In 2009, I wrote a blog post for Bitch Media detail­ing why I did not think Tay­lor Swift’s music was fem­i­nist. I was sub­se­quent­ly informed, for sev­er­al years run­ning, that I was an ​“idiot.” In a writ­ing career stud­ded with opin­ions on rape, abor­tion and the short­com­ings of var­i­ous politi­cians, that post remains one of my most con­tro­ver­sial. Which is to say: Some peo­ple have a lot invest­ed in this par­tic­u­lar pop star.

The rest of Swift’s music, especially when she talks about other women, tends to reinforce the message that female self-acceptance is only all right if you have a specific kind of female self. Or maybe just one female self, named Taylor.

Tay­lor Swift start­ed out as a coun­try prodi­gy, tapped at age 14 to work with var­i­ous prac­ticed song­writ­ers. (Despite Swift’s rep­u­ta­tion as an emo­tion­al­ly acute singer-song­writer, all of her albums except Speak Now, her fourth, have employed indus­try vet­er­ans to co-write her work.) A romance with Jonas Broth­ers heart­throb Joe — fol­lowed by a few spite­ful songs and YouTube videos that seemed to be about the breakup — turned her into a house­hold name. She’s now a 22-year-old megas­tar with a cult of devout fans and five albums under her belt. Her lat­est, Red, has had the best-sell­ing first week of any album since 2002.

Swift trades in a brand of swoon­ing, fairy-tale roman­ti­cism. Ref­er­ences to ​“mag­ic” and ​“princes” abound. This she laces with barbed pop­ulism; her foils are the elit­ist cheer cap­tains, crit­ics and hip­sters of the world. Despite being incred­i­bly wealthy, suc­cess­ful, famous and con­ven­tion­al­ly beau­ti­ful, Swift presents her­self as a hum­ble, gosh-gol­ly Every­woman. This may not be true of Tay­lor Swift’s life, but it does a lot to estab­lish com­mon ground with her lis­ten­ers. Swift pur­ports to speak for the ignored, uncool and snubbed girls of the world; her voice blends with theirs, makes them feel heard, or at least reflect­ed. Are you there, God? It’s me, Tay­lor.

Out­sider, how­ev­er, doesn’t equal fem­i­nist. Swift’s pub­lic per­sona relies on her being del­i­cate, pure and ​“good,” the vir­ginal side of Freud’s Madonna/​whore com­plex — some­thing she works to estab­lish in her lyrics. After all, fairy tales require a ​“princess,” some­thing Swift actu­al­ly calls her­self at times.

At oth­er times, she’s telling boyfriends that she’s ​“too young to be messed with” and claim­ing that an ex-boyfriend kept her scarf because ​“it reminds [him] of inno­cence,” pre­sum­ably Swift’s. And, like ​“good” self-infan­tilized girls from time immemo­r­i­al, she reserves the right to cas­ti­gate ​“bad” women. ​“Bet­ter Than Revenge” is a slut-sham­ing tem­per tantrum about an ​“actress” who’s ​“bet­ter known for the things that she does on the mat­tress.” ​“You Belong with Me” sets a mean-tem­pered girl in ​“short skirts” and ​“high heels” against the sweet, mod­est­ly dressed Swift.

Of course there’s noth­ing wrong with being young or inex­pe­ri­enced or under­stat­ed in one’s sex­u­al­i­ty. But when that’s pre­sent­ed as the stan­dard of female worth, and as a legit­i­mate rea­son to be cru­el or judg­men­tal toward women who don’t meet that stan­dard … well, then we’re deal­ing with bla­tant sexism.

As it hap­pens, Swift agrees with me: Her music is not very fem­i­nist. In an Octo­ber 22 inter­view with the Dai­ly Beast, Swift said, ​“I don’t real­ly think about things as guys ver­sus girls. I nev­er have. I was raised by par­ents who brought me up to think if you work as hard as guys, you can go far in life.”

