Although I write about legal issues quite a bit, and I tend to write about them in terms both hyperbolic and profane, this week, there’s been a decision that has actually upset me enough that it’s cast a pall over my everyday life. Kiyemba v. Obama. The D.C. Circuit held that habeas corpus is not available to prevent the transfer of individuals in U.S custody to countries where they face a substantial likelihood of torture.

I’m actually getting a little bit of a welling of tears typing this. I want to do my usual explanation and dissection right now, but I can’t. This issue … it’s something I know a lot about. I spent a lot of my time last year kinda immersed in these issues. So this bugs me more than it would ordinarily bug me.

Some days I love America so much. Iowa, Vermont. Thank you. Some days … I wonder whether the principles that I kinda fell for while ignoring my con-law professor mean anything. So I’m not going to say much about it.

Not much, other than: this really, really sucks because there are grounds under U.S. and International law that prohibit transfers to torture, but without habeas, it’s really hard to imagine anyone actually being able to benefit from those protections. Dammit. I’ll tell you how it works later, if you’re interested.

But now, no.

So here’s what I’ve been letting myself focus on, to sublimate my half-sick feelings about the great writ …Taylor Swift.

I hate that song of hers, “Love Story.” And not just because the thing is simplistic and tedious, and manages to turn one of the best-known works of Western Literature into something more shallow than a zit cream commercial … but because it’s insidiously anti-feminist, and it plays into a sickening propertarian view of female sexuality that pisses me the fuck off.

If I had a daughter, I’d be more comfortable with her listening to “Givin’ up the Nappy Dugout” than this song. Here’s the jist of it, if you haven’t heard it. (And if you haven’t heard it, would you tell me how you managed to miss it? I’m so jealous):

There’s a young woman. We know she’s at least of the age of consent, because of the way the song ends. She sees a guy, and she likes him. Her dad tells him to buzz off. She cries, and asks the guy not to go. She begs the guy to take her away somewhere, alone. They meet up again, and she begs him again to run away with her.

Eventually, she goes off somewhere to wait for him. She waits forever and ever. Then he pulls up in a truck or something, and says: Hey, lady. It’s ok. I talked to your dad. Now we’re getting married! Pick out a dress!

You probably don’t get why this pisses me off so much. A lot of people, I think, are pissed off by how much time the narrator spends begging the guy to save her, and all of that. I think that that’s not so bad.

 Even though she begs him to save her, she’s always the one telling him what she wants. And what she wants, it’s clear, is to just run off and be together. The guy is reluctant. So, eventually, when she runs away, he dicks around until he gets her father’s permission, to marry her. Happy ending.

 So this is what we know: Here’s a woman of legal age to be married. She wants to run away – presumably, to have sex, or some other liason. She never brings up marriage. She never seems to want her dad’s approval.

But, Romeo knows better. He doesn’t let poor Juliet’s hormones run away with her, and let her ruin her “purity” or her life by having premarital sex. No! He does the right thing! And the right thing is, of course, letting Juliet’s father decide under what circumstances she gets to have sex.

The moral of the story: Women get carried away with things sometimes. Therefore, it’s important that men are able to think clearly, and do the right thing, lest a woman wreck herself by making her own sexual decisions.

Basically, this is the kind of song they play at a purity ball.

Basically, this is an insidious reminder that, although we’re allegedly a society where the line between legal sex and illegal sex – or taboo sex and legitimate sex – is consent (And the capacity to consent) … we really kinda still believe that a woman’s “purity” is her father’s property.

This may not seem like a creepy thing initially. The interest of parents in their children’s well-being may encompass, to a certain extent, an interest in their sexual decision-making. Arguably. Maybe. However, that interest should diminish and finally be terminated at some point in adolescence. I would argue, sometime between puberty and a full time job.

It is creepy, though, when you recall that the idea of a woman’s or girl’s “purity” as something to be “guarded” was legally accepted for hundreds of years in western society. As a result, until the seventies in some states, a man couldn’t be convicted of rape unless it could be demonstrated that his victim put up enough resistance. Under a propertarian system, this makes a perverse sense: if a woman is not the owner of her sexual decisions, but merely the caretaker of her purity, then if she is less than vigilant in protecting it, then how could anyone possibly be convicted of a trespass against it?

Rape wasn’t a crime of non-consent; rape was a crime of theft. You can’t steal abandoned property. In states where marital rape was not a crime, the logic was similar.

So.

Please.

Don’t let your daughters listen to Taylor Swift. 

And give me a bit, before I decide whether to write about Kiyemba.