Images of Taylor Swift and Jake Gyllenhaal from October 2010 are crystalized forever in many minds. The paparazzi snaps capture something essentially autumnal—the falling leaves, knit beanies, paper coffee cups, the new-beginning beauty of falling in love. Swift and Gyllenhaal looked like love’s most photogenic representatives. They are literally picture perfect.
She was 20 years old. He was 29.
Swift remembers her relationships “all too well,” as she sings in 2012 album, Red, which is widely understood to be about her relationship with Gyllenhaal. But we, the public, have a memory that warps with time.
During their relationship, coverage tended to ignore the couple’s age gap, or to suggest that Swift alone was responsible for it. Us Weekly noted that Swift’s boyfriend was “nearly a decade her senior.” Sounds Like Nashville featured Swift on a list of female stars who “go for the older guys.” In 2012, Business Insider published a listicle titled “A Timeline of the Age-Inappropriateness of Taylor Swift’s Romances.”
But now, as Swift rereleases Red, including a long-awaited 10-minute version of “All Too Well,” a different narrative has emerged. Urged by Swift’s choice to cast 19-year-old Sadie Sink and 30-year-old Dylan O’Brien in the “All Too Well” music video, as well as a line in the extended lyrics, fans are reexamining Swift and Gyllenhaal’s relationship. (“You said if we had been closer in age, maybe it would have been fine / And that made me want to die,” Swift sings.) This time, instead of Swift being cast as a temptress, Gyllenhaal’s behavior is under scrutiny.
Let’s be clear: It’s legal for a 29-year-old to date a 20-year-old. The oldest age of consent set by any U.S. state is 18. But just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s ethical. For some women who were teens during the Red era and now are closer to Gyllenhaal’s current age, this new perspective feels troubling. This relitigation of an antique pop culture moment—a kind of collective whoopsie about the demonization of a too-young woman—feels like Britney Spears all over again.
Feminist writer and critic Moira Donegan summed up one view on Twitter: “Taylor Swift revisiting her 10-years-old bad breakup with an older man reflects a really particular feeling where women remember relationships they had with older men in their teens and twenties and wake up like ‘wait, that was exploitation.’” And young adult novelist Leah Johnson tweeted, “All I can think about after watching Sadie Sink (a BABY!) in that role is how predatory that age gap really was and instead of empathizing with Taylor or acknowledging that particular type of harm in that era all folks wanted to do was get their jokes off about her dating history.”
But in another popular tweet, a user named Rachel raged against “the constant infantilizing of female adult celebs,” calling out those who are “acting like a 9-year age gap is factually, inherently predatory between two consenting adults.”
Put aside for a moment Swift’s polarizing charms and Gyllenhaal’s status as a kind of alt-America sweetheart. The Red revival is causing a moment of reckoning bigger than just their brief relationship. Fans and critics are asking: Can a legal age gap be inappropriate? If one member of a couple was recently a minor, does that make the relationship predatory?
‘All Too Well’ Has Us Asking—When Is an Age Gap Inappropriate?
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