This essay is not an analysis of Life Of A Showgirl. Not
exactly.
Is it even a coherent analysis, or is it just a messy,
confused vent about what happens when a woman is famous? Well, dear reader, we’re
going to find out together.
First, a disclaimer on my own biases, my own little
standpoint theory discursion.
I have a Swiftie in my life who’s very important to me, and
that definitely prejudices my perspective on this. I started out as a pretty
thoughtless Taylor Swift hater myself. She was tall, blonde, and pretty, and I’m
none of those things, depending on who you ask about the last one; it was easy
to project the cruelty I’d suffered at other people’s hands onto her as an
aggressor.
Commentators I like, like Todd in the Shadows, also were
very happy to make fun of her. Did I unpack this at the time? No, that had to
come later, with some maturity.
Still, nobody is ever neutral about these things, and anyone
who thinks they’re an objective critic is being fooled by the very concept of
objectivity.
So, let’s start with the album itself. What did I think?
The Album
Life of a Showgirl is fine. It’s pretty mid, but it’s
not the worst album I’ve ever heard by a female artist – that dubious honour
belongs to 0304 by Jewel, which failed so spectacularly at its concept
of mixing Big Band music with showtunes that my teenage heart was broken.
Still – it has some clunky lyrics, yes, and the songs aren’t
as catchy as on some albums. Is it one of her best albums ever? Absolutely not.
But it’s also not the artistic massacre that some people seem to think it is.
Between this and The Tortured Poets Department, my
personal analysis of the last two releases is that Swift has started putting
out music for herself, rather than with her career and her fans in mind. It’s
also entirely possible that she’s going through what I’ve seen happen with many
authors; namely, she’s too big to critique properly, and people who should be her
creative aides are yes-manning rather than editing her.
The thing about the album that I personally appreciated,
though, was that she seems happy.
The internet, however, has lost its goddamn mind over this
album.
Mass Hysteria
By and large, this album has been succeeding financially,
but failing with fans and critics. A bunch of people I know have absolutely
loathed this album, and there’s a huge backlash among both Swifties and
Swift-haters alike.
The thing is, though, the backlash isn’t just a matter of dunking
on clunky lyrics. There’s an aura of self-righteous triumph among critics, and
a sort of woeful, “Whoa, was she really Bad all along?!” response from a lot of
fans, that’s seriously skeeving me out.
Now, this backlash comes in multiple parts; let’s start with
arguably the most damning and justified part.
The Woobification of Charlie XCX
The song “Actually Romantic” is apparently a riposte to “Sympathy
is a Knife” by Charlie XCX. Now, podcasts I like (such
as ICYMI) went into detail on this, but not quite *enough* detail.
As this essay
put it, ghere’s no getting past the aggressive element and tone-deafness of
writing a song called “Sweetheart” about other women picking on you, then
writing “Actually Romantic” and what could be read as biphobia/homophobia. I’m
not going to defend that perspective, because at best, it’s a bad look, and
shortsighted.
The interesting thing is, people are mostly going from the
context of the song “Sympathy is a Knife” and this song – but that’s just not
the whole story about whatever has gone on between Charlie XCX and Swift.
For one thing, as the Swiftie in my life pointed out,
Charlie didn’t *just* write the song. She made tweets and other cagey
references to Swift online. And there was also this photoshoot, which totally
is just symbolic of Charlie’s struggles with fame and definitely, absolutely,
not a reference in any way shape or form to the friendship bracelets that are a
huuuuuuge thing among Taylor Swift fans.
Add to that, the fact that Charlie XCX – who is not a tiny,
up-and-coming indie artist, even though she’s obviously not Taylor Swift – was previously
opening for Swift on the Eras tour, and that she’s married to a bandmate of one
of Swift’s exes, Matty Healy…and it all just turns into something a little less
cut-and-dried. My personal read is that they’ve probably bickered in private,
and stuff has happened that the general public doesn’t know about.
But to read and hear about the internet’s reaction, you’d
think Taylor Swift had football-kicked a puppy.
To summarize, then: is it homophobic? Kinda. Petty?
Definitely. But is there more going on here than meets the eye? We have no
way of knowing, but the internet sure isn’t pausing to consider that.
A History of Misogyny and Victimhood
The reactions I’ve seen to this album’s release have been,
to put it mildly, fucking unhinged – particularly because the album itself is
being read in the absolute worst faith possible, and being used as an indictment
of Swift as a person. I’ve seen comments that included, but weren’t limited to,
the idea that Swift is “lowering herself” with Kelce and that she “could do
better” with a partner; the idea that she’s now signalling herself as a
tradwife and is secretly MAGA, to the idea that her opalite necklace is a coded
white supremacist nod. (On the necklace, there are 8 lightning bolt charms and
14 links between them, which some people think is a dogwhistle about the Nazi
meme “1488” – recently referenced by Pete Hegseth in an infamous military
address with top generals. 1488 references the fourteen words, a white
supremacist pledge, and 88 references the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, and
stands for “HH”, meaning “Heil Hitler”. It’s a whole thing, because fascists
used to have to hide their shit, and couldn’t just say things the way they seemingly
can nowadays.)
