I liked your essay but I think you've missed the point a bit. Most of the people who are hating on Taylor Swift don't know the first thing about her music, or if they do, it's ancillary to their issues with her. They don't like a woman so powerful she can get 35k people to register to vote with one Instagram message, or who draws so much attention that the NFL has made featuring her an actual business decision that has paid off in the hundreds of millions for them.
Misogyny is about wanting women to stay "in their lane" - meaning small, unobtrusive, and in the background, acting as helpers to men - not "stealing" the spotlight. The fact that she has a long history of standing up to men who have hurt or abused her is also a part of the problem. The people who don't like her music mostly don't like that she often calls out the bad behavior of former beaus in it. Complaints that she writes too much about breakups are specious - everyone writes about relationships gone wrong, but the difference is that Taylor names unacceptable things that her exes have done - at times even naming names, as with Dear John, about her relationship with John Mayer.
Artists like Dolly Parton, Billy Joel, and Paul McCartney have praised her songwriting skills, so although it's possible that her genres aren't everyone's cup of tea, mostly people who claim not to like her music don't like her and what she represents - a strong, modern, woman who isn't going to quietly sit by and take a lot of the BS that too many men have expected women to silently accept in the past.
I do find the plethora of college courses about Swift and her music to be fascinating. I'd like to sit in on one someday. She is a masterful storyteller but it is a bit absurd to decide she's the Last Great one. Still, I read a description recently of a course being taught at Harvard that looked quite substantive and meaty. Here's an excerpt from an article about it that I really enjoyed.
"My students will analyze Swift’s work, think in detail about it, maybe create footnotes to it, in order to see how the verbal skills and musical elements that move us are not just all in our head—they are choices Swift makes to communicate a particular message or feeling. Students will in turn gain tools for literary and cultural analysis that they can take along as they study other eras and other words, and hopefully discover more art that they love.
I would not be teaching this course if I did not love Swift’s songs. But I would not be teaching this course, either, if I could not bring in other works of art, from other genres and time periods, that will help my students better understand Swift and her oeuvre. We will be reading two novels by Willa Cather about ambition, talent, and femininity in an earlier Middle America—novels about young women who want to become self-sustaining, recognized musicians, one who succeeds and one who fails. We will be reading James Weldon Johnson’s sharp-edged, irony-driven 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex–Colored Man, about a very different set of barriers for a young man who seeks musical success.
We will also look at three centuries of page-based poetry, meant to be read, not sung, on other topics central to Swift: childhood nostalgia and adulthood regret (William Wordsworth); girlhood, daughters, and heterosexual pessimism (Laura Kasischke); reactions to the haters and the low-down dirty cheats (Alexander Pope). I’ll take advantage, frankly, of a classroom full of Swifties to introduce hundreds of students to these poems. I will also help us attend to the way those poems describe being 15, or being 7, or being a constant target for unruly fans and resentful rivals in the streets of London—an experience that the Swift of her album Reputation shared with the Pope who wrote the great “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.”
People (like me) who think that college English courses should study works of art we take pleasure in will, I hope, be happy with these choices. So will people (like me) who think that college English courses should build analytical skills that can be applied in other contexts. As for the people (unlike me) who think that college English classes should focus on classics, on works that have stood the test of time (how much time? whose test? what kinds of works?), I hope they’ll end up happy with this course too. If you want, and I do, more undergraduates to read Pope and Wordsworth, Cather and Johnson, you might notice how many students will come for the Taylor and stay for the other writers involved."
