Should Men Care About Taylor Swift’s Meltdown?

When I was younger, my friend had a not-so-secret crush on Taylor Swift.  He obsessed over her incessantly, blasting “You Belong With Me” twenty times over while I rolled my eyes and told him to listen to Nickelback. (Cringe!)  Even when were old enough to play DMK (Date, Marry, Kill – the more proper way to play FMK), he would pick Taylor Swift for all three categories, the latter only because “in that way, I can ensure that I’ll be the only one she truly ever loved.”  Though I never publicly reciprocated his infatuation, in my head I thought her songs really catchy and really sweet, really genuine.  She had a place in my life as the first pop celebrity who I could really relate to on a personal level, if not a, well, romantic, level.

Contrast that image with the Internet storm over Kim Kardashian’s secret recording of Taylor Swift approving the infamous lyric to Kanye West’s (who I will definitely write something about at some point) hit single, “Famous” – where he broods:

“For all my Southside niggas that know me best

I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex

Why? I made that bitch famous”

Now, a friend once told me of how much she hated those lyrics because of how degrading they are to Taylor, so the fact that T-Swizzle herself gave approval to them severely damages the image of being the clean, innocent girl we all know she tries so hard to cultivate.  There’s no question that this is a horrible development for Taylor and Co.   She even called this recording “a character assassination.”

Pockets of Female Social Media in particular is reacting strongly.  There’s been a strong feminist backlash against Taylor for being the emblem of “White Feminism” (a pejorative term used in Intersectionality Theory to suggest that a lot of contemporary feminism exists solely for the benefit of upper-middle class White women) and for getting her fame from “playing the victim,” as a recent Snapchat story claims.

Also, there’s this, from a Facebook friend:

So, a contingent of women feel like justice is being served to country gal T-Swizzle here for playing sickly-sweet all this time.  Karma’s a… you know.

I’m sure that some of this same contingent won’t hesitate to chastise me for my previous statements bringing to light Taylor’s role in my life as a “sweet” “genuine” girl who I could relate to on a personal level.  I’d almost have to agree.  It’s my nostalgia for this “sweetness” that’s getting in the way of the position in which I originally intended to write: that men should stop viewing celebrities as anything but manufactured creatures, propped up by corporate media to generate a thin veneer of sugary appeal – especially to men like us.  I should say: record labels over-sexualize Katy Perry to make boys buy her songs and go to her concerts, and they over-romanticize Taylor Swift to make us buy her songs and go to her concerts as well.  In fact, record labels oversaturate everything about their female stars these days in order to give them a male audience, and the only reason they’re continuing to do it is because men are continuing to respond to it.  Men need to stop incentivizing oversensualized portraits of women, plain and simple.  They need to be aware of the market, and of commercial interests trying to grab them by teasing their basest instincts.  And they shouldn’t be surprised, nor should they care all that much, when it becomes apparent that these celebrities are really just Plastics.

I should stop here.

I really should stop here.

For artists like Katy Perry and Rihanna etc. who I don’t feel anything for, I am stopping here.  But Taylor Swift… I think a lot of people fail to recognize how important Taylor Swift was to the growing adolescent male in 2008.  For our middle-school, unkissed, selves, Taylor was our first understanding of what romance could look like.  Of what heartbreak could look like.  Before we had real girlfriends, we had Taylor Swift.

I know that image was carefully crafted to appeal to the pre-teen girls flocking like cattle to her shows, but an important side effect, if you want to call it that, was the passage of her songs to boys like me and my friend.  We grew up with her soft voice and stories of sweet romance too.

It’s why many guys like me really really hated it when she bent her way out of simple love songs and into this electro-pop abyss with her latest album.  After her transformation, so heralded by the elites at the Washington Post, a lot of ordinary 18-20 year old guys felt that she had lost that tenderness, that soft spring that had carried them through adolescence.  And now, to find out that Taylor was not only no longer innocent but never innocent, never genuine… I can’t help but kind of choke up a little.  It’s a rewrite of our past that’s almost Gatsby-like in its melancholia. (Not to mention it was first Gatsby that introduced to us the idea of changing the past.)

The Taylor we knew was already gone.  But now we’ve found out that she was never there.

In all of my righteous instincts, I’d say we shouldn’t care – it’s just another celebrity whom we suddenly realize is a celebrity.

But if you can’t help but put a few figurative teardrops on your metaphorical guitar, that’s okay too.

 

https://www.facebook.com/thekennethxu/