age gap discourse (taylor's version)

send jake gyllenhaal to The Hague

I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do my third substack like three days days after my second one. I promise to not be this annoying in the future, please don’t unsubscribe. I love you all. But it’s not my fault that ten minute All Too Well came in and saved/ruined my life!!!!!

Bad week for men with big dumb faces I wanted to sit on. First Aaron, then Jake. As a fan of Swiftlore, I of course knew that Jake Gyllenhaal was the inspiration for All Too Well and much of Red writ large. But since most of my Taylor fanning has been focused on the Kaylor era as of late, I hadn’t spent much time thinking about how he’s actually the worst person in the world. 

I think I assumed they were closer in age, or imagined that the relationship happened at different stages of their lives. Like of course if the ten year age gap had been between a 27 year old and a 37 year old it would be different—and I'm not immune to dating older men! All of my boyfriends have been 7 years older than me (lol, also my parents age difference….brb stabbing myself.) And yet...my opinion on the matter changes when one of the people is 20. 

I am saying it, the thing that will get me banished from ‘cool’ leftist society: I think older men dating 20 year olds is bad. I think it’s really bad. I think it might actually be one of the worst trends in the world—of course many things are Worse, but most of the bad things, everyone calls them bad.

Men dating 20 year olds like it’s their favorite hobby? People love to defend this and talk about how normal and acceptable it is, women as well as men. Women love to say that when they were 19 or whatever and they dated a 35 year old it was actually totally fine because they were mature and different. 

You’re being formed when you’re twenty. The people you spend time with at that age affect who you become for the rest of your life. WHY DO men so desperately want to be partnered with someone who is so malleable, so unsure of their path, so busy exploring the world and themselves? I don’t even have to answer those questions! We all already know! But what I do want to know is why so many people so adamantly defend it as normal and okay. 

PAUSE. HAND TO MOUTH I DID NOT KNOW IT WAS HER VIRGINITY SLDKJGLSKDGJLSKDJGLKGJLGKSJLDKGJLSDGKJLDSKGJ

I’m sorry normally I wouldn’t leave my keyboard slamming in a piece of ‘published’ writing but…..I cannot express my SHOCK!!! And people have the AUDACITY to question her fixation on this????? JESUS CHRIST!!!!! 

At the time, Taylor Swift was saving herself for marriage and Jake Gyllenhaal convinced her to lose it to him because they’d be together forever. Now obviously I’m not like a huge proponent of waiting for marriage lol, but if that was the thing she’d decided on, that was her choice! And him persuading her to lose it to him under false pretenses, you know, it’s not rape or anything, but it’s manipulative, disingenuous, and also just like, gross?? Dude you were 30!!! What fucking business does a 30 year old have convincing a 20 year old to lose her virginity to him! 

In the short film, Sadie Sink’s youth further displays just how young Taylor was when this happened. Sure, she was already famous, but if anything, that makes her seem younger in retrospect, not older. She didn't have the coming of age that so many people do, and, to add insult to injury, her every move was on display to the world. OF COURSE SHE believed everything he told her, and of course it was brutal when it all turned out to be fake. Do the haters not remember what it was like to be 20? 

Y’all aren’t gonna catch me with sympathy for him. He did what he did! This is what we call consequences! I’ve never understood the like, ‘ooohh this poor man doesn't’ deserve this’ narrative. What is ‘this’? A woman….saying what happened? Literally just stating what happened in artistic form? It happened to her. And let’s not forget that Jake Gyllenhaal is….once again dating a 25 year old! Who he met when she was 22! But I’m sure she’s just really mature this time. You know, she’s French. 

Is it so awful to be with a woman who knows who she is? Is it so torturous to spend time with a woman who has her own opinions about the world instead of blindly accepting the ones that you foist on her? According to These Guys, apparently it is!!!! Then again, I knew that already—I see it in some men’s eyes when I hang out with them. The visceral disgust. The absolute hatred. 

