The Burden of Emotional Maturity In Female Art

Part 1

“Forgive and forget; I know my age and I act like it.” -- Olivia Rodrigo, “All-American Bitch”

For most of my life, music was in the periphery: something I neither knew much about nor placed any importance on.

But eventually, I decided that that needed to change. I needed to have taste. So, I set out in search of the so-called Great Music that apparently no longer existed on the modern landscape of popular culture. Armed with a classic rock playlist and Rolling Stone’s “100 Greatest Artists of All Time,” I tried to care about what I listened to, hoping to stumble across a song so powerful my entire life was changed by it.

But as much as I obsessed over every ancient rock band I’d come across in my research,

I was never able to tell if I actually liked it or if I liked it because I was supposed to. The best benefit that listening to the music on these lists gave me was an idea of what was okay to appreciate, what was respectable and what was drivel. I lived for the validation of people like my parents and grandparents, the little pats on the back I got when I said I loved Led Zeppelin. I strove to be different from my peers, a rockist in a decade of poptimism.

Which was why it came as quite a shock to me that the artist that changed the way I looked at music for the first time was Taylor Swift.

Because I had spent so long straining to understand old 70s music, when I finally heard something I actually related to, it blew me away. I sat bolt upright when I heard “Enchanted” for the first time, and thought, “this is the perfect encapsulation of a feeling I’ve been trying to understand my whole life.” “Enchanted” introduced me to Speak Now, which led me to Dear John, which led me to “All Too Well” and Red. One day I looked at my Spotify and realized I knew more Taylor Swift songs by heart than I did all the rock bands that I’d forced myself to love. And more importantly, I had more fun listening to Taylor Swift than I did to 50-year-old rock.

But I also knew that nobody thought the same way. I wouldn’t get any pats on the back for liking Taylor Swift; I’d get eyerolls. Stupid, immature teenage girl music. And you know what? I always thought that that was what made it great. “Fearless”, with all of its princesses and white horses and knights in shining armor, encapsulated the idealism of adolescence. Speak Now, and the way it oscillated between savage rage and despair and triumph, sometimes astoundingly wise, sometimes maliciously petty, had something I could return to no matter what I was feeling. But for the rest of the population, that teenageness, that emotional immaturity, made her impossible to take seriously. Even after she’d long outgrown those first few albums, the label of teenage girl music continued to follow her around, creating what felt like an insurmountable barrier preventing her from getting the respect and plaudits she deserved.

This changed with Folklore and Evermore. When she released her collaboration with the indie band The National in 2020, it represented a seismic shift in the way the general public viewed her as an artist. Now she was serious. Now, she was a credible songwriter.

A part of me was happy that more people realized that Taylor Swift writes excellent music. But another part of me was pissed off that this grand moment of realization only occurred because the public believed that working with the National revealed something new that no one had seen before. I remembered reading one review from the Washington Post, shaking my head in frustration as the reviewer begrudgingly praised her new album, before dismissing almost everything that came before as “legible and unambiguous… a little too eager to please and way too eager to be completely understood.” Now, though, she could be considered a lyrical genius. Now, she was worthy of critical acclaim, when the truth was she deserved it the whole time. Everything that came before Folklore, from when she was still forever associated with teenagedom, was just as important as what came after.

The only thing that I can think of different about her music now, apart from her now collaborating with an acclaimed male band, was that in the quiet and introspection of Folklore, it had become undeniable that Taylor Swift was “mature”, and in fulfilling this characteristic, she was finally allowed to be considered a capital-A Artist.

This is not new. Whenever someone decides that this new group of female artists just doesn’t live up to the past, they’ll wax lyrical about Joni Mitchell and Carole King, maybe talk about how Adele is this generation’s saving grace. Female artists are required to have a kind of emotional maturity in order to be great. If you go back to any of the reviews of Adele’s first albums, somewhere it inevitably commends her for her “soulful voice, filled with wisdom beyond her years.” It’s not that this is a bad thing. I adore artists like Adele and Joni Mitchell; they deserve the accolades they receive. It’s when it becomes a prerequisite to the wider acceptance of female-driven artistry that it becomes a problem, and a double standard.

Emotional maturity is an expectation leveled at nearly every female artist who wants to be taken seriously, and yet is curiously withheld from their counterparts.  When are male audiences ever told that what they identify with is immature and stupid? When are male artists ever told to grow up? Usually, it’s seen as the opposite. “Immature” pieces of popular culture made by men are generally praised for capturing the mythos, feelings, and attitude of a certain generation and age group. Their immaturity is labeled as honesty, and therefore praised as high art. Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, for example, is, per its wikipedia page, “often interpreted as a teen revolution anthem.” It describes the conflicting emotions and beliefs of a generation, and is fundamentally, purposely, immature. And yet when it was released, it was met with immediate acclaim for the way it so accurately portrayed the apathy of Generation X. “It captures the particular desperation of its day, while having a handle on the perennial teen-age obsessions with boredom, claustrophobia and sex,” declared the New York Times’s review of Nevermind, the album which “Smells Like Teen Spirit” belonged to. And they’re right. Nevermind is an amazing album, and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is an amazing song, precisely because it captures what it feels like to be a part of that age group. It’s good because it’s immature. So why isn’t female art allowed to be good in the same way?

Part 2: The Ingénue and the Woman in the Room

“I don't get angry when I'm pissed, I'm the eternal optimist, I scream inside to deal with it” -- Olivia Rodrigo, “All-American Bitch”

Young aspiring female artists have been stuck between two unfulfillable models of how to be a great musician for as long as I can remember. First, since society prizes youth and innocence, there’s the ingénue: someone responsible, who doesn’t swear, who gazes around, wide-eyed and naive, unable to imagine how she could be so successful. This endears her to us. We, as a society, adore this girl and the way she makes us believe in fairytale endings.

