I’ve already told you: the only way to a woman’s heart is along the path of torment. I know none other as sure. — Marquis de Sade
MANILA, Philippines - Taylor Swift’s newest single Blank Space contains nothing new. The lyrics sway between mawkish, self-confessional, and contemptuous; a paraphrase of the media’s deep dossier of her doe-eyed, man-eating proclivities in rhyme. Yes, Taylor Swift has had choice picks of lovers in real life, including my personal favorites Connor Kennedy and Jake Gyllenhaal. Blank Space obviously isn’t the first time she’s capitalized on her admirable and seasoned dating career. She’s penned herself as the victim in the past. Cue shudder-inducing Dear John circa 2010 (“Dear John, I see it all now it was wrong / Don’t you think 19’s too young to be played?”), which was written about — you guessed it — the 13-years-older John Mayer. These days she’s 24, singing about having “a long list of ex-lovers” who’ll all tell you she’s “insane.” The licentious crazy woman in her sings to me.
The recently released video is as problematic as it is pretty. It is a satirical take on emotional instability and domestic violence against men. Blank Space director’s Joseph Kanh’s moving pictures speak louder than Taylor Swift’s words. Swathed in pastel and leopard print, viewers can marvel at her quasi self-referential latest inception as Cray Cray Tay (which is how the character she portrays will be called in this piece), a serial dater with a pernicious vicious streak. In the grand tradition of femme fatales, the clip revolves around a picture-perfect slow dance of a courtship that escalates/degenerates into remorseless crime passionnel. Packaged for the YouTube generation, it is a glamorization of mental illness and a non-cautionary tale of female impunity. Basically Cray Cray Tay copped my love life.
The creative tandem of director Joseph Kahn and Taylor has proverbially applied a thick smear of Vaseline on the lens for Blank Space. Everything in the video seems soft to the touch, like the ax and knife Cray Cray Tay brandish in the video wouldn’t even scratch your skin if you were to reach into the screen and graze your hands against them. Taylor attracts men like bees to honey. The grand Gilded Age mansion, which serves as a hive for Taylor the Voracious Masticator of Men, is worlds away from a jail cell or psychiatric ward.
Cray Cray Tay subliminally hints that the problem is not them; it’s us. The men in this video are breathtakingly attractive yet homogenous and passive targets, mute until the point of death. It’s like there’s a conveyor belt of hot guys in heaven and she’s at the receiving end. Once she snuffs the first one out (Did anyone else notice that utterly deranged, necrophilic lip bite?), a facsimile shows up at the doorstep. We, the women, are the ones constantly instigating trouble. We are always dunking iPhones, mutilating paintings, and beating cars. The poor men don’t stand a chance, especially the ones who “love the game!”
Blank Space is a marketable hodgepodge of semiotics and gendered tropes. The video’s discernible references are as ancient as they are contemporary. The biblical temptress Eve and her mortal fruit are in attendance. Also present is a nod to Mean Girls.
Historically speaking, women have been pegged as irrational and hysterical creatures. Hysteria, derived from the Greek word for uterus “hystera,” was an actual medical condition exclusive to women up until the 19th century. Culpability was found in the wonky, wandering womb. The idea that femininity has always been imbued with a taste for being overemotional is as old as it is current.
You kind of see yourself in Cray Cray Tay, resplendent in tears and smeared eyeliner. Aspirational and relatable, let’s all tag each other on Facebook as we quote the lyrics, shamelessly calling each other out on our raging tendencies to perform stunts the video fictionalizes in real life. “But it’s you with the (golf) club, (redacted) with the phone, and me with the shit flying across the room.” That’s what my friend of 24 years (it is not lost on me that this is the number of years Taylor Swift has been around) typed along with a link of the video. I even went so far as trying to tag an ex-boyfriend until I realized that I’d blocked him.
Society is a tad more tolerable of unhinged behavior if the person exhibiting same is an attractive woman. (Okay, I know I just called me and my friends pretty!). We’ve all drunk the Kool-Aid. Dark humor is cool. Bitches be crazy. They put the “hot” in psychotic. Crazy chicks and their aggressive sexuality rule.
Obviously a male pop star would not get away with depictions of abuse against the opposite sex. It’s a double standard that’s skewed in women’s favor. Like if or when you slap your boyfriend, as Cray Cray Tay does in Blank Space, The action is a tad more acceptable because the perpetrator is a woman. The situation takes a turn for the transgressive when he hits you back.
If you find yourself in an episode where you want to kill your significant other, please: Restrain yourself. Take a Xanax. Walk away. Break up. I’m also hollering at the men out there with their underreported statistics of being smacked down by their women. Domestic violence is never okay regardless of your gender.
Men are attracted to crazy women because of their perceived helplessness. She can’t help it, I mean who would choose to be so troubled? She needs a knight in shining armor who can draw goodness out of the unstable female heart. That is how some men think.
I know all of this forms experience. A shiver of self-recognition ran down my spine while watching Blank Space. More than a handful of men don’t seem to understand the severity of living with a debilitating mental illness. Guys used to say I was “the good kind of crazy” until a bipolar II diagnosis coupled with a years-long bout of depression made things not so good anymore.
“Don’t I didn’t say I didn’t warn you,” croons Cray Cray Tay in a line from Blank Space. That resonates with me since I always disclose my condition with potential partners, but they ultimately concede that they didn’t understand what I was warning them about in the first place. Coming from someone who has a legitimate mental illness and a colorful blotter of near-death romantic mishaps, I look at Taylor and think, “Damn, I wish I could monetize my bad reputation too!”