Taylor Swift “All Too Well” lyrics: The story being Jake Gyllenhaal's keychain. - Slate

(Yes, all those parentheticals are in the official title.) On Gawker, Olivia Craighead—despite being a self-declared Swiftie—injected a healthy dose of skepticism into the conversation, under a clickbaity headline announcing that “Taylor Swift is lying.” Craighead took issue with what Swift has said in interviews about the song’s backstory; as she told Jimmy Fallon, “The 10-minute version of ‘All Too Well’ is what was originally written for the song before I had to cut it down to a normal-length song.”.

Craighead’s j’accuse centers on one line in the 10-minute version: “And you were tossing me the car keys/ ‘Fuck the patriarchy’ keychain on the ground.” If, based on Swift’s timeline of events, these lyrics were written sometime in 2011, can we believe that she would have inserted the feminist phrase “fuck the patriarchy” at the time, or was it something added later—which would undermine the notion that these are the song’s initial lyrics, which were pared down for the original Red album.

(Was “fuck the patriarchy” said by the car-key tosser, assumed to be Gyllenhaal, or something written on the keychain? And whose keychain was it anyway?) And let’s also leave aside the role that the song’s co-writer Liz Rose might have played in shaping the lyrics in their various manifestations?

Is Craighead right to dismiss “fuck the patriarchy” as an anachronism revealing that the lyric couldn’t have been written in 2011.

Based on the fact that Google Trends shows nary a blip for “fuck the patriarchy” before 2012, Craighead concludes: “If Swift is to be believed, she either actually coined the phrase a full year before any written mention of it made its way to the internet and then didn’t say anything about it for a decade, or, more absurdly, Jake Gyllenhaal did.”.

While those early examples show “fuck the patriarchy” as a phrase in longer sentences, it soon could stand alone as a rallying cry?

While “fuck the patriarchy” may have emerged as a slogan in activist circles by the mid-’90s, it was still a long way from reaching more mainstream exposure of the kind that might have caught the eye of a young Taylor Swift.