The Transmasculine Defense of Tortured Poets Department (Rafael’s Version)
...ready for it?
First, dear subscriber, by way of disclosure: I have only recently become a Swiftie. As in within the last month. And yet here I am, publishing an essay in defense of her Plathian latest album, and really of her in general, on my personal Substack. But, I can hear you protesting: she’s so wealthy and cishet – what could a Pringle-eating, overall-wearing, irregularly bearded transmasc who looks like if Jack Black read too much theory and then began dressing like a chubby dimestore Olsen possibly resonate with in Swift’s Americana-meets-fairytale whitebread pop music? Your brow is furrowed, you are having a hard time just continuing to smile and nod as I prattle on about how the Eras Tour is operatic, or how she’s been writing the soundtrack to all our lives since she was literally sixteen. You snap, telling me that I can’t keep going on with this diva worship nonsense, that Swift isn’t even worthy of such worship. I assure you that she is, and that I’m not “worshipping” anyway, because that is a species of attempted ownership — something Swift has likely had enough of for a lifetime.
Can you hear that record scratch? How did we get here? At this point, Taylor Swift’s career spans nearly two decades, and it began at a high pitch immediately, sixteen-year-old Taylor achieving a truly dizzying level of visibility with her self-titled debut album. The visibility has only intensified with each subsequent album into a level of megafame that I personally would not wish on my worst enemy. And for the bulk of this eighteen-year career, I was[1] either indifferent to Swift or maybe slightly annoyed by her, though I often had a hard time identifying what it was about her exactly that annoyed me. If Taylor Swift ever came up in conversation among me and my friends, it was in a sort of “Isn’t modern life a giant uncanny valley?” kind of way, me making some stoned hipster observation about her ubiquity or ability to influence elections or a heavily ironized reference to songs I secretly loved on Red: “Do you guys remember being fucked up beyond repair and then the dubstep version of ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ came on? Was it not a quasi-religious experience?”
And then it was 2014 and 1989 was released. 1989 is quite possibly Swift’s most agreed-upon album, indisputably the one that cemented her as a permanent fixture of the American collective consciousness, something like if Sylvia Plath had the visibility of Princess Diana but was also a Lunchables-eating millennial[2] from suburban Pennsylvania. It became clear that Swift had to be part of the conversation, a fact which many people seemed to resent, which then made my ears prick up. Because I was alive and paying a modicum of attention in 2014, I heard many, many times songs such as “Style” and “Blank Space” and “Shake It Off,” which began to strike me as a kind of hyper-accessible-but-no-less-elegant form of poetry set to music, and which I was having a harder and harder time being annoyed by. These songs made me happy, or they made me think, or they allowed me to experience a form of catharsis, and I loved them no less than I loved reading Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters or listening to Sufjan Stevens’s The Age of Adz. I began to identify myself as an “appreciator” of Swift with the emphatic caveat that I was not a Swiftie. My absolute rush to say this should have struck me as suspect, but back then I decided to play it down by making a joke of it: rolling my eyes thoughtfully up to the ceiling, shrugging, and saying in a slow and considered tone: “Now, I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a Swiftie, but…”
It was around this time that it dawned on me that Swift and I were born within days of one another,[3] so I decided to make a joke about this, too: “You know, T-Swift and I are both Saggitarians. Born within days of each other. One of us is doing maybe a bit better than the other, career-wise.” And here I would over-ironically gesture to myself, feeling a good deal of self-hatred and pity, and whomever I was telling the joke to would look at me quizzically, realize I was indeed trying to be funny, and force a laugh. It was an unfunny joke because of its incoherence: sure, Taylor Swift has done incredibly well, as far as creative careers go. But her material success is so incomprehensibly stratospheric that it no longer registers as a point in the Cartesian space of millennial striving. It’s unchartable, cosmic, truly beyond. So it loses any meaning as a metric of comparison, and Taylor Swift loses all meaning as someone who could possibly be relatable or really even human, and the joke defaults back to me. Back then, I was having every logorrheic perfectionist’s most annoying problem: appearing to be doing a very good job, and yet choosing to complain very loudly about what a subpar job I was doing all the time. This had the unintended effect of estranging several friends, and making my sweaty, nakedly self-effacing jokes that much harder to pretend-listen to.
