The XX Factor: What women really think.

One Swift Kick in the Pants

A post from Double X writer Hans Eisenbeis:

Taylor Swift is the biggest thing since I stopped caring what the next big thing is. I might never have noticed except that my 11-year-old daughter has now officially schooled me. Phoebe is an exceptionally sheltered child. Her mother is an ex-punk-rocker-turned-strident-Waldorfie. We forbade any screen time—no TV, no computers, and certainly no iPod.This is ironic, since pop culture literally paid our mortgage for many years back when I was a music critic in the post-Nirvana '90s. As I recall, music started to suck about the time I became a father, and I’d happily traded in my backstage pass. In my new role, I saw how messed up our culture is by age fetishism: Adults want to be kids and kids want to be adults, no one is ever happy where they’re at, and the media plays a huge part in this game ... (Read more in DoubleX.)