r/NuancingTaylorSwift

So now that we actually know a bit of what happened at the wedding, I think we're finally at a point where a bit of nuance is possible. At 4:00 on July 3rd, celebrities, musicians, athletes, and randos from Cleveland and Wyomissing descended on Madison Square Garden. Inside there seems to have been a hell of a party... people were still leaving at 6:00 AM of the fourth.

Details have emerged over the past few days, and they describe a wedding of two people utterly in love. The space was apparently magically transformed into a secret garden (in the garden). There was no parade of models escorting the bride and groom; they were accompanied only by their siblings. Adam Sandler married them... but really the ceremony seems to mostly have consisted of Taylor and Travis' vows. Friends of the newlyweds played songs (ok... those friends happened to be Paul McCartney and Stevie Nicks). The food was from restaurants that the couple loved... this seems to have included Krispy Kreme donuts (the likelihood that fried chicken and seemingly ranch was served is 100%). There were carnival games and prizes (ok... the prizes were cartier watches and american muscle cars). No one seems to have left quite sober.

Taylor's wedding was black tie... but by not telling anyone a theme, she seems to have creatated this world where no one quite understood what it meant. So everyone dressed fabulously, but just slightly the wrong way... almost embodying taylor herself who also always looks fabulous, and just slightly wrong! It was black tie with donuts. Black tie with Adam Sandler. The most gorgeous of secret gardens, in the most banal and yes tacky of spaces. Ferris wheels, kisses and lilacs...and things you said were dumb. Has any wedding ever better expressed the personality of the bride and groom than that.

The thing I get from the description of the wedding by its attendees was shock. Shock at how perfect and magical this celebration of love was. Taylor is very good at being in love.

Oh... and no... as of yet she has not sold viewing right to her fucking wedding.

From October 3rd all the way until now, it’s been so dizzying and weird for her. I feel like the fair criticism is getting buried by the influx of hate. Obviously this does not translate into sales and stuff but, whew! I sometimes wish she would speak out against some things, but I also think it wouldn’t matter what she does. She’s the biggest star of the decade.

That being said, if this is all effecting yall somehow. Leave the internet for a week or two. Not saying it’s going to get worse, but I really encourage those who have been asking about Taylor hate and are correcting misinformation every hour to go offline. You’ll see how much everything is over exaggerated. It can be overwhelming, but the good thing is, we all have the privilege of choice and we can just take a breather. The same people who have been violently hating her are going to not change their mind. So why get just as passionate as them? It’s frustrating, but I think it’s best to think about “what’s going to change now if I get into it with a person who hates Taylor for just breathing?” Just an advice from someone who kinda was chronically online and just comes and goes. Have a good morning :)

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Ofc as we all know a ton of people hate taylor swift for some... interesting reasons. First of all they say her and Travis are MAGA when they very clearly aren't, there's even a picture of her holding up cookies that say Biden 2020. Not to mention these haters have wished de@th on children just for liking her music, which is incredibly immature and concerning considering that most of these haters are fully grown adults that have spouses and maybe even children. They say that swifties are the problem (yes some of the fandom is rabid, but I think we're a bit better now) when people planned a terrorist attack in Vienna, and murd3red innocent children. Also, people are hating on their wedding venue, when in fact people have gotten married there before (which they seem to conveniently overlook). I really don't understand why she's getting all the hate, bc yes she's a billionaire, but going by their logic, if all billionaires are evil then why is she the only one getting hate. Why is she always targeted when there are so many other people that have done worse? I don't understand how people joke about d!ddy and Epst3in and then when Taylor flies a jet on her tour she gets more hate than both of them combined. Also sorry about the censoring, I just don't want my post to be taken down.

I was just on Instagram and came across a post celebrating her 26 million dollar donation. I would've typically liked and scrolled away, but I read the comments, and most of them were criticising her being a billionaire and her private jet usage. Nothing new in that. But then I saw this creator I was following also in the comments, also criticising her being an unethical billionaire. The creator doesn't make any videos regarding pop culture or politics. That sort of made me a bit upset but whatever.