This weird joke I had about myself and Swift, my newfound appreciation for some of her songs, and my very queer predisposition to be sympathetic to a pop diva conspired to soften my attitude towards her over the years, well into the Trump presidency. She was at that point still the All-American Soft Girl victim of impertinent, Hennessy-swilling Kanye West, who was hopelessly compelled – as he seems to have been with increasing frequency in the years following his mother’s death – to do the exact worst thing in the racist Grand Guignol of American pop culture. This time, it was cravenly antagonize a young, fragile-looking white woman again and again in some reckless, megafamous performance of the “Black-man-is-persistent-threat-to-white-woman” myth that has led to the violent deaths and incarcerations of generations of Black men in America.[4] America being predisposed to the set of opinions it’s predisposed to, the public attitude toward Swift appeared to be at its softest in 2016. Sure, she had plenty of detractors, but she was fun, a case could certainly be made for her talent,[5] and were there not certain songs of hers that were positive bops, as the kids say? Shortly after West released the “Famous” music video that, incredibly, featured non-consensual recreations of a number of celebrities’ naked bodies, including Swift’s[6], America was as ready to embrace her as it ever was. Put simply: there is no better publicity for a white woman than being publicly antagonized by a Black man.
And then Swift disappeared for a year,[7] and when she returned it was with this album that was neither soft nor all-American, but was instead about having been fucked with. Horribly fucked with, by a number of people, many of them men. And she went on tour for this album and was kind of weaponizing her eroticism both in her songs and her performances, she was finally being sexy but it was, confoundingly, not with a cute eagerness to please. And then came a redoubling of the Dude As Unmoved Mover Discourse (hereafter referred to as DAUMD). At its core, the DAUMD postulates the following: 1) Taylor Swift only writes songs about men; 2) Taylor Swift is a man-eater who burns through relationships just to make hit albums about them; 3) What a tragedy, to date Taylor Swift: I would not do it, and nor should anyone else. There are a variety of variations on the DAUMD, such as “Taylor Swift’s heterosexuality is oppressive” and “Taylor Swift songs don’t pass the Bechdel test” (even though her songs aren’t dialogic), but before and during Swift’s Reputation era, it was deployed mainly by men and Girls Who Can Hang (later also known as “trans men in denial,” “lean-in lesbians,” or “too cool for feminism,” among others) as a means of dismissing Swift as an artist. The idea that a woman who looks like Swift could also be as good as Swift is at what she does was an idea too destabilizing to cisheteropatriarchy for the IPA-and-Tame Impala set to consider.
Two things happened post-Reputation: Swift’s popularity took on Beatlemania heights of religious fervor (she became, as only a few have before her, an industry), and hating Taylor Swift became a popular pastime. Now that she had done this very strange thing, this distinctly Swiftian fuck-you in the form of another album-memoir in which she is angry and bewildered but also threateningly sexy, being hot onstage but not in a pleasant kittenish way, the helpless princess no longer an applicable archetype? That meant that she had confounded patriarchy in this intricate, quasi-literary way, and that was – well that was just not fucking okay.
So, as happens so frequently in American culture, two opposing camps emerged: the Swifties and the Swift-haters. To be among Swift-haters was to see the entire world as comprised of Swifties, and vice versa. Swift-hatred seemed to be seriously in vogue in the circles I wanted to be a part of in my late 20s: the queers, the anarchists, the artists. All seemed to have a reason to despise her: she’s a thin, able-bodied cishet white woman (basically the new thin, able-bodied cishet white man, who I guess has now ascended to god-level?); she’s a literal billionaire and acts like a CEO; she’s a pop hack who’s got everyone hypnotized with her good looks but really the songs are all just about [insert preferred flavor of DAUMD here].