Red OG came out when I was 21. It was the soundtrack of my senior year in college, quite literally—I danced to 22 on my 22nd birthday, I cried to Holy Ground about my own Jake-esque character (oh but my situation is much more embarrassing,) I choreographed a Great Gatsby-themed lip sync for my sorority and our brother fraternity to I knew You were Trouble. We rewrote the lyrics of the songs to be more about their lives than they already were. 

I realized this morning, I can remember every. Single. Man. who was the ‘Jake’ to one of my friends in college. These men were off getting wasted and fucking other girls in the chapel, while my friends and I were cradling each other in our arms as we sobbed like Sadie. I just don't’have it in me anymore to be sympathetic for someone who’s out there causing pain like that and leaving other people to pick up the pieces. 

In the short film, the Jake-esque character says ‘I’m not making you feel [upset,] you’re making yourself feel that way.”  which is somehow the M.O. of this type of guy distilled into a sentence. They love to take forming, malleable women, tormenting them, and then walking away saying ‘who me? What?’ shrugging their shoulders and throwing their hands in the air.

If these women are so immature and childish and obsessed with their own emotions…..WHY DO GROWN ASS MEN KEEP DATING THEM?????? And justifying it! And half the internet comes to their defense, and makes fun of the me’s of the world for being scolds. 

In basically like, every other situation on earth, I’m a pretty chill person when it comes to like, people doing what they want. But...this is actually Not About people doing what they want. It’s about one person doing what they want, and the other person being in a situation that they think is one thing, but it’s actually something else. I’m sure there are exceptions, but they’re not the ones I hear about in intimate detail.

Also the year that the album came out, I did a little thing called writing a satirical play about a hazing scandal at my school, called SHAME. The entire saga is truly a story for another day. The title was a fun thing to chant (still is) but the truth behind it was not for the laugh or chant factor, it was for the intense shame that I felt, even just by proxy, when I heard about the sexual abuse that a sorority (not mine, thankfully) was rumored to have inflicted on their new members. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I couldn’t sleep. So I wrote the play. The entire school got hella mad (lol it really is a good story…but I digress…)

Like hazing, this all feels like a sickening game. These old men just play with young women and act like it’s all part and parcel of the passage of time. What if it weren’t that way? What if getting put through a meat grinder by an adult man wasn’t a rite of passage for 20 year old girls? How different could our lives look? How many years could we get back?

As for the whole ‘omg such ADO about a three month relationship….’ when you’re 20, three months feels like a lifetime. Hell, a night can feel like a lifetime. 

I wrote an entire novel in college about a guy who kissed me once. We had an on and off flirtation at parties for a year and a half, he threw me in the air while high on molly at a Cartel concert, I slept in his car in a rainstorm in Monterey. I don’t give a shit about this guy anymore, but I still remember everything. I wrote a novel about it and I wrote a choose your own adventure themed essay about it. 

No you can’t read either one :)

When I was 21 I was embarrassed that I wasn’t dating seriously, but today, when I think about my 21st birthday, going to the townie bars at midnight, my friends waking me up with my own cake-flavored handle of vodka and making me take shots in my bed, showing up drunk to African politics class and then having to leave painting class to nap, I nearly cry with gratitude that I was being buoyed by my friends through all of this, that I was so loved and protected and cherished instead of looking at the door, waiting for a man.

I never, ever, thought I would say this, but I was so, so, so lucky in my youth to be unencumbered by men’s whims. It made me who I am. It made my life. 

I have no problem saying that at twenty I was still developing, still becoming, that I had a lot of growing to do and I needed to do it in a safe space where someone wasn’t manipulating my desires. I’m not ashamed at all. I was twenty years old. The only way men had ever looked at me was either with a leer or complete and total disregard and disgust. There was no in between. That was not my fault. It was the worlds. I dare you to look that girl in the eye and tell her that she’s a pathetic loser for thinking that older men shouldn’t be messing with her and her peers. I dare you to look me at thirty in the eye and tell me that now. Twenty year old me would have probably cried. 

Thirty year old me will roll my eyes and laugh. There’s nothing left for me to envy in the attention of men.