And then I got another reel from another creator I was following. Now this creator, she is an outspoken feminist. She makes videos speaking out against men. I admired her and liked her content. This reel was about how Taylor Swift is a performative feminist, and that she isn't a hater but her warming up to Brittany Mahomes, wearing "athletic" fashion, showing up to Travis's games, her being in a "athlete's girlfriend" era just shows how performative she is, it screams that she is the kind of girl with no personality of her own and just centres herself around her boyfriend, copying everything he does. This really rubbed me the wrong way.

And it made me think of everything. How my friends also hate Taylor for the typical "billionaire" thing, the private jet discourse, etc. I went back to the post about Taylor's donations, and noticed that all those people criticising Taylor were accounts belonging to normal people, so they weren't bots or anything.

I was just kind of put off by so much hate for Taylor, especially by creators I respected. I sort of felt that if my facourite creators are against Taylor, surely something must be wrong, and that I am a bit dumb and naive for liking Taylor. I also now think that, more people hate Taylor than the people liking her. It just feels bad and strange when you are just supporting someone, and so many people you also like hate her. Can anyone else relate?

Like it’s pretty clear that they’re not. Why do people wanna make them out to be Trump Supporters when Trump fucking hates them?

This article was written in 2024, but its author posted it yesterday again to demonstrate its relevance.

***

It has been nearly 15 years since Kanye West stormed the stage at the MTV Video Music Awards to protest Taylor Swift’s win over Beyoncé in the “Best Female Video” category. His shockingly rude interruption was a preview of his own descent into madness. It was also a preview of how large swathes of America would descend into madness over Swift.

The most recent Taylor Swift insanity is the suggestion by conservative media figures that she is faking a relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce as part of a plot that also involves rigging the Super Bowl with the end goal of re-electing Joe Biden. These people are mostly not the brightest bulbs in the conservative movement — though Harvard-educated businessman Vivek Ramaswamy has questions he’d like answered about the subject — and some conservative commentators, like Erick Erickson, would like to dismiss the Swift fixation as a purely online phenomenon kicked up by charlatans like Jack Posobiec. But Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini says “Taylor Swift is probably the biggest dividing line between MAGA and non-MAGA Republicans other than Trump himself,” and he has data to back it up — as of last June, before Swift and “Mr. Pfizer” had even started dating, 25% of Republicans who described themselves as primarily supporters of the party had an unfavorable view of Swift (similar to the 23% figure among all likely voters), while 46% of Republicans who identified primarily as Trump supporters viewed her negatively.

There is something about this woman that bothers a lot of Trump supporters, and in pandering to that sentiment, grifters like Posobiec have demonstrated once again that they have a better understanding of the new GOP base than traditional social conservatives like Erickson. Fox News has gotten in on the act, too, in content aimed at its elderly and not-necessarily-very-online viewer base; for example, a segment last month explored whether Swift is a “Pentagon asset.” It seems there is real demand out there for this sort of nonsense.

And yet, not every breathless statement in this montage that led The Recount to declare that “Taylor Swift has broken Fox News” can be blamed on the conservative fever swamps. When Fox host Jesse Waters told his viewers “the New York Times just speculated she’s a lesbian,” he was saying something true. Or, at least it was very close to true — last month, the Times really did run a feverish and interminable (4,776 words!) essay consisting of an opinion editor’s desperate hopes and speculations on behalf of her fellow “Gaylors” that Swift is bisexual, as can apparently be learned through a close reading of hidden messages in Swift’s videos, lyrics, and public statements. In one instance, the author cites Swift’s explicit statement that she is not part of the LGBT community as a possible sign that she is in the closet. In another, she suggests Swift would have come out by now if not for the unfortunate distraction of Scooter Braun buying her masters. The essay truly must be read1 to be believed — when I tell people this essay exists and was published not on LiveJournal but in the most prestigious newspaper in the world, they initially think they must have misunderstood what I was saying. But what Jesse Watters and I are describing actually happened, with multiple employees of The New York Times Company having decided it was a good idea.