I was some ridiculous age like twenty-eight,[8] the kind of age at which you are convinced you no longer want to be a popular kid but still very sincerely do, just not in any way you realize. I was having this odd experience of continuing to warm to Swift’s music even as I drew closer to social circles in which she was persona non grata, and despite being twenty-eight, I continued to maintain that I was “no Swiftie, but admire her as an artist,” and that “some of her songs sound really good.” Luckily for my social anxiety, statements such as these tripped no alarm bells among the joyless young leftists with whom I made art, did drugs, and fretted about the end of the world. Yeah, typically came the response, already disengaged, already onto the next point of judgment or criticism. I guess some of the songs are kind of catchy. Succumbing to restrained enjoyment of the top forty was a rare un-cancellable offense, especially living as we were at the end of history. There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, after all!
I imagine you’re still wondering about the record scratch, dear subscriber? Never fear – I haven’t forgotten! Things intensified, as they often do: there was COVID, and then I changed genders so completely that there are now many people in my life who are utterly shocked by old photos of me,[9] and then I underwent a set of personal traumas that would sound more convincing if they were a plot arc on an HBO miniseries, and then Taylor Swift’s music helped me through a large portion of those traumas, and then – a little over a month ago – I looked up and realized that “Swiftie” is an accurate descriptor for me.
The circumstances by which I became a Swiftie are best saved for another essay[10]: what I’d rather spend time on now is explicating the strange experience of being a newly-minted Swiftie who is: 1) queer and trans; 2) a white dude; 3) adjusting to Switfie-hood during the release of an album, and not just any album, but The Tortured Poets Department.
Have I felt variously elated, confused, antagonized, and antagonistic? Yes. But more importantly, I’ve come a long way from my “Sagittarius of Failure” bit. This feels as controversial a statement to make as “I am pro-choice” or “I am pro-life,” so here goes: I have grown immensely as a result of listening to Taylor Swift’s music, and being a Swiftie has shown me things about the world that I could not have known otherwise.
* * * *
Since its release a week ago, I have been listening to The Tortured Poets Department (hereafter referred to as TTPD), either actively or passively, pretty much all of the time. If I am conscious and not engaged in an activity that prohibits the playing of music, TTPD is playing. There are some tracks that must be bumped and sung along to, even in a supposedly passive listening situation (“Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me,” and “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”), while there are others that must occasionally be played on constant loop (“Down Bad,” “Guilty As Sin,” “The Alchemy”). The album itself had the staggered-release drama of many a Swift album – I’ve learned from veteran Swifties that the advent calendar thing is not uncommon, with release day functioning as both Christmas and a rather spendy mini-advent in itself, Taylor tweeting with more content at 1:00am, and then dropping some special edition vinyl at 8:00am, and so on – and once I had my hands on the double album Anthology version of TTPD, it became immediately clear to me that I was listening to the millennial Bell Jar in pop album form, and that we have in Swift a hybrid of Sexton, Plath, and Bishop who is also Stevie Nicks and Clara Bow[11] and every dewy, ethereal public paragon of femininity onto whom we have stapled our societal needs for a Madonna, a whore, a mother, a lover, a scapegoat, a good girl, and so on.
The Bell Jar is a book about a prodigiously talented and intelligent young woman whose inability to find fulfillment in material success and the objects afforded by it lands her in a state of anhedonia and suicidality. Esther’s hyper-competence – genius, really – disillusionment with the life paths allowed her, and anxieties/anger about men and sex are all themes shared by Swift in TTPD, and which are driven home by the luminous music video for “Fortnight.” Swift, tortured confessional poet that she is, has always been telling us exactly what’s going on as best she can, and in TTPD she informs us of her childhood precocity, and the various times she’s been called insane, and the horrible part of fame where all the “I love your work” turns into “You owe me better” turns into “I made you, and I can break you.” And she persists in writing her memoir despite the persistent echo of the DAUMD, the tireless and ever-adaptable and always-enduring DAUMD[12]. Can you imagine if every time Karl Ove Knausgaard put out a book, viperous fans leaked the first chapter and posted it on social media with the caption “The entire thing’s just about his mom” or “This is literally just about his ex-wife”? Or if when Justin Timberlake put out “Cry Me a River,” hundreds of millions of people had dismissed it as him whining about Britney Spears? And I don’t think it’d be going out on a limb to say that neither Knausgaard nor Timberlake are engaged in the same project of highly vulnerable (and highly visible) self-disclosure that Swift is, and has been for nearly two decades.
