance movie like The Notebook and some mixture of Star Trek and Star Wars. What's interesting is that unlike other sci-fi works where the romance is obviously heterosexual or implied as such, Stardoc has homosexual relationships and gender bending and alternative families. *Begin spoiler* The main character is the feminized clone of a mad geneticist who almost rapes her to impregnation *end spoiler*. There is also a species of humanoid that link biochemistry with their mates to marry for life, opposite marriage of course. Yet one of the male folk of said-species falls in love with another man, a human bird hybrid; so excommunication ensues. A whole host of other things happen like interplanetary slavery and inter-dimensional stepmothers that try to rewrite your memories for the fate of the universe. (I know that makes it sound like a B-movie SF flick but it is one of my favorite series a if this was a sci-fi blog I would have a full critique in praise of it.)

That's all for my tangents. (Now would be a great time to lay off the caffeinated products.)