And that’s just insanity from January. In December, when Swift was named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, Donald Trump apparently grumbled to associates that he should have been given the award, since he’s more famous and has more fans than her. Meanwhile, left-wing activist Saira Rao — most famous for charging $5,000 to yell at liberal white women over dinner for being racist — had a different complaint. She said on Twitter that Swift was a “white American woman billionaire who could end the genocide of Palestinians with on [sic] IG post” but that she doesn’t because of “white love of Black and brown genocide.”

For years before that, Swift faced bizarre accusations about her failure to bring about liberal ends in American politics, which Politico Magazine covered in 2017 as “The Weird Campaign to Get Taylor Swift to Denounce Donald Trump.” For her silence, the Guardian newspaper attacked her as “a musical envoy for the president’s values.” Swift later explained her reluctance to get involved in the 2016 campaign by saying she thought yet another celebrity endorsement for Democrats would only feed Trump’s narrative of fighting against the elites. But she also changed her mind — saying she regretted not having spoken up, and making Democratic endorsements in later election cycles, including for former Tennessee governor Phil Bredesen’s Senate campaign in 2018 and Joe Biden’s presidential run in 2020. Bredesen lost by 11 points, and I think Swift’s initial instinct — that her megacelebrity was not likely to do much to sway voters’ choices — was the correct one. That said, because I am not insane, I know it is Taylor Swift’s prerogative to make political endorsements if she feels like it, just as much as it’s her prerogative not to make them if she doesn’t feel like it.

Beyond politics, coverage of Swift’s love life has also been unhinged, going back well before her romance with Travis Kelce or anyone’s contention that it is an “op.” Last year, Swift was romantically linked to Matty Healy, the lead singer of the band The 1975, who has a history of making (seemingly intentionally) offensive statements. I understand why people might not care for Healy, but just check out the possessive and demanding tenor of the coverage from Stephanie Soteriou of Buzzfeed News about fans’ outrage over the fact that Swift would dare to date him:

"Needless to say, many of Taylor’s fans were left hurt and disappointed by her decision to associate with Matty considering his problematic history. Understandably, Black, Asian, and Jewish Swifties were particularly devastated. 

But as exposé after exposé on the concerning things that Matty had done started to emerge, Taylor remained defiant. Despite constantly teasing that she sees everything that her fans say about her online, she made a point of ignoring the growing offense that her relationship was causing…

In a pointed statement, the star hinted that she was unfazed by the online discourse, saying: “I’ve just never been this happy in my life — in all aspects of my life — ever before.”"

“Taylor remained defiant?" She’s not your daughter, ma’am, and she doesn’t owe you a response to your “online discourse.”

These examples offer us two sets of delusional fantasies about Swift. Some are fantasies of power. She controls who wins the Super Bowl. The Pentagon and the CIA rely on her. She could end the war in Gaza with an Instagram post, but she chooses not to. And some are fantasies of intimacy. She must know what we’re saying about her on the Internet. She owes me an explanation of why she’s dating a man I disapprove of. She is sending me secret messages about how she is queer. When she says “I’ve just never been this happy,” that’s a personal attack on me. The fantasies of power are not limited to her detractors — see the liberal fans who were so desperate for her to enter politics to help their side — and the fantasies of intimacy are not limited to her fans. As sports broadcaster Colin Cowherd describes, a lot of the recent Swift-Kelce rage comes from “weird, lonely, insecure men” who are taking out their rage for all the women who rejected them on Swift, as though she were somehow personally involved in the slights.

The roots of all this derangement are also the roots of her success.