One thing that being a Swiftie has made me realize is that Taylor Swift has been a ready-to-hand concept for my entire adult life. Long before I realized her music meant anything to me, I knew exactly what she looked like, and could thus immediately conjure an image when my friend told me she had a crush on a woman who had “a cat-like face like Taylor Swift’s.” If someone made a joke that relied on knowledge of the “You Belong With Me” music video, I had that knowledge by virtue of being a human millennial who’d put in his time guzzling cheap wine and staring at laptop screens. If you stare at enough laptop screens for enough hours, you are bound to see Taylor Swift’s face several times. She has been around for decades, and she is such a popular and common touchstone that knowledge of her can be relied upon like knowledge that the sky is blue, or that peanut butter is made of peanuts.
For the non-Swiftie, this fact is amusing at best, aggravating at worst. But for the Swiftie – particularly those of us who struggle, as countless humans do, with oversharing and codependency – it is quite staggering. The Swiftie knows, after all, that Taylor Swift is giving us a lot: she loves songwriting, and she seems to also love performing[13], and she is putting out giant albums at a truly shocking rate, and is currently performing a 3.5-hour concert around the world, and all the music is of a stunningly high quality – that bedeviling Swiftian genius, that conundrum of hyper-competence and dewy femininity at once! – and has at this point accepted that the DAUMD is going to happen, is even using it to her advantage via a system of carefully-laid Easter eggs. The Swift-hater is convinced that the Swiftie is a feckless naïf totally fooled by the Taylor Swift industrial complex, but what the hater doesn’t know is that the Swiftie is the least fooled of all, for she is actually listening to the music and paying attention to the lyrics and knows what Taylor Swift has had to learn the hard way: that material success and its trappings (the money, the fame, the boyfriends, etc.) can severely destabilize you. Capitalist success, even the stratospheric kind, is not the one-size-fits-all solution to the pain of being human that we’ve been led to believe it is.
But who are Swifties? Let me tell you, dear subscriber, about some of the Swifties I know: they are millennial women, sure, but also women of all ages, many of them mothers of little girls who are also Swifties. They are gays of many genders, they are sensitive people whose creativity has been belittled by parents and teachers and partners, they are goofs and oddballs who have been told that no one will be interested in their stories. Contrary to popular belief, they appreciate a wide variety of music: they love Nina Simone (who also suffered from intense stigmatization of her genius, further complicated by misogynoir), Grizzly Bear, Frank Ocean, M.I.A., Limp Wrist, Credence Clearwater Revival, Cher, etc. etc. They are all extremely, uncritically supportive of the idea of womanhood as a collective shared experience worthy of its own poetics, not as some kind of looks-based gated community or a club into which one wins admission via demonstration of physical perfection and emotional restraint. The Swifties I know are quite a chill crew, happily posting about their support of Taylor and her music and rarely if ever straying from their joy to wander antagonistically into someone else’s comments, as I’ve seen many a Swift-hater do.
Granted, I am making a claim about the small group of Swifties that I know personally, not all Swifties. Any fandom is bound to be multifarious and prone to parasocial obsession, cancellation and infighting: a fandom as large as Swift’s certainly has its judicious share of punisher[14] rabidity. I’m merely saying that, along with the rabidity, there are also legions of young girls and their moms (and sometimes even dads!) bonding over lyrics that hit the patriarchy exactly where it hurts, and there is also a tireless Israeli stan who drew strength from Swift’s lyrics while she was in prison for refusing to join the IDF, and there are countless queer and trans people like myself who resonate with Swift’s meaning-making regardless of her sexual orientation (we know, as she does, how it feels to be defined by who you date, to be relentlessly surveilled by a world that seems to have a personal stake in your appearance and attachments). Any dismissal of Swifties as a bunch of slavering fangirls who love a billionaire’s “bad” music[15] includes all the above parties. When the conversation gets heated – as conversations about Taylor Swift and Swifties tend to nowadays – I am inclined to say to my frustrated interlocutor: “What did a bunch of little girls and their moms ever do to you?”
