If they’re mad at Taylor Swift from the left because she refuses to come out of the closet as the gender-fluid pansexual she doubtless is deep down, the right says hold my beer, that is, as long as it’s not one of those beer brands that hires transgender influencers or Broad City creators. The (fringe? very-online?) right is mad that she is… and it is here that I’m lost. She is a conventionally attractive thin blonde white woman, a pop star with an Americana aesthetic, who dates men, and whose current beau is a professional sportsballer. What exactly is the problem here? The role model for little girls is a wholesome straight (sorry, Anna Marks) lady whose image is that she is not edgy. Isn’t this what they’re supposed to like?
Well, they don’t. I don’t know why. I know that there exists some kind of meta version of revenge porn of her on the internet, a deepfake, which is, as I understand it, a high-tech version that Waiting for God where Tom goes to a photo shop to have them superimpose Jane and Harvey’s heads on adult images. Why? Not why as in, why are people fantasizing about getting to watch celebrities having sex—nothing new there—but why are they mad at her? I have seen the answers, ranging from ‘she is 34 and doesn’t yet have 34 children’ to ‘she might vote Democrat (but who knows)’ to ‘her boyfriend was vaccinated against Covid’ (as if the GOP politicians weren’t as well). It still doesn’t add up. She embodies mainstream in a culturally conservative way, what is the problem?
What I’d failed to consider: the problem is that she’s fat.
Why had I not thought of that? Maybe because for the love of god this woman is not fat, not by even the snarkiest 1990s yardsticks, what an odd thing to think. Not-that-there’s-anything-wrong-with-it if she were, but also: what?
Yes, I used some of my precious time on this Earth to argue with a pseudonym on the internet, someone I will not further humiliate here by pseudnaming, who was insisting that Swift is not as skinny as she once was (which, whomst amongst us), as though this explains… something:
Who will be the first person publicly to acknowledge that Taylor Swift is no longer “thin”, and that those sequined leotards they've imposed on her for some inscrutable reason hardly flatter her mid-section?
What does Taylor Swift look like in these leotards? Think a 1990s supermodel but a bit thinner. What’s going on here?
There was also a pseudonym with a ton of followers, taking me to task for calling 34 “young,” as if this is the sort of thing one can satisfactorily hash out in that forum, with one of pseudonym’s followers, under a real name—kidding—referring to her as nearly “geriatric” as though the pregnancy category is the relevant one here, as though these ding-dongs on the internet are this close to impregnating Taylor Swift, or would be if she were ten years younger.
What interested me was not arguing with one of the internet’s many geniuses about whether a thin woman is Actually Fat. No, what struck me was that the phenomenon—one we at this blog know well—of calling famously beautiful women “mid” is a weird negging thing, but also, in part, about shut-ins.
I made a sort of offhand post asking whether the people making such remarks have ever seen normal people in real life—which, if you have, you’d realize that even if Swift’s image is gawky relatability, she is still more supermodelesque than 99.99% of the population—and then it hit me that maybe this is it, maybe they haven’t.
Hear me out:
Lots of people really don’t get outside. You don’t necessarily have to, anymore, for work. You can get stuff delivered. There were the Covid lockdowns, there was MeToo, it was supposed to be bad to interact with people irl. Dating apps and chatting with avatars was more noble, anyhow. It’s not that shut-ins are entirely new—there was a guy in my college dorm who was so stoned out of his mind that he stayed in his room during fire drills, and I had two different such neighbors, pre-Covid—but there would have to be more of them these days. You don’t meet them at school drop-off or whatever because, let me reiterate, they are not people who go outside.
Most of the non-house-leavers are almost certainly men (I bet there are studies but you can google it if you need a survey to confirm the obvious). Some of these men—#notall—are posting about what women look like, from the vantage point of never looking at any in real life. They are looking at… I have no idea what, exactly. I’d assume it varies! Something on screens. How computer-generated or not I cannot say, but they are not spending their time doing frantic searches for ‘random women, of all ages, walking through a mall.’
And the end result is that they might just not know. It’s not like in the past, where actresses or models or porn stars or whatever led to unrealistic beauty standards. No, it’s that they literally do not see normal-looking women. They are comparing Taylor Swift not to the average woman, not to the average attractive young woman, but to some sort of AI woman with eight fingers on each hand and breasts each the size of the couch I’m sitting on.
Given that one of the core grievances of the MAGA right is their lack of mainstream pop cultural relevance, I'm gonna guess this is a resentment of her power and influence. Even if she is white, straight, hetero, Christian, and mostly apolitical, the fact that she can't always be relied upon to be lockstep with them and is vastly more powerful than them is yet another reminder of their own cultural limitations, especially with coveted demographics like young people.
You'd think they'd give her huge bonus points for unapologetically associating with and even dating the likes of Matty Healy despite how much the social justice crowd hates him.
Lol (as usual.) Yep, it's the Incels (also as usual.)