So, is Swift drifting rightward?
The problem is, it’s almost impossible to extricate the conjecture
about Taylor Swift from both normal press misogyny and the problems she’s
created for herself. Swift has built a career as a confessional songwriter,
coding in little hints and references to past relationships in her songs, and the
press and fans have been delighted to hunt for these Easter Eggs. The problem
is, hunting for patterns that sometimes exist is ripe ground for conspiracy
theorists. Now, Taylor Swift isn’t the right kind of chronically online
politics nerd who’d understand the danger of this, but it’s somewhat directly
fed into the problem of the Gaylors, chronically online queer conspiracy nerds
who’ve concocted increasingly elaborate explanations for how Taylor Swift is
secretly in a relationship with Karlie Kloss, a former best friend. (And of
course, “Actually Romantic” isn’t exactly going to help these allegations.)
But, back to the subheading. Is Swift a victim or a perpetrator?
God, that’s a stupid setup, and yet it’s the one we’re all
being offered, twenty-four-seven right now. The shine is off the apple! This
will sink her career! Never mind the fact that this kind of background radiation
has been in the air since, I don’t know, Reputation? Or Lover? I
understand that not every news story can be a serious piece about, say, the rise
of fascism or the ongoing climate crisis that I guess we’re all just fucking
ignoring now. Still, the way international press and media are crowding around
to join in on the Serious Speculation about whether Swift has *finally* lost
her touch is, frankly, terrifying.
From the whole reference entrapment with Kanye West – where she
agreed to be referenced in a song, though not in the way he portrayed her (as a
naked wax doll in bed with him, in the context of sexual conquest and saying he
“made that bitch famous”) – to whichever jeering article has come out about her
dating history, it seems like the media is genuinely trying to knock Swift off
a balance beam at every opportunity.
The White Woman Conundrum
There’s a queasy problem at the heart of criticizing Taylor
Swift. Let’s talk about white women.
Now, I don’t really identify as a “woman” anymore; that particular
word has always stuck in my throat. But as a “political woman”, i.e., someone perceived
as a woman who experiences misogyny and etcetera? Yeah, for sure. For the
purposes of this essay, I’m going to lump myself in with womanhood, because
that’s how I’m perceived and how a lot of my experiences fit.
There’s this weird, uncomfortable thing where white women
are simultaneously protected from our possible failures in a certain way, and
also the most delicious, juicy, easy target for certain kinds of misogyny. As
usual, I’m going to talk about a Canadian and American context, because that’s
what I know best, but your personal cultural context may include more than what
I’m talking about. Whereas Black women, Latina women, and Asian women are
highly sexualised and fetishized, white women are weirdly both de-sexualised and
the object of desire. Everyone is supposed to be like “us”, but we’re supposed to
collect traits and clothes from other cultures, trophy-like. We mete out
discrimination against other women and often hand down violence, but also end
up being really, really comfortable targets for hatred.
White women are both allowed to express ourselves sexually,
yet also seen as virginal and weirdly de-sexed. The standard for beauty and
success, but also an extremely easy target for criticism, both on the left and
the right. White women are also the figureheads and standard-bearers for what
is deemed to be cringey.
Now apply these thorny contradictions and nuances to Taylor
Swift. As a conventionally beautiful white woman who’s suffered from disordered
eating and anorexia in the past, she’s both defined beauty standards and
suffered from them. As someone who’s also suffered from disordered eating,
there’s something that breaks my heart about this. Even someone who defines the
beauty standard both didn’t feel like she was enough.
Swift has definitely lashed out and been petty in public and
private, and she doesn’t seem to see her own role in conflicts very well. The
song “Karma” from Midnights, which is my favourite of her albums, exemplifies
this perfectly well. She has a tendency to re-open old wounds and dig up past
conflicts and relationships. She puts her foot in her mouth. She can’t leave
well enough alone – and sometimes she recognizes these traits, and sometimes
she doesn’t.
The Morality Trap
The thing that makes me, personally, deeply uncomfortable
with the backlash to Life of a Showgirl is that people seem to be
addressing Taylor Swift without an iota of self-awareness that a) she’s never
going to see their thoughts, and b) most of the people who will…are just her
fans.
Now, it’s really fucking tricky to criticize something that
people like. Angry clicks get attention. Hell, there’s something deeply
uncomfortable to me about even writing this essay, because in a way, I’m still
participating in the same attention economy around Swift that I’m criticizing.
There’s an ouroboros of criticism on the left in particular that really worries
me; an endless well of critique and self-critique that sometimes verges on the
political equivalent of self-harming your movement. Self-reflection and
accountability are important, but do we really think Taylor Swift is going to
experience either of those from our critiques?