To return briefly to the ready-to-hand thing: I was recently watching the Eras Tour on Disney Plus, and at one point in the nearly four hour show, Taylor pulls out her acoustic guitar, says something like “OK, will you all come back to high school with me?” And when the sold-out stadium roars, she begins playing “You Belong With Me” as the screen behind her flashes with the words and color palette signaling our entrance into her Fearless era, and it hit me: Taylor Swift has been assisting us in individual and collective meaning-making since she was a literal teenager. For years upon years, we were all figuring ourselves out while enjoying the luxury of anonymity, listening to “I Knew You Were Trouble” or “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and thinking Wow, this describes exactly how I feel about my ex! And meanwhile Taylor Swift was also trying to figure herself out, but while writing music so sonically and lyrically appealing that several of her songs would become anthems of her generation. She was being scrutinized by millions and then eventually billions, she was obviously scrambling to guard herself against the perils of such intense exposure, she was being coerced and manipulated while also being made publicly aware of the various and painful ways in which she herself is certainly no angel. At eighteen, I would have fallen apart if all the kids in my grade suddenly started saying mean things about me – I shudder to think how I would have felt if hundreds of millions of Twitter users were doing the same. But Swift’s life changed when she entered the public consciousness in 2006: she has long passed through the looking glass, and the once-private citizen named Taylor Alison Swift[16] has now become an object, a concept, an archetype to which the entire world has access. It must be dizzying to have a fanbase as vast as Swift’s making the claims to ownership of her life and work that fan bases always do. Equally dizzying: balancing megafame with the type of confessional singing-songwriting she does. No other folk-memoirist has achieved her level of exposure, and honestly I’d eschew megafame[17] if I was doing the kind of work Swift does – it seems she feels similarly, but unfortunately her die has already been cast.
The excitement I am currently feeling about TTPD is comparable to the excitement I felt about Beyoncé’s opus Lemonade, another highly confessional memoir-album with “establishing a poetics of femininity” as part of its agenda. Beyoncé’s story about being cheated on by Jay-Z (a particular that served as the narrative backbone for such powerful universals as “Black women’s liberation is often overlooked and deprioritized in favor of Black men’s liberation” and “feminine sexuality is routinely seen as a threat in both art and life”) was endlessly interrogated and picked apart until it was frayed at the seams, and TTPD has already met with a similar fate.
This album – which, I cannot emphasize enough, really feels like reading a hybrid poetry/personal essay collection – had its detractors before it was even released. Certain tracks were leaked, and the DAUMD was immediately triggered: it was determined that Matty Healy is TTPD’s unmoved mover, though there are other tracks about Joe Alwyn and Travis Kelce. Lyrics – typically the ones intended as jokes, or the ones in which Swift reveals herself to be just as terminally online as the next millennial – were posted and dissected and submitted as evidence of her airheadedness, her lack of literary talent, and Swifties were once again taken to task for being a barely-literate group of screaming girlies who wouldn’t know Real Poetry if it smacked the cheap lipstick right off their faces.
A species of Swift- and TTPD-hatred I encounter with most frequency in my present social milieu is that of the Serious Male Novelist. Mind you, one does not have to be a man to be a Serious Male Novelist: I’ve met many a woman and nonbinary Serious Male Novelist, as well as many who would describe their politics as “radical” and their worldview as “anti-patriarchal.” And yet, when I make mention of loving TTPD, being a Swiftie, or feeling compelled against my better judgment to dive into the comments when encountering Swift-hatred online, the Serious Male Novelist looks at me askance. “Are you really doing this, Raf?” he/she/they seems to be saying. “Surely you haven’t become a full-bore Swiftie?”
