Calling Taylor Swift ‘Not a Good Role Model’ is Just Repackaged Purity Culture
When I walked out of the doors of my high school graduation I was faced with my first existential crisis: to go off to college and get a degree and a career or to stay at home, do a year or two at a community college, volunteer at church, learn from the older women around me about how to be a Biblical woman and hope and pray that my husband would appear so that I could get married and begin having children.
When I go back to that memory and stand outside the high school gymnasium, my body pulls me to the right–toward the highway that heads out of my tiny, one-stoplight town, to a life that is bigger. There was always that part of me that knew that there was so much more to life than what I was being shown and told about. Something inside my soul told me that I could have more; I wanted more. It wasn’t that I thought that there was something wrong with being a wife and mother (I still don’t think there is anything wrong with that!) I just knew that the life I was built for was more than the picture I was being sold.
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This week Newsweek magazine published an opinion piece with a bold headline titled “Taylor Swift is Not a Good Role Model”. Read it if you’d like but if you want my opinion about his opinion: it’s garbage. His reasoning for Swift not being a good role model is:
“At 34, Swift remains unmarried and childless, a fact that some might argue is irrelevant to her status as a role model. But, I suggest, it's crucial to consider what kind of example this sets for young girls. A role model, by definition, is someone worthy of imitation. While Swift's musical talent and business acumen are certainly admirable, even laudable, we must ask if her personal life choices are ones we want our sisters and daughters to emulate. This might sound like pearl-clutching preaching, but it's a concern rooted in sound reasoning.”
And there it is…despite her success in many areas of life, the fact that she remains unmarried and childless, she is not considered and *actual* success as a woman.
Despite it being 2024, over two decades since I stood outside my high school gymnasium being pulled toward the highway knowing there was a bigger life out there for me, women are still being told that real womanhood, successful womanhood is not and cannot be found in anything other than a tiny box.