What’s more likely is that a) Swifties in your life are
going to see you mocking her work, and feel kind of vaguely shitty and uncomfortable,
or b) feel that peer pressure to join in. Or, in my case, c) wonder just how
many of these invisible and extreme standards are actually in the back of
people’s minds, and being applied to other women.
Because here’s the thing that’s eating a hole in my brain, and
has been since I started seeing articles about how Swift getting engaged to her
football boyfriend was “a disappointment”.
How many of the standards being applied to Taylor Swift are
actually representative of people’s background thoughts about the women in
their lives?
White women like Swift tend to get a lot of criticism, but
also a lot more forgiveness for our fuckups. We have a lot more chances to come
back from disappointments and rebuild our reputations – so many nonwhite women,
particularly if they’re Black, get absolutely fucking wiped out and persecuted
for far, far smaller and much more dubious offenses than Swift has committed.
So the question is, who are all these thinkpieces *for*?
Talking to Ourselves
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with trying to process
your feelings out in the open, but I do think there’s something really
interesting and possibly rather bad about the way that sometimes, criticism
influxes from the right and left create a confluence. Swift has been
getting a fresh backlash of hate ever since she started showing up at her
boyfriend’s games. Meanwhile, people on my side of the street are very
earnestly criticizing her for what we certainly think are more meritorious
reasons, with actual grounding.
But when does criticism just become a kind of misogynistic
blur of background hate and radiation? It’s awfully hard to make a good point
when you’re just part of a crowd, and if there’s one thing I’ve noticed on the
internet, it’s that people are absolutely shit at contextualizing their
perspectives with those of others.
One person hating something is an observation; two dozen
hating something is a clamour; two hundred thousand is a sort of oceanic roar, for
which all the details blend together.
So, then, what do we do? Does that mean we can’t hold public
figures accountable?
The thing is, I’m not so fucking sure that all this critique
is really about accountability. I also don’t know if people who are talking
about accountability see how they’re pretty much just playing out games of
punishment and shame, just with updated language and internal self-justifications
that this time, the hate is justified, and the target is big enough that
really, it’s harmless.
Who’s Fair Game?
And now we come to the part of the essay that has been
keeping me up at night. Who are we allowed to hate? I’m certainly not innocent
of despising some famous women and people, or mocking them – preferably in
private or semi-private, rather than adding my voice to the cosmic radiation
static of hate and jeering that tends to blare from every portal to the
internet.
For those who don’t know, I’ve been running as a public
school board trustee in a local election. That will be over by the time this
post is up, although results won’t be in yet. Recently, I was at a Pink Tea celebrating
the Famous Five who brought voting rights to Canadian women (vote rights for white
women, that is, because the five were also anti-immigrant eugenicists).
The topic of misogyny came up among some city council and
public school board trustee candidates. We talked about our local member of parliament,
Rachel Thomas, whose policies I strongly dislike (to put it somewhat mildly).
She’s advocated against safe injection sites, voted against abortion, and voted
against trans rights. While yes, she’s experienced misogyny, as older
candidates pointed out, she’s also voted only in favour of certain women. The
thing is, the more centrist people there were keen to protect and shelter her
reputation and save her a seat at the table, figuratively speaking.
It comes back to the concept of white feminism. Can we trust
those who don’t advocate for us? The question I would ask is, maybe we should
focus on those who are not just failing to advocate, but directly advocating
against us. But even then – how often do we let ourselves slide into the guilty
secret pleasure of misogyny when we deem a woman to be safely hateable? I don’t
have an answer for this one, but I’m going to be looking into the mirror about
it for a long time to come.
But Taylor Swift is also not a goddamn activist, despite
what people would like her to be; she’s a pop star, and an extremely normal
person. I have been developing a terrible, creeping suspicion that all these billionaires
and people in power are, in some regards, terribly normal and petty, and utterly
unprepared for and unable to understand the power they wield.
That does not mean we should not hold them accountable – but
it does mean that we should, amongst ourselves, fucking interrogate both our priorities
and the meaning of accountability itself.
What we need are nuanced discussions. What we have is a
trend cycle being doused in the gasoline of AI slop and propaganda.
And at the end of the day, I wonder – has all this cultural
criticism of creative works amounted to a hill of beans?
Kurt
Vonnegut dryly commented, “During
the Vietnam War... every respectable artist in this country was against the
war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The
power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a
stepladder six feet high.”
I guess what I’m saying is, treating Taylor Swift’s marriage
and parental dreams as a failure of her feminism is extremely stupid bullshit
in the context of vicious backlashes against queer rights.
Pick your fucking priorities,
people, and think more carefully about the standards you apply to women and
femmes in your lives. It’s just a mid album, but there’s something fundamentally
gross about being this excited for a woman’s downfall.
***
A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB
with xer family and their cats. She is currently working on the next books in
her series, other people’s manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking
as much tea as humanly possible. Find xer all over the internet: *Website * Amazon * Substack * Patreon * Ko-fi * Instagram * Bluesky
* Mastodon * Tumblr * Medium * OG Blog * Facebook
