Dear Taylor Swift, Why Are You Like This?
By Stacy Lee Kong
Image: twitter.com/taylorswift
Content warning: This newsletter contains references to misogyny, misogynoir and sexual violence.
If there’s one thing we can say with certainty about Taylor Swift, it’s that she always knows exactly what she’s doing. As Vox’s Constance Grady argued in her excellent 2017 essay about the singer’s meticulous brand, “everything about her music and her image is so precisely and impeccably crafted that no one can doubt it to be entirely under her control.”
This is most evident in her creative decisions: “Every time Swift launches a new album, she tweaks her hair and her style and her talking points to suggest that there’s a new Taylor to go with the new sound,” Grady goes on to write. “And every time, she’s careful to make sure that the new Taylor is exactly what will silence her critics and delight her fans. The new Taylor is always carefully crafted as a response to whatever criticism has been thrown her way during the previous cycle. And Swift is able to respond to that criticism because she keeps track of everything everyone says about her, as she told GQ in 2015.” Similarly, she deliberately embeds Easter eggs in her song lyrics to encourage obsessive engagement with her work. Ditto those thinly-veiled references to past relationships in her older songs—which also explains her marketing strategy for 2021’s Red (Taylor’s Version), which, in a return to form, dredged up a decade-old dating scandal involving Jake Gyllenhaal via the release of a long-rumoured 10-minute version of “All Too Well,” as well as an accompanying short film starring a Gyllenhaal-esque heartbreaker played by Dylan O’Brien. As I wrote at the time, this was both a genius strategy and morally sketchy.
But that control also extends to her personal life, particularly in how she allows it to be perceived—or not perceived as the case may be. (Remember when Zayn Malik seemingly confirmed that wild rumour that she avoided the paparazzi by hiding in a huge suitcase, which her security team would transport from place to place?) All of which is to say, when Swift chooses to be photographed leaving a recording studio with The 1975’s Matty Healy amid swirling rumours that the two are dating? That’s a choice. And it’s kind of a fucked up one.
What is Matty Healy’s whole deal?
I didn’t actually know who Matty Healy was before this week, and please know that I truly wish I could go back to that more innocent time, because this dude is just ick upon ick upon ick. He’s a self-described feminist who has been praised for calling out misogyny in the music industry, but he has also received well-deserved criticism for what his fans describe as ‘bad-boy’ antics, though I think his behaviour might be better described as racist, Islamophobic, antisemitic and misogynist. An incomplete list:
2014: In an interview with IX Daily, he told two female interviewers he was surprised at the depth of their questions, saying, “These are quite heavy questions for girls dressed like you two.” When one interviewer said she was “a little offended” at that remark, he responded, “You look nice in the interview, you’ve made an effort. You’re, like, a pretty girl—I’m going to have certain stereotypes.”
2016: He told British magazine Q that dating Swift would be “emasculating.”
2014: An avowed atheist, he consistently critiques organized religion—but somehow, whenever he wants a specific example of a problematic religion, he always seems to land on Islam. In 2014, he conflated ISIS with all Muslims in a tweet, then told a young Muslim woman who criticized him that she was too shallow and later too young to educate him. In 2019, he again made Islamophobic statements in an interview with Brut Mexico.
2018: In a conversation about drug use in the music industry with The Fader, he implied that both drug use and misogyny are rampant in hip-hop, but not in rock and roll, saying, “One of the problems is the youth of hip-hop. At the moment, with SoundCloud rap, it's become a bit of a drug-taking competition, and that happened in rock and roll. Those things get weeded out the longer those things exist. The reason misogyny doesn't happen in rock and roll anymore is because it's a vocabulary that existed for so long is that it got weeded out. It still exists in hip-hop because [the genre] is so young, but it'll stop.” (He later apologized for being “patronizing, uninformed and reductive.”)
2020: He tried to use George Floyd’s murder to promote the 1975’s 2018 song, “Love It If We Made It.”
