Being an artist's muse can be tough

Taylor Swift humiliated a former lover with a song called Dear John. Photo / AP

Late in the first season of the TV series I Love Dick, adapted from Chris Kraus' 1997 novel of the same name, two men have a drink and a conversation. They are Sylvere, an academic married to a woman named Chris, and Dick, an artist with whom Chris has become increasingly publicly obsessed. Chris has been writing letters to Dick and posting them all over their tiny town. Dick is miserable and furious.

Sylvere is jealous. "What's the matter - you don't like being a muse?" he asks.

Most of the time, Dick is a cowboy stoic. Now, though, he's drunk and exhausted. "Can I tell you the truth?" he asks. "It's humiliating."

It's a much milder response than that of the real-life academic Dick is based on, Dick Hebdige, who sent a cease-and-desist letter to Kraus after the novel was published. He compared the intrusion into his life to the press stalking of Princess Diana.

Men like Dick do not expect to find themselves used in someone else's work, largely because the role of muse is traditionally occupied by women. Feminist art activists Guerrilla Girls asked, "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?" citing the fact that, in 2012, 5 per cent of artists in the museum's modern collection were women - compared with 85 per cent of its nudes.

In theory, at least, most of those women sat for their portraits, but there are some muses who did not consent to being captured. Dick's humiliation and Hebdige's outrage are appropriate responses to finding yourself in someone's art unwillingly - but Hebdige's comfort in voicing that outrage, and the critical response Kraus got for the book, display a gendered double standard towards artists and muses little changed in the 20 years since I Love Dick was published.

The outrage was not limited to Hebdige: I Love Dick is "a book not so much written as secreted", says a 1998 Bookforum review, suggesting the novel is the product of some gross biological process. This kind of attack is familiar to women who write; Joanna Russ includes it in the tactics she discusses in her 1973 book How to Suppress Women's Writing.

"Assertions that the work indicates the author's bad character and hence is primarily of scandalous interest," she says, are one of the ways the culture tells women they aren't really writers - just self-interested girls transcribing their gossip.

Men criticising female artists for making details of a private interaction public are not limited to Hebdige: John Mayer, too, was "humiliated" when Taylor Swift wrote a song about their relationship, Dear John, about him playing around with a girl "too young to be messed with".

Another one of Swift's muses, former One Direction member Harry Styles, dropped a self-titled solo debut on the same day the show I Love Dick was released on Amazon. Styles was publicly good-natured about Swift's 1989, which included a track shamelessly named Style: "She's really good, so they're good songs," he said in 2015. He did, however, co-write a track called Perfect for One Direction in which he wonders if his would-be lover is "looking for someone to write your breakup songs about".

On Harry Styles, Styles claims a muse of his own: Townes, as in Townes Adair Jones, a 20-year-old UCLA student he reportedly went on a blind date with in late 2016. "She never saw herself as a West Coaster / moved all the way 'cause her grandma told her, 'Townes / better swim before you drown', " goes one of the verses of his song Carolina.

According to the Daily Mail, which broke the story of her identity, Styles and Jones know each other through mutual friends, but she didn't get a warning she was about to become international news: Jones discovered that Styles had written the song when her dad called after hearing it along with the rest of the world when Styles debuted it.

There's been no discussion whether Jones, like Hebdige and Mayer, might be humiliated: the tone of the media coverage of her is uniformly breathless with jealousy. A Seventeen headline calls her "Lucky AF". Who wouldn't want to be so desirable that she gets to be the woman who inspires an artist to make his art?

Well, someone who wanted to have a private life, perhaps. Jones hasn't responded to requests for comment, but a friend of hers - or maybe a "friend" - spoke anonymously to the Daily Mail. Her father gave an interview about the song to his local news channel. They got about 15 seconds out of him before Jones called to tell him what he was and wasn't allowed to say.

It does start to sound humiliating, doesn't it?

Styles' choice to name a woman without asking her - especially one who doesn't have an established public persona or the same platform to speak back about him - feels deeply uncomfortable. He and Swift and Mayer can trade shots in the cover stories of magazines, but if Jones chooses to speak, she'll get called grasping and probably end up as tabloid fodder.

It's hard not to wish Styles could have been more empathetic in his imagining of what writing about Jones might do to her and her life.

Where Styles is given the freedom to write about a girl who will only ever be considered lucky to have got his attention, Kraus' book remains an act of defiance. "It's humiliating," Dick says on screen, and he's not wrong. The question is, when will a woman be allowed to say so? And how much longer after that until she is believed?