And that’s something I still struggle with, the expectation that, because I fit into the definition of an adult in some ways–old enough to vote, to drink, to rent a car–that I should now be an adult in all ways, when so much of the time I still feel like a kid playing dress up. Adulthood sneaks up on me in ways both huge–signing as a witness on my best friend’s Ketubah last summer, paying my rent–and tiny–catching myself sounding confident and self-assured at work, spending more than $100 on anything. But for every self-financed vacation or home-cooked meal there’s a day that I call my mom just because her voice on the other end of the phone feels like an anchor, or a day I have to remind myself that a temper tantrum is a disproportionate response. I’m still figuring out how to get up in the morning, how to budget my money, how to cut my grocery shopping to one trip a week, instead of four.

There’s no one right way to grow up, either. At 25, I know people that are married, people that have kids even. I know people that are still in school, people working traditional office jobs, people that are living with their parents and people that moved across the country as soon as they turned 18. I hover somewhere in the middle-ground: financially independent and also unsure if I’m ready for the commitment of a kitten. And the thing is, none of us is any better or worse at being 25, we can’t measure ourselves against each other. We are, I am, in an in-between age. As Britney Spears put it, “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman.”

But what Taylor Swift does so beautifully is pour that exploration into the songs she writes. As Tavi Gevinson put it in her excellent piece for The Believer‘s music issue a couple of months ago, Swift “mak[es] it her job to blow up the most minor event into something that more accurately represents the way she experienced it.” She understands the power of music to speak an emotional truth that can be otherwise difficult to capture. Whether she’s writing about love and heartbreak–and taking a seemingly endless amount of flack for it, more on this later–about leaving home for the first time, or the pitfalls of fame or female friendship, she nails emotions at their most extreme. I would imagine that that’s the thing about her music that so appeals to young girls, who churn with hormones at every moment and feel every emotion to the highest degree possible. Taylor Swift gets them, she understands how phenomenal one moment of your life can be, and how wrenching the next, and she knows how to package that into the right lyrics and the right tune so that you can carry it inside yourself, or share it with the world.

His reason seems to be, mostly, that it’s an inescapable ear worm, and that he hates Taylor Swift as a person. He refers to 21-year-olds as “essentially mentally disabled” (which is not only ableist language, but also wildly condescending), accuses Taylor Swift of being “boring and vapid” and he says that he suspects “dating her is like talking to a white sheet of paper with a little bit of vanilla ice cream on it that doesn’t say anything.” He also attributes any skill in her songs to her producers and calls her lyrics “vapid.” More than anything, he seems to resent her for her fame and success, and for the fact that she appeals to a demographic with a certain amount of buying power, notably a demographic that isn’t thought to be interested in what he does. Overwhelmingly, it feels like he’s talking about an idea of a pop star, not about Taylor Swift in particular.

I’d encourage you to take a look through Taylor Swift’s twitter. Her recent tweets are mostly giddy exclamations about the guests she’s brought on stage at her latest tour stops and glamour shots with her best friend. She retweets a lot of excited fans, I’m sure only sending that excitement level skyrocketing, and, as I said before, she posts a lot of pictures and vines of her cat. To some her relentless enthusiasm seems manufactured, an attempt to maintain a certain image, and I’m sure that comes into play. The celebrities that tweet without a filter–Dan Harmon comes to mind–tend to get themselves into trouble along the way, and the weight of that role model moniker she carries must be pretty heavy. To me though, she mostly seems pretty genuine. A lot of 11-year-old girls have big dreams for their lives, but not many of them pursue those dreams as ardently, immediately or successfully as Taylor Swift did, and 12 years later it’s nice to see that she still seems pretty happy with her choices.

But what’s more alarming to me than Braunohler’s attacks on a 23-year-old public figure are his attacks on her largely young, largely female fanbase. I’m five years out from teendom, and I’ll admit that that’s still pretty young, but not so much so that I haven’t been known to groan about “youths” when a crowd of noisy teenagers joins my subway car in the morning, that I don’t sometimes express dismay at how much has changed since I was in high school, a whole 8 years ago, but I’d never dismiss teenagers at large. I still remember what it was like to be one of them. In this new in-between age the world is a little more muted than it was in the before age. I’m not living in some colorless hellscape, waiting to die, but neither can I hyperfocus the way I could at 16, I’m less familiar with emotional extremes. Kurt Braunohler may think teen romances are “dumb, shallow and…essentially meaningless,” but that’s because he’s not a teenage girl, for whom those same teen romances are everything. There’s a reason television has produced so many series about teenagers falling in and out of love: it’s because nothing feels as life-or-death as a crush, and no pain hurts as badly as rejection, when you’re 17.

Contrary to what Braunohler may believe, teenagers have very little power. Most of them function within a strict school schedule, they have to answer to parents, guardians, teachers and other authority figures, and only some have access to cars or public transportation. At 16 or 17 you start having those moments, those flashes, of your adulthood on the horizon–I remember standing in an aisle of the grocery store, with my keys slung between my fingers, not long after I got my driver’s license, and feeling so very grown-up, just for that split second. It was startling and amazing and kind of terrifying–but there aren’t a lot of people that will trust you with it.