But this woman is never allowed to be a genius. She’s never allowed to have a legacy. We adore her for what she represents, not who she is or what she does. And we get bored of her. Really, really, fast. At some point, her surprise stops being genuine, and she doesn’t seem so innocent, and soon enough everything she does grates on us. But that's okay! Because there’s someone else now! Someone new to fawn over! She takes us back to the beginning and we repeat the cycle over and over again, building up women and then tearing them down when we become tired of them.

We simultaneously like this girl because she represents the best of what we want to believe about girlhood, what we want it to be, and hate her because she will eventually, inevitably, fail to embody it. Women are constantly stuck between the idealized ingénue and the fact that society expresses little interest in understanding the deeper tolls of carrying that label.

Despite our initial adoration for women who represent this trope, the female artist we reserve our true respect for represents an entirely different ideal. She’s usually older, if not in years then in “wisdom”. She sits in her room, with a guitar, or a piano, or just her voice, and observes. Instead of criticizing the world, she criticizes herself. And when she does turn her sharp gaze back onto others, we assume these attacks are earned. She represents the maturity and perspective we associate with womanhood, a topic that is considered much more socially and artistically acceptable to explore. I don’t have a very good answer as to why: maybe because people assume womanhood is more stable and world-weary, less angry. I think we begrudgingly give women who fit this ideal the space to be sad, and incandescently hopeful, and (sometimes) angry, because we feel like they’ve lived enough of their life for their beliefs to become valid, as if pain and suffering turns their feelings from whiny to legitimate. That in the process of becoming a woman you must’ve gone through something worth writing about, so I suppose you should be allowed to complain for once (of course, with the caveat that you’ll be forgiving). Not that any of that’s true, but that's what we think; that womanhood, and the maturity and pain associated with it, is the only valuable part of the female experience.

In order to be authentic as a teenager, the kind of authenticity that gets you acclaim, you have to break the role of the ingénue and reveal the complexity, breadth of emotion, insecurities and immaturity that come from being young. And for women, given the additional prerequisite of emotional maturity in their songwriting, it's a Catch-22: You can’t be “great” without being authentic, and yet the immaturity that comes with real authenticity is equally frowned upon.

All of these tie back to the same roots. Women are never allowed to be young. They’re never afforded the space to make mistakes, never given the excuses of youth. Their actions will always be held against them. As much as we say that girlhood is something precious, something that needs to be preserved, we also have created a world in which women are forced to bear the brunt of the responsibility when something happens. It’s an environment that will never coexist with timeless innocence.

As part of her rerecording process, Taylor Swift began releasing songs that she’d written in the past which previously didn’t make the cut for the album. As part of the Red (Taylor’s Version) release, she put out a new track featuring Phoebe Bridgers, called “Nothing New”.

Swift, early in her career, was somewhat able to straddle the expectation of being both the mature, authentic artist as well as the wide-eye ingénue. People saw her as this naive, lovable girl who could play the role of the underdog, and who wrote songs that other young women could see themselves in. However, her strange ability to straddle this divide meant that she was also attacked from both sides. People accused her of inauthenticity, of not really writing her music, and criticized her surprised face every time she won an award. At the same time, they accused her of immaturity, of writing cliche, unserious music that only appealed to teenage girls (as always, the go-to insult). How someone can simultaneously be criticized for not writing their own music as well as the musical content within those songs is beyond me.

All of this history, the way in which Swift has been besieged from both sides of this spectrum, is what makes her confessions within “Nothing New” so much more powerful all these years later. Within an artistic process that is quite literally about reclaiming your past, “Nothing New” revealed the way in which Swift had understood for all along how fragile her success was:

They tell you while you're young

"Girls, go out and have your fun"

Then they hunt and slay the ones who actually do it

Criticize the way you fly when you're soarin' through the sky

Shoot you down and then they sigh, and say

"She looks like she's been through it"

She was around 21 when she wrote Red, still seen by many as an ingénue. It’s interesting to that she chose not to release this song with the rest of the album all those years ago, and I can’t help but wonder if part of it was because she was worried about it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, that as she pushed beyond her country-starlet image into mainstream pop, people would get sick of her. She was all too aware of the protection that being the ingénue granted her, and releasing a song addressing the limitations and anxieties of that label could very well have shattered this perfect illusion she’d managed to craft.

That’s why I was so elated when she did release it with the rerecord, because her ability to put words to an indescribable feeling calls out this expectation. It makes us look for it in our world now.

It could just be me, but lately I’ve felt like “Nothing New” is part of a broader movement to recognize the dangers of expecting emotional maturity in female art. I think now we’re finally starting to understand that the adolescent experience of women is just as worthy of acclaim and attention as the adolescent experience of men. Beyond being at the center of almost every mania our country has seen, pieces of popular culture that gives girls words for the emotions they’re experiencing, even if those emotions are irrational, and yes, immature, can also be great art.

About three months ago, Olivia Rodrigo released an album called Guts, and I fell in love with it, because it’s about the very dichotomy between the ingenue and the mature woman. It’s an album of expectations: the artistic ones set after the success of Sour, societal ones about the ways in which we ask female public figures to be role models, and the social ones, where we convince ourselves that we’ll date the right person or tell the right joke. In Guts, she makes a conscious choice not to meet them. In these songs, she fails (a lot), makes the same mistakes over and over again, and feels like an idiot most of the time, but ultimately refuses to be anything other than a 19 year old under an extraordinary amount of pressure. It’s a declaration that yes, the emotions in these songs, immature as they might be, are important, and everyone deserves a soundtrack to belt out in their car when they need to feel understood.