Taylor Swift and the Trap of Needing To Be Liked
I’ve never been a fan of Taylor Swift or her music. I loathed how perfect she seemed, and I found her good girl shtick annoying. I’m also from Nashville and have a deep hatred of country music for that reason alone. But out of some twisted combination of insatiable curiosity and masochism, I decided to hate-watch her new Netflix documentary last weekend. Imagine my surprise when the opening scene immediately pulled me in and made me actually like her. Because this woman 12 years younger than me was fearlessly admitting, right out of the gate, what so many of us—at any age—have a hard time saying out loud: that we desperately need to be liked. Miss Americana is a wake-up call for us all.
Needing to be liked is a death sentence for women.
Swift secretly starved herself to have the body she thought everyone wanted her to have. I get it. Despite thinking myself quite the feminist, I fundamentally believed no one would want to sleep with me, like me, or take my ideas seriously as a woman if I wasn’t pleasing to the male gaze. For nearly two decades, I dieted, starved myself, threw up, overexercised, you name it, all in the name of being thin. By the end of this outright war on my body, I was vomiting blood and nearly ruptured my esophagus. My fear of actual death was what finally forced me to get help, let go of what “they” want me to look like, and eventually learn to love my big butt and Hamlett hips.
If people couldn’t like me for my looks, they’d just have to like me for something else.
Swift encountered this dilemma too. She also tried to be liked by being “the good girl” and always doing “the right thing.” Her entire moral code was wrapped up in this. The problem is, she, like so many of us, soon learned that being good and being liked are often in direct conflict with each other, especially as women. The good girl doesn’t ruffle feathers or make people uncomfortable. But the right thing often requires us to do exactly that. We’re screwed either way.
I get now why Swift stayed mute for so long though. It wasn’t just being locked into the good girl persona, having low self-esteem, or being so young. It was also her handlers, the industry itself, and even her own dad pressuring her to keep quiet. Swift was even in tears, begging her father to forgive her for getting political and speaking out against Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn. Being from Nashville, I know exactly how hard it is to go against your family members and friends by standing up to Senator Blackburn and the GOP. Just like me, Swift has had to learn about privilege and how much she benefits personally from it, and to accept that some people aren’t going to like you for talking about it.
People would just have to like me for something other than biting my tongue in the name of “good.”
As a woman, you also have that fun choice between being liked or respected. A lot of folks like the good girl, because she says yes when she should say no and, thus, lets people walk all over her. They prey on her desperate need for approval. For years, Swift exhausted herself, accommodating and overcorrecting to satisfy conflicting wants, get pats on the head, and avoid criticism. But when your entire foundation is built solely on those likes, the thought of even one person hating you threatens the whole structure it stands on. For me, it still feels like a death threat when people troll me on Twitter over one of my articles, and I’m not even famous or getting that many actual death threats! It’s not surprising to me that when #TaylorSwiftIsOver became the number one trend on Twitter, she was faced with nothing short of an existential crisis. “I had to deconstruct an entire belief system for my own personal sanity,” Swift says in Miss Americana. If she was to survive, Swift had to not only give up being the good girl, she also had to let go of her need to be liked.
Not needing people to like you is the only way to be genuinely liked by anyone, including yourself.
I used to be a lot like Swift; I was the yes girl and the go-to girl. I was too afraid to say no, and I loved feeling important. Some people call this people-pleasing, but I wasn’t really trying to please anyone; I just needed them to think I was amazing. This approval-seeking behavior led me to sleep with men I didn’t want to, give my time and energy to people who took advantage of it, sometimes end up in dangerous situations, and ultimately feel victimized and bitter—even if no one ever forced me to do any of it. Like Swift, I found myself in the traps of the victim narrative, which is so much easier than admitting to yourself that your need to be liked was the root of your problems. Swift owns up to this, and I respect the hell out of that.
My critical turning point with needing to be liked was just like Swift’s. Being sexually assaulted was a wake-up call for her and me both. For Swift, despite having witnesses and a photo and zero doubt in her mind that she was groped, some entitled man baby was still trying to sue her and insist he was the victim. So she endured the humiliation of going to trial to hold him accountable and to set an example for her fans. Even though she says it wasn’t worth it in the end, she did realize that making some people angry is actually empowering as hell.
I didn’t get the justice Swift did, unfortunately. When I went to the police after escaping my ex, who’d tried to blackmail me and bite my fingers off (among other things), raped me multiple times, and later posted stolen photos of my lady bits on Twitter, they did nothing. Zilch. Despite having proof, witnesses, and texts to back up my story, they never even called him in for questioning. Instead, they suggested I get a restraining order if I really was all that worried about him. I have refused to remain quiet about it despite the police’s attempt to shut me up. I’ve written about it openly in my articles and spoken out about it on a podcast to shine a light on the problem. Since then, women have written to me, saying they left their partners after hearing my story. Like Swift, I realized talking about subjects that make a lot of people uncomfortable not only empowers you, it also empowers others who need hope.
It’s not just the good girl, the go-to girl, the yes girl acts that I had to let go of. My cool girl facade, which is rooted in the same search for approval, had to go too. I could hang with the boys, tell the dirtiest jokes, drink everyone under the table, and talk more shit than the alpha-est of men, but my entire identity was wrapped up in being the opposite of “those” girls. The cool girl is the chosen one. She’s special. She could beat up the good girl if she only cared enough. But the cool girl isn’t supposed to care about anything. She’s oh so chill and really hates the kind of “drama” those other girls create. But in the end, the cool girl is kidding herself.
I don’t want to be liked for not being someone else.
Like Swift, I ultimately had to let go of all of these archetypes that box women in if I was to be free. The patriarchy demands opposing things from women, then convinces us to hate ourselves and/or other women for buying into these very things. So, the nice girl, the cool girl, the fill-in-the-blank girl all have the same problem: They are toxic identities we cling to at first for our very own survival—until we realize they are the very things destroying us. Just think about it. What would actually happen if the misogynistic boot perpetually on a woman’s neck just magically disappeared one day? Well, as Swift so beautifully showed us in her Netflix special, she’d probably be left to face an equally relentless and hostile oppressor: herself.
Our need to be liked is killing us.
Sometimes I’m not sure what to be more afraid of: the outside forces of the patriarchy or the forces within myself guaranteeing that very system stays intact. Like Swift, I’ve finally learned to at least deal with the latter. I cannot change the world or dismantle the patriarchy alone, but I can do my part to ensure that I like and respect myself. Funny thing is, when you stop needing something so badly from others, they’re more likely to give you just that.
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