The Times Herald (Norristown, PA)
Daring to criticize Taylor Swift
When you poke a hornet’s nest, you expect to get stung. If that hornet’s nest is filled with young girls in spangles and tutus — and their doting parents — you can expect to get skewered.
That is exactly what happens if you criticize the social phenomenon known as Taylor Swift.
I think I have some standing to write about her because my legal practice has a satellite office in Reading, just down the road from where the songstress took her first steps towards mega-stardom.
Taylor Swift is a Berks County native, a quasi-local girl who doesn’t much talk about her Pennsylvania roots but who is revered by many who “knew her then.”
It is a form of heresy to attack her song catalog, her lipstick choices and her boyfriends.
It is considered misogyny of the highest order, and might even trigger a claim before the International Human Rights Tribunal at the Hague. Since I have experience in asylum law, I’m prepared for the backlash.
There is something about Swift that sticks in my craw, and it has very little to do with her politics, which trend leftward.
When she was a country girl with a Berks twang, we assumed that she was apolitical at worst and possibly even conservative. People smiled as the teenager poured out her angst in songs like “Love Story,” thinking that this adorable little girl couldn’t possibly be very annoying.
Back then, she wasn’t. She was everybody’s baby sister, writing her own little songs for talent shows.
Then she started racking up the boyfriends, who eventually dumped her. This is a normal occurrence, as I can confirm. I have been dumped, and it isn’t pretty. Of course, I didn’t go and spite write a song about each of the cads who put my heart through the meat grinder.
The problem with Taylor was never her politics. You didn’t really take her politics seriously. She was too light, too lacking in gravitas, too fluffy and spangly and bright.
To consider her politics as a motivating factor would be like asking a Disney Princess for her views on the immigration crisis.
Of course, leftists like to make it out as if conservatives hate her because she supports President Joe Biden. It’s possible that some actually do resent her for that, but that’s not true of the vast majority of Taylor Haters, if you want to put a label on it.
There are so many women who are legitimate role models in the world: Malala Yousafzi, who took a bullet in the head because of her advocacy for female education; Riley Gaines, who has made it a life’s mission to protect women in sports; Amal Clooney, who has used her legal skills to obtain justice for female victims of genocide; and Giorgia Meloni, the first female prime minister of Italy.
These are women who have accomplished things of substance, things that will be remembered long after the last chords of “Shake it Off” fade away into the ether.
While Swift is a savvy businesswomen with a keen sense of how to market herself, and while she isn’t obscene in the way that some of her contemporaries are, baring flesh to scale the ladder of success, close examination of her opus displays an unexceptional mix of pop tunes that are hummable and infused with a message of “girl power.”
Except she’s not a girl. She’s a 34-year-old woman, and her insistence on targeting a middle school demographic is a bit weird.
I think that’s one of the reasons that men and women who call themselves “Swifties” come to her defense, because she deliberately inhabits this middle world of “not a kid” and “not a woman.”
They feel protective of her, and lash out at those who have the temerity to criticize her.
Well, I have the temerity.
And I’ve made it through an entire column without talking about the thing that angers me the most about Swift: She’s a passionate supporter of abortion rights.
The fact that there are pro-life mothers out there who are allowing their daughters to look up to a woman who supports Planned Parenthood and talks about “reproductive autonomy” as if it was a catchphrase in one of her songs is troubling.
How is that admirable?
How can you empower women by ensuring that hundreds of thousands of them will never be born?
I have also managed to avoid talking about Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. He is the least of the problems, to be honest.
But as a woman who has been going to NFL games since 1973, I resent the suggestion that Taylor Swift is “bringing women to the game.” Excuse me?
Unsportsmanlike conduct, 15-yard penalty and repeat first down.
So many people have taken the attitude of exasperated annoyance, rolling their eyes and pretending they have too many other important things in their lives than to worry about Swift.
And I’m sure they do. But as I write this, I am suffering from bronchitis and coughing up a lung, and I still have time to provide an opinion on a cultural phenomenon I can’t understand.
Hating Taylor Swift is ridiculous.
Worshipping her is no better. I have seen so many accuse MAGA of being cultists, but they would reject the label for themselves.
Just saying, if the sparkly tutu fits…