French bulldogs George (left) and Violet, dressed as Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift, respectively, are walked by owners Kate Steen and Kevin Tubas at the Howl'oween festival in Toronto, Ontario on October 28, 2023. (Richard Lautens/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Back in the fall, Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote a remarkable account for The New York Times Magazine of her trip to Swift’s Eras Tour stop in Santa Clara, California — a reporting approach she had to take in lieu of interviewing the pop star, since Swift is now too big for magazine interviews, unless they’re related to naming her Person of the Year. As Brodesser-Akner describes, the women and girls — it’s mostly women and girls — who come to see Swift don’t just adore her; they relate deeply to her, seeing her struggles as theirs and mapping the “eras” of Swift’s career onto their own lives.

What has made Swift a star is her rare combination of superior talent, immense work ethic, and deep relatability.2 It’s also easy to see why this combination would make her work so emotionally rewarding for her fans — it allows them to feel seen by someone important, as in the case of one fan who cried when telling Brodesser-Akner about how Swift shows we do not need to be “ashamed of our eras” any more than she is. Brodesser-Akner herself writes that the way Swift sings is how she would sing if she could, and the topics she sings about are the ones she would sing about, too. And of course, different fans can react to the same Swift song or album or “era” with different interpretations — her music is an invitation for listeners to project their feelings and hopes and experiences onto her and see it reflected back, which allows her to have an extremely broad appeal.

But it’s also easy to see how this formula can become deranging. After all, here’s one of the most famous people in the world, and it feels like we know her, and she’s talking to us, and she’s our friend. But she’s not our friend — she’s a famous stranger, and that means that sooner or later she’s going to fail to uphold the obligations of a real-life friendship. Or maybe she doesn’t feel like our friend. For some of us, she feels like someone we hated in high school — someone who was too successful, or who was too popular, or who wouldn’t have sex with us. Via either route, that can all add up to people feeling: Taylor Swift is so famous and so powerful, and I know her, and maybe she even knows me, and she’s not doing what I want. And then they go insane.

In a way, the least insane version of this reaction to Swift is the one that has come from MAGA Republicans. Of course, the idea that she could rig the Super Bowl is insane. And picking a fight with one of the biggest celebrities in the world does not enhance a presidential candidate’s odds of election. But since MAGA is already itself a fandom — not, as Ron DeSantis learned to his great frustration, particularly interested in whether a president can produce conservative policy outcomes, but very interested in hearing the right angry statements and pissing off the right people on the other side — then a beef with Taylor Swift works really well as a fun way to get attention and make people mad. Once you accept that the MAGA world is in a parasocial relationship with Donald Trump — the sort of parasocial relationship you might expect someone to form with a celebrity who picks a lot of beefs, like Azealia Banks — then it follows logically that they would look for opportunities to stan him in a dumb fight with someone even more famous than he is.

Politics-as-fandom is also a worsening problem on the left, as distinct from the liberal mainstream of the Democratic Party. I go back to Saira Rao’s demand that Swift end the conflict in the Holy Land with an Instagram post. This sort of thing has been a major goal of pro-Palestinian activists in the U.S.: getting people who have no control over events in the Middle East to say a magic word, “ceasefire.” They show up at school board and city council meetings to demand resolutions for “ceasefire.” In some cases, those resolutions pass — the city councils of Chicago and Seattle have officially demanded “ceasefire,” as have the Ann Arbor Public Schools. For the people of Gaza, this does nothing. But as fan service — as a project to benefit people who simply enjoy having their own opinions said back to them — it works. Like so many fans, they just want to hear lyrics they can relate to come from Taylor Swift’s mouth.

Of course, centrists are generally not vulnerable to this sort of nonsense because we do not look to famous people to validate our worldviews. There’s something about getting your way on public policy most of the time — it fills you with the confidence not to need to be told over and over again how right you are. We can set politics aside and just enjoy Taylor Swift for her music — unless we’re subject to one of the non-political sources of Taylor Swift derangement, in which case, all bets are off.

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Now that Blake was not invited to the 1000 guest wedding, it means that Taylor and Blake are absolutely done. So ould anyone explain why Taylor wrote “Cancelled,” which was seemingly in support of Blake Lively?!!

I even went to TLOAS release party movie and I don’t recall the explaination for this song.

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