Chelsea Swan

I think we experience communal femininity more in childhood, when with our mothers and aunts and grandmothers, and then in teenage years, laughing (or giggling as it is called when assigned to girls) and learning the rules of being a woman from other women and girls. I now only tend to find it when dancing, or when I am at gigs that have a majoritively female fan base. We are taught to hate and distrust our femaleness, that other women are our rivals (always the narrative in films and tv and magazines), that if we want to stand out we have to become ‘not like other girls’ and we drift away and isolate our femaleness to our inner and protected spaces. We dance in the kitchen, dial it back in public, but then the perfect song comes on and it’s ok to love it and to be female and to share the feeling without the gaze of men. How rare that is in adulthood. Other women are made out to be the watchful spies of men that we have to prove our appropriate femaleness too. And we do grudge, we do it very well. But when you let those societally instilled thoughts drift away and just enjoy that shared experience, that unique joy of being a woman, the joy is undeniable. This is what I think is good about The Eras Tour (Taylor Swift) being at the cinema and all the girls that have gone and danced at the front together because in a communal space girls lose that sense of fear and judgement and can view themselves without the gaze, feeling free enough to sing and dance and enjoy. The sad thing is these occurrences have been laughed at and belittled by men on social media. Everything a woman likes is silly, lesser than, frivolous. Let’s be serious, it’s nowhere near as important as football, and you could never look up to a silly female singer the way you can study the male genius musicians.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/aug/09/female-experience-inside-taylor-swift-club-night-sweeping-the-uk