Also “Taylor Swift was the first female country artist to sing about BPD” is a bad take. I mean,
“Taylor Swift was the first female country artist to acknowledge BPD” also a bad take! She didn’t! She’s been doing it all in subtext, it’s just the 21st century and she’s better as a lyricist!
Listened to Fearless again and at this distance, yeah, it’s an album of love songs written by someone with BPD, that’s the thing.
But… what if that was the secret ingredient all along? That in our self-aware postfeminist age, authentic, boy-thrilling, country-song need for a man can only be evoked and projected through pathological heterofemininity?
Blank Space and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend are the only works I can think of to acknowledge that “use Borderline Personality Disorder as an idiom to reconcile our stereotypical flighty mercuriality with our self-image as serious, self-sufficient moral actors” was the next trend in Millennial White Girl
It never really trickled down from the elite though, maybe they assumed that with Obamacare requiring mental health coverage, psychotherapy was going to be A Thing again; maybe they thought that we’d destigmatized craziness enough people would talk about it more
I suppose you could make a case for Gone Girl
wait a second, is “Borderline” (from 1983′s Madonna) riffing on Borderline Personality Disorder (from 1980′s DSM-III)?
dat video tho. I say that part of her brand identity was “has a thing for rough trade”, but woo.
Kinda clarifies how Paglia used Madonna as the key to her feminism, what I as ‘90s boy expected to inherit, eager like a kid on Christmas Eve
see not just that women would become men, but that then heterosexuals could get to be gay men together
like the idealized straight view from the ‘80s
(the early still-basically-the-’70s ‘80s, where that meant fun and not death)
like we could all have an urban tribe that were basically our friends but also our lovers on a fluid basis
in retrospect shoulda paid more attention to how the lyrics of all those house tunes were about being abandoned by someone you thought loved you but had been instrumentally using you
or the queer film festival entries about how without a difference-powered dynamic or a reproductive imperative so much of your social-sexual value came down to ability to perform superficial features of youth and wealth and beauty and life was hellish otherwise
oops
wait a second, is “Borderline” (from 1983′s Madonna) riffing on Borderline Personality Disorder (from 1980′s DSM-III)?
They: Borderline Personality Disorder is a Cluster B personality disorder characterized by dramatic and unpredictable shifts in self-image, emotions, and interpersonal relationships, with no apparent external cause.
Me: Uh, I’m sure I’m not the first to notice this, but that sounds an awful lot like a description of “women” as by Shakespeare. Or Roissy.
Me: So what’s the treatment?
They: You have a figure of intimate authority explain that their emotions are illogical and wrong.
Me: …are you fucking shitting me.
They: No, no, that’s trivial, the real problem is finding a figure they’re willing to submit to, that’s a total crapshoot.
Me: …