2023: In January, he did a Nazi salute on stage. Then, in February, he was a guest on The Adam Friedland Show, which yielded several problematic moments. According to Buzzfeed, “[Friedland] referred to American rapper Ice Spice as ‘one of the Inuit Spice Girls’ and a ‘chubby Chinese lady’ before mocking a variety of accents. When Matty said that he’d messaged Ice Spice, Friedland asked, ‘So you slide into her DMs and ask “What are you? A fucking Eskimo or something?”’ Matty laughed and replied: ‘Yeah, that's what I was like, you fucking…’ before saying something unintelligible. He then encouraged Adam to do an impression of Japanese people working in concentration camps, and could be heard laughing uncontrollably at the racist stereotyping as the host mocked the Japanese accent.”
That was bad enough for the episode to be removed from podcast platforms, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts, but there was a whole other conversation that just resurfaced and I’d argue it’s much worse. In this part of the conversation, Friedland tells a story about a time when Healy was caught masturbating to ‘Ghetto Gaggers’ porn by a friend. This is another thing I’d rather not know about, but: Ghetto Gaggers is an extreme porn site that features videos of white men humiliating and degrading women of colour, and especially Black women. Per Buzzfeed, the site’s (warning: very jarring) official description reads, “Extreme hardcore face fucking, ebony hoodrats, ghetto double penetration, yellow discipline and interracial throat banging of the Ghetto Gaggers,” while a 2017 Medium article explained that the videos feature “physical violence coupled with jokes about poverty, welfare, slavery, putting nooses on women.” Healy himself acknowledged that he was watching a Black woman being “brutalized.”
That’s… really bad. But the proliferation of that kind of porn also has real harmful impacts on Black women, something we’ve known for a long, long time. In a 1997 article in UCLA’s National Black Law Journal, feminist scholar Jewel Amoah argues that, “because the pornographers and the consumers strictly adhere to racial stereotypes that Black women and white women function to serve different needs in the pornography industry. White women are seen to play the role that they should be made available for men's sexual satisfaction. Black women must serve men's sexual satisfaction (by virtue of the natural male-female power imbalance) and they must also serve the man's white supremacist notion of dominance. Just as it was argued earlier that men perceive themselves to be naturally powerful vis-a-vis the powerless female, furthermore, white men see themselves as being racially superior vis-a-vis the Black woman. This second perception translates to much more violent and dehumanizing sexual activity… Black women are usually depicted in a situation of bondage and slavery. The Black woman is shown in a submissive posture, often with two white males. This setting reminds us all of the trappings of slavery: chains, whips, neck braces, wrist clasps. These are the means of keeping Black people in their place” (emphasis mine).
It's not blaming a woman for a man’s actions to ask her what she sees in a racist misogynist
Clearly, there’s a pattern of behaviour here. And it begs the question: why is Taylor Swift intentionally and publicly dating a guy like that? Or, put more bluntly: what happened to all her concern about misogyny?
The answer is simple: she mostly cares about misogyny when it’s levied against her. Swift has built her career on a careful balance of victimhood and empowerment; as Ellie Woodward pointed out in a 2017 Buzzfeed article, she has been adopting the posture of victimhood from the very beginning. “In the early days of her career, Swift adhered to the markers of white feminine fragility, presented as a modern-day ingénue figure. Her passivity and purity were the centrepiece of an appealing narrative constructed around traditional girlhood… Her innocence also contributed to the emotional impact of the most common theme of all: Swift as the victim of the behaviour of a bad boyfriend, or rejection by her crush. This is a common trope in teen pop music, but for Swift it became the very foundation of her posture as victim.”
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the way she leveraged her long-running feud with Kanye West. To be clear, his behaviour has been ranged from rude and annoying (interrupting her Best Female Video acceptance speech for "You Belong with Me" at the 2009 VMAs) to pretty fucked (including the line “I made that bitch famous” in his 2016 song, “Famous,” then allowing his then-wife Kim Kardashian to post clips of a phone call that implied Swift had okayed the line when the truth is actually a little more complicated than that). But Swift has benefited by keeping the conversation going, especially when she uses it as a feminist talking point, whether that’s performing a song that referenced the incident at the 2010 VMAs or using West’s behaviour as fodder for an empowering acceptance speech at the 2016 Grammy Awards.