And what if I have?
The Serious Male Novelist is a risk-taking artist who is still concerned with maintaining a certain degree of respectability. He (because this is the pronoun that applies most frequently) is a reader of novels and poetry and essays that challenge the mind and prompt one to live an examined life. He likes art that takes similar risks. He likes intellectual rigor. He has Good Taste. He is a feminist, of course – he’s not a barbarian. He loves Eileen Myles and Joan Didion and Zadie Smith and has always had a soft spot for Rihanna’s artistry and chaotic nihilism, maybe even for the occasional Phoebe Bridgers or Joanna Newsom song. But…Taylor Swift? With her gauzy dresses and tendency to break up with guys and then write albums about them with such stupid lyrics? With her softness, her indulgence in to-the-hilt girliness, her embarrassing love of cats, her tendency to play the victim despite being a literal billionaire? The “singer-songwriter” that all those little girls like, whose albums all those suburban moms stand in line at Target to buy? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, Raf.
No, in fact I am not kidding you.
It’s odd how my Swiftiehood has affected the Serious Male Novelists in my life. I have had multiple tense conversations with multiple highly educated, left-leaning people, all with the same subtext: The fact that you are a Swiftie makes me uncomfortable. There is a sense of disbelief and even embarrassment that I – someone who by all rights should be stepping into the role of for-real Serious Male Novelist – is so into this pop diva. What do I see in her? Could it be that I, Rafael Frumkin, am after all just another vapid, internet-addicted fangirl?
There is certainly a great degree of exceptionalism happening in conversations with the Serious Male Novelist about Swift: when Rachel Cusk or Annie Ernaux or Elena Ferrante write about heartbreak or friendship or sex, they are apparently doing something different than the multi-platinum dithering Taylor Swift is doing. They are erudite while she is complaining all the way to the bank. Never mind that all these artists are working with similar sets of themes, that a childhood spent as a Swiftie could very well prime one for an adulthood spent reading texts like Delta of Venus and The Argonauts. (Although why wait until adulthood to start reading when Swift is giving detailed Dickinson, Brontë, and Fitzgerald recommendations to her young fans right now?)
I’m convinced the real sticking point for the Serious Male Novelist in conversations with me about my Swiftiehood isn’t my confounding enthusiasm for Swift’s music, but the transness that undergirds it. Transitioning has allowed me the mental space to embrace my femininity as I was never able to while struggling to meet the normative requirements of my assigned gender. Now that my body – hormonally and surgically modified – feels homier and more welcoming, now that I am able to finally exhale and be the fruity weirdo I was intended to be, I’m finding that I’m resonating with media about being a woman as I never allowed myself to before. Books and films and songs by women about feeling sad or angry or euphoric or scared or vengeful or chaotic, about butting heads with the stultifying fact of the cisheteropatriarchy, now resonate with me to an unprecedented degree. And when this fact becomes clear in my conversations with the Serious Male Novelist, a chasm opens between us — or perhaps the already-open chasm just widens dramatically. Because I am not even enjoying Swift as a gay boy or agreeable “male feminist” or really any sort of man: I am enjoying her as a woman, meaning that I used to be a woman, meaning that I am trans.
An observation I’ve had the chance to make several times in the past week, subscriber: there are few people who want to be reminded of the fact of someone else’s transness. No matter their avowed open-mindedness or voting record or dutiful virtue signaling on social media – if you’ve got a flat chest and a beard, your conversation partner will be perplexed and likely a bit uncomfortable when you casually mention your “former womanhood.” Now you’ve gone and destabilized cisheteropatriarchy, which is better done with a polite “Hate Has No Home Here” sign, or maybe a rainbow Bank of America float in a Pride parade[18].
