delladilly:peetakmellark-deactivated201403:I’d like to be my old self again, but I’m still trying to
delladilly:peetakmellark-deactivated201403:I’d like to be my old self again, but I’m still trying to find it.been thinkin about tswift a lot lately like you do sometimes when all you care about is pop culture and princesses, & i think the objectively best moment of this song aside from that devastating hairflip earlier is her performance of the innocence line, which is the only time that she holds eye contact with the camera— the rest of the time she’s pretty actively avoiding engaging with the camera’s gazeand her look back is so challenging, so aggressive, which is fascinating to me because like, taylor swift’s career is built largely on this deliberate construction of idyllic innocence— a willowy white girl with long blonde hair who writes about “fairy tale” romances and talks about desire but only sex when it’s other girls doing it.and then you have in this song a description of “days and nights when you made me your own” and the camera circling tswift like a vulture. and she says that only at the very beginning of her relationship with [you/a man/the camera] did she remind you of innocence, and that’s an accusation. suddenly [you] are the one determining and fetishizing her innocence— keeping and smelling her things because they remind you of this concept that she used to embody— before [you/the man/the camera] owned her, and in that ownership devalued her. “innocence” is suddenly both something you put on her unfairly and something you deny her now, and she’s looking back at you furiously, ruthlessly, holding you accountable for the way you’ve been looking at her in her princess dress, which is also obviously part of the performance.anyway, i don’t know, but she doesn’t smile for the audience or the camera at the end, and she did about eighteen hair throwing neck maneuvers and that was pretty exciting too. -- source link
#gender shenanigans#damsel arise