I could probably sing you two bars from Taylor Swift’s catalog. No offense — I’m not the target market. But when you’re everywhere, like she is, I hear about you whether I’ve actually heard you or not.
And what I’ve been hearing about Swift, from other men as well as from women, is that the internet is forcing women they know into an increasingly unjust and uncomfortable silence about Taylor — about the person, the artist, and the phenomena, especially in the wake of her endorsement of Donald Trump’s rival for the White House.
And it looks a lot like nobody remotely near his stature can openly speak the mind of specifically female citizens secretly resisting conscription into the Taylor cult.
What's the dirty secret about Taylor Swift's full-court press phenomena? More and more women are suffering in silence under the pall of what feels increasingly like a formal obligation to support, celebrate, stand with, and otherwise fangirl Taylor in all her corporal and corporate forms.
I’ve heard this even from former Swift fans, even before the endorsement. It’s the inescapability, the triumphalism, the self-satisfaction; the relentlessness, the fandom, the conformity; the robotic, premeditated quality of the public-facing imagery and messaging, oddly, even unnervingly combined with a “witchiness” that eludes easy description but boils down to a love hex: the primeval psychic insistence that you have to like me.
Lacking a robust, peer-reviewed scientific study on this matter — does anyone really believe those anymore? — I was inclined to let the uncanny situation ebb into the background until someone mentioned it with furrowed brow the next time.
But then ... Trump.
His instant-classic social media broadside — “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” — can be read in a lot of ways. To me, it registered first as a typical chuckle-inducing act of postmodern earnestness, along the lines of a post to X.com reading, "I HATE MONDAYS!"
And while I can’t endorse the feeling, of course (because I don’t hate anyone), this other feeling keeps creeping in, that this is a twist on the Trumpy meme that “they’re not after you, they’re after me; I just happen to be in the way.” Trump’s supporters have always said they love that he speaks his mind. Really, what they love — who wouldn’t? — is that he speaks their mind.
And it looks a lot like nobody remotely near his stature can openly speak the mind of specifically female citizens secretly resisting conscription into the Taylor cult.
It’s possible I might be crazy here, but the logic pencils out. In the neo-feudal world of digital domination, one must find one’s feudal lord for protection in the Dungeons-and-Dragons-like realms of identity, speech, representation, reputation (ahem), and so forth. Who is strong enough in one's identity, speech, etc. to provide lordly cover for the silent majority (?) of women who feel a deep and abiding spiritual discomfort with the Taylor cult — even setting aside nakedly partisan matters entirely — other than Trump? Remarkable!
And suppose I am right, and this all somehow becomes a topic of general conversation. In that case, I expect the result to conform to the pattern of the times: not a debate about the “facts on the ground” but a cosmic dispute about whether “that’s a bad thing” or “good actually.”
As for me, I’ve worn the Kelce-stache before (and just might do so again), so I’m inclined to cut Her Royal Swiftness some slack. Again — not the target market. Compulsory-Taylor-enjoying doesn’t analogize so well to anything men typically impose and enforce on one another. But I’m hearing what I’m hearing, and it feels like society is just getting started in earnest on this one.
P.S.: It’s impossible in our clone-happy age not to think one step further about what will happen if compulsory-Taylor-enjoying really, demonstrably works. They’ll do it again with someone else. And next time, they’ll be less like an entertainer and more like some kind of priestess.
