- ̗̀ prev. taytayswizzle ̖́-

i am obsessed with the reoccurring use of ‘the girl in the dress’ in ‘dear john’, and i have always thought it was such a clever use of language. the way she is being described by only two identifying features, being a ‘girl’ and wearing ‘a dress’ suggests the purely sexualised way that ‘john’ sees the narrator, and draws on sexist stereotypes  by suggesting that he sees her as weak and defenseless because she is so ‘typically’ feminine. the lack of names and descriptions also means that this could be any one of the ‘long list of traitors’ in ‘john’s’ life crying the whole way home, which shows how they are interchangeable and completely replaceable to him like material objects. i think this is so interesting and think it works as a comment on the objectification of all women in society, as well as the victim-blaming culture we live in. far too many women have been that girl in the dress who cried the whole way home, and rather than blaming the man who caused their emotional trauma, those suffering women have just been told that they ‘should have known’ and the narrator’s first instinct is to blame herself. it’s essentially a parallel of the ‘they were asking for it’ ideology. the best part is how taylor subverts this though, john is then portrayed as someone who plays with fire, through the image of the girls that he has ‘burned… out’. the song then flips the narrative when the narrator steals his matches and sets the town alight, because if john was playing with fire… well then he was obviously asking to get burned, right? the narrator knows this as the final lines fade out with her changing ‘i should have known’ for ‘you should have known’. it’s calling out double standards at it’s finest