This is a typ­i­cal opin­ion from young women who don’t know much about fem­i­nism, but it’s always dis­ap­point­ing. Many women slammed Swift for her mis­un­der­stand­ing of fem­i­nism, which doesn’t mean ​“guys ver­sus girls,” but rather, an end to the auto­mat­ic assump­tion that guys are supe­ri­or to girls. Jes­si­ca Wake­man of The Frisky called out the idea that ​“when women don’t suc­ceed it’s because we just didn’t work hard enough.” Indeed, the notion that struc­tur­al dis­crim­i­na­tion can be over­come by spunk and can-do spir­it does seem a lit­tle Republican.

But of course she also had her defend­ers. ​“It’s not our place to demand that Tay­lor Swift be knowl­edge­able and elo­quent on any top­ic, much less fem­i­nism,” wrote Daisy Bar­ringer at xoJane. Oth­er fem­i­nists pri­vate­ly expressed frus­tra­tion that a woman who doesn’t open­ly iden­ti­fy as ​“fem­i­nist” is the auto­mat­ic tar­get of out­rage from women who do; they argue that this does noth­ing to lift women up, and plen­ty to tear indi­vid­ual women down.

And that’s fair. A fem­i­nism that devotes itself only to cri­tiquing oth­er women’s lack of fem­i­nism will get nowhere. Yet when some­one is pre­sent­ed as a role mod­el for young women, we needn’t auto­mat­i­cal­ly accept her work as empow­er­ing. The key to the debate is not what Swift intends her music to do — ques­tions about the artist’s ​“intent” are pret­ty dat­ed, after all — but what lis­ten­ers do with her music.

One thing they do is com­mis­er­ate. Swift famous­ly writes, in detail, about the men she’s dat­ed who have let her down. Songs about bro­ken hearts have been around as long as music, but every one of Swift’s albums comes with clum­si­ly cod­ed clues — cap­i­tal­ized let­ters in the lyric books — that spell out which famous men the songs are about. For exam­ple, the code ​“MAPLE LATTES” accom­pa­nies the song about the scarf-steal­er. Celebri­ty blogs went wild when Swift was spot­ted drink­ing maple lattes with actor Jake Gyllenhaal.

Nam­ing the evil that men do, even when that evil is as banal as not giv­ing back a scarf after a breakup, can be an empow­er­ing move for young women. So, where some of us see Peo­ple Mag­a­zine: The Musi­cal—celebri­ty gos­sip set to twangy gui­tar — oth­ers see a young woman who’s fear­less­ly claim­ing her right to express anger.

Thus, on some lev­el, Swift’s songs are a fem­i­nist project. Instead of exist­ing in iso­la­tion and assum­ing that any bad emo­tion­al reac­tion to a man must be her own fault — which is the space the cul­ture wants young women to exist with­in — Swift is sit­ting down to write out her own reac­tions and share them with oth­er women. If lis­ten­ing to the woe­ful tale of Gyllenhaal’s scarf envy is what it takes to get a young girl to start ques­tion­ing her lev­els of self-blame, that’s good enough for me.

What I ques­tion is whether such a bal­lad will nec­es­sar­i­ly lead the girl into a con­text where she can con­nect the hurt she’s expe­ri­enced to the cul­ture that has sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly giv­en men’s feel­ings and expe­ri­ences pri­or­i­ty over women’s.

The rest of Swift’s music, espe­cial­ly when she talks about oth­er women, tends to rein­force the mes­sage that female self-accep­tance is only all right if you have a spe­cif­ic kind of female self. Or maybe just one female self, named Tay­lor. Con­sid­er her com­pli­cat­ed stance on boyfriend-steal­ing: ​“You Belong with Me” is vicious because she wants to steal the oth­er girl’s boyfriend, where­as ​“Bet­ter Than Revenge” is vicious because the oth­er girl stole her boyfriend. The pri­ma­ry sin one can com­mit in a Swift­ian uni­verse isn’t treat­ing women bad­ly; it’s refus­ing to give one spe­cif­ic woman exact­ly what she wants. Struc­tur­al cri­tique is what real fem­i­nists do, and you can’t build a struc­tur­al cri­tique entire­ly around the idea that one per­son deserves all the toys.