The irony here is that when I was a girl, I was a Serious Male Novelist. If TTPD had come out during the height of my self-torture due to internalized misogyny (roughly ages 16-22), I would have been quick to join the chorus of Swift-hatred. I would have gleefully picked apart her lyrics, or gestured to the DAUMD as conclusive demonstration of how one cannot be both boy-crazy and a serious artist, and probably raised my eyebrows at avowed Swifties as many have recently raised their eyebrows at me. Anything to separate myself from that pathetic, cloying, sparkly pink mass of girliness: anything to show that I was not like the other girls, that I was smart and serious and funny just like the guys. If only I could tell that girl that she would someday be accepted as one of the guys, would be allowed into that coveted inner sanctum of rarefied tastes and fancy wristwatches and unabashed mansplaining, and would end up preferring the ethos of the sparkly pink mass instead.
And what a time to embrace being part of the sparkly pink mass! I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling like TTPD is a personal gift. For me, the occasion is my reconciliation with – and outright enthusiasm for – my femininity, and the chance to inhabit a joyful, colorful, non-toxic masculinity that openly celebrates said femininity (and all its softness, sensitivity, and alleged “too much”-ness) in myself and others.
As for the Serious Male Novelist, I wish him peace. Nothing good comes from fetishizing fame and material success until both become ends in themselves: the annals of American history are full of public figures learning this lesson over and over again. I suppose I should tell him and his fellow Swift-haters that there is a difference between expressing a preference and mounting an ad hominem attack, that he can only say “her music is bad” and “she is basically Elon Musk” so many times before it starts sounding like “it scares me that someone has achieved such massive success singing about girl issues” and “if I can’t have the wealth, fame, and external validation that I so desperately crave, then no one can – certainly not someone as trivial as Taylor Swift.”
I cannot foresee a future in which I am not a Swiftie, a fact which brings me great comfort. To my fellow Swifties: thank you, as ever, for your community. And to all those deeply offended by Swiftiedom, TTPD, and the meteoric success of Swift herself: I hope you can get some therapy for those champagne problems of yours!
[1] Or at least I thought I was.
[2] Kindly do not step to me with any form of “Taylor Swift has never eaten a Lunchable” discourse. She has eaten more than one Lunchable (inclusive Oreo and Capri Sun), she has had those 90s grocery store sugar cookies that were so good despite their bewildering chalkiness, she has eaten Little Caesars garlic knots and Burger King fries and onion-filled casseroles. Just fucking relax and let the woman eat.
[3] My name is Rafael, and I was born in 1989. (On December 15th)
[4] Am I also working on an essay about gender, race and the 2009 VMAs? Yes.
[5] Talented for a girl!
[6] Speaking as a rare Swiftie who is also a great admirer of Kanye’s music, I will say that there are few lyrics of his worse than “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / I made that bitch famous,” but the whole “I got bleach on my t-shirt” sequence in “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1” probably qualifies.
[7] Salinger and Pynchon disappeared for a whole lot less.
[8] No offense, twenty-eight-year-olds: it’s just become clear to me these past four years that my adult life finally began in earnest at thirty, or possibly even thirty-one!
[9] To be clear: this concept of having been a woman and now being a man is a heuristic I apply to my transness and mine alone. Different trans people understand their transness differently!
[10] It’ll be in Salukis on Swift, which I’m co-editing with my former MFA student-turned-professional-writer-and-editor Mandi Jourdan!
[11] Yet another stunner of a song off that album.
[12] If all human life were somehow wiped off Earth, I’m convinced there’d still be cephalopods saying “That album was just about Matty Healy” to each other in their cephalopod language.
[13] Within reason, of course! I’ve been tired out by doing improv or reading from my books in front of audiences of thirty or forty, and that’s a pretty far cry from performing an epic space opera about my various heartbreaks for literal millions.
[14] “Punishers” is the nickname Phoebe Bridgers has given her most possessive, out-of-pocket fans.
[15] The amount of times I’ve heard this characterization of the Taylor Swift fandom spoken not just by cis men, but people of all genders!
[16] Born on December 13th, 1989.
[17] I would personally eschew megafame no matter what, but that’s a story for another time.
[18] Note: neither of these things constitute actual destabilizations of cisheteropatriarchy, which is of course the point.