This self-serving attitude toward misogyny transcends her interactions with West, btw. It’s right there in her reaction to a joke about her past relationships in the Netflix show Ginny and Georgia, and her insistence that the epitome of feminism is not ‘bringing other women down,’ where ‘other women’ actually means ‘Taylor Swift.’ Remember how upset she got when she thought Nicki Minaj was being mean to her, but actually Minaj was legitimately angry about racism in the music industry? There was also the time when she shaded Tina Fey and Amy Poehler for joking about her dating habits during their hosting stint at the 2013 Golden Globes in a Vanity Fair cover profile, saying “Katie Couric is one of my favorite people, because she said to me she had heard a quote that she loved, that said, ‘there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.’”
Even her 2020 documentary Miss Americana, which served as both a long-awaited explanation for her early-career political silence and a look into her various political awakenings, focused mostly on her understanding of feminism as a cis, straight, white woman. As student journalist Madison Lammert wrote at the time, “frankly, it adds fuel to the long-standing argument that she uses political involvement as an attention-grabbing mechanism and the rainbow flag as a fad… Her feminism is white-washed—not once does she talk about women in minority groups when speaking about how offended she is by Blackburn’s policies. Not once does she give voice to people of color when discussing politics. She has famous LGBTQ+ individuals surrounding her, but at the end of the day, the overabundance of rainbow wigs and sets cannot make up for the lack of conversation surrounding specific issues within the community.”
Three years later, the same dynamic continues. Only this time, what she’s not saying is why she is choosing to publicly date someone despite all of his very public controversies—and I think that is a fair thing to expect from a public figure who has spent so much time working to convince the world that she’s a good person who cares about others. (Especially after Miss Americana made the case that she was only silent about oppression because her team pressured her to appear neutral, but that she has always cared.)
Her defenders deserve scrutiny, too
I will say, in a pleasantly surprising twist, many of her fans are horrified that she’s dating Healy. (Although at least one seems to think baking cookies in support of the 2020 Biden/Harris presidential ticket somehow absolves her of racism, which… 🙃) But not everyone sees the problem. So, to be clear: the people you choose to surround yourself with say something about who you are, what values you hold, and what kind of behaviour you think is acceptable. If Swift doesn’t see Healy’s blatant misogynoir as a dealbreaker, it’s fair for her fans, especially Black and Jewish ones, to wonder if she truly sees all women as deserving of the respect and support she demands for herself… and what other racist behaviour she thinks is acceptable.
That’s why it was so troubling to see Vox publish a piece by senior correspondent Rebecca Jennings, whose work I usually enjoy, downplaying Healy’s behaviour. In addition to characterizing his Nazi salute as satire, she framed his comments about watching Ghetto Gaggers porn as a joke and made sure to characterize the 1975’s catalogue as thematically focused on the “tension between irony and sincerity,” which again implies that while Healy might do problematic things, he’s doing so to send a message or make a point.
… To which I’d say, eventually, white people are going to have to admit that there is no material difference between doing a Nazi salute satirically and doing it earnestly. It’s still a fucking Nazi salute—and it's not overly sensitive or extremely online to be upset if your favourite pop star thinks it’s okay for her new boyfriend to do it on the regular.
And Did You Hear About…
Nylah Burton’s excellent piece on marital rape in Bridgerton.
A little late but: This very detailed breakdown of Tattoogate, the Cambridge, Ont. tattoo shop drama that was all over TikTok last week
Two recent articles on how queer culture (and specifically the ballroom community) is shaping internet slang: the NYT on ‘mother’ and Rolling Stone on ‘cunt.’
The Twitter user who asked for funny memes or videos that “make you laugh when you’re sad” and got 10,000 perfect, hilarious responses.
This smart, and perhaps more importantly, hopeful Green Line feature about what it would take to build a more joyful Toronto.
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