It’s cool to hate Taylor Swift. She’s a social media pariah, the punchline of every meme, a living snake emoji. Her new single Look What You Made Me Do was jeered into the charts , making it to number one and breaking records on its way. Her new album is to be a treatise on reputation, and boy could Swift deliver a TED talk on that subject. She’s become universally despised to the point where it’s taboo even to admit to feeling sorry for her. One is allowed to concede that 1989 had a few bangers but that’s the limit.
Swift became synonymous with the snake emoji thanks to one fateful subtweet by Kim K. Her spat with the Kardashian-Wests is what has earned her most of her bad reputation – she’s a liar who got what she deserved, right? Case closed. But it’s naive to think good old-fashioned karma is all that’s at play in the Swift saga.
Swift is not the first snake woman. Since the Old Testament, society has sought to discredit and vilify women by associating them with the scaly and the slithering. It’s the oldest trope in the book – from Eve to Medusa, the snake has always been a faithful misogynist device, used to destroy female reputation.
Good looking young woman becomes at least decamillionaire through popular beat combo.
That’s misogyny.
A good(ish)-looking but “Universally” despised (=assorted femmi-cuntz don’t like her) singer still makes it to numero uno because ….????. Even after her “feud” with a famously shallow female sleb who is famous for owning a big arse more famous than the said sleb herself.
Surely all this must have just chased North Korea off the world media’s front pages.
“Swift became synonymous with the snake emoji thanks to one fateful subtweet by Kim K[ardasian].”
“the snake has always been a faithful misogynist device, used to destroy female reputation”
See, when women fall out – that’s misogyny!
I don’t personally know Miss Swift but she sings harmless catchy songs and took the mickey out of herself in her video to ‘shake it off’ so she seems OK.
I was musing the other day on the concept of celebrity and success. The thing being that successful people (be in film, music, business, politics) are not 9 foot tall, possessed of super-human strength, telekinetic abilities, the ability to see into people’s minds or foretell the future. And yet the media and much of society treats them as if they must be very, very different to us.
I doubt they are. If they are separated at all it is probably a combination of luck and determination. And the latter is entirely down to the individual.
@ Ecks
“Even after her “feud” with a famously shallow female sleb who is famous for owning a big arse more famous than the said sleb herself.”
I thought Katy Perry was famous for her tits?
Weird isn’t it? Surely only mentals care about this stuff? And women of course; because hating other women is very important to them.
I know nothing about Miss Swift except she looks like the world’s most advanced robot sex doll (in a good way).
I actually saw one of her videos the other day so was able to match her with a song (that I think I’d heard before). Bubblegum pop, nothing wrong with it. Good luck to her.
From the Graun comments:
Taylor Swift has produced piles of racist and misogynistic music, Bad Blood, the music video set in a colonial fantasy world, all her slut-shaming lyrics, just to get started. Much of this has been covered in this very newspage.
What is the purpose of making apologies for her: she sat out the last election, making no comment, endorsed obama in 08 after he won election, and was vocally pro-republican before that. Her celebrity iconography is based on appeals to the misogynistic traditional gender roles of middle America: she is the pure innocent white woman that can do no wrong, and is always the victim.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/does-taylor-swift-hate-other-women?utm_term=.co466NpLGl#.fwoppYG78B
like yeah it is very easy for people to hate women in this society, but could any part of that have to do with people that claim to be feminists, such as the author, writing false apologies for rich women’s false dawn feminisms? I’d take a piece about or by Chelsea Maning any day over this tripe that seeks to apologize for a privileged misogynist.
This is the logical equivalent of excusing trump’s sexism because he has to appeal to a sexist voter base.
Mental as anything.
It’s the Guardian – what do you expect – consistency, well thought out arguments , intelligence.- or Guardian cock rot ?
John Square–The article mentions the Cardassian woman. Very nasty pieces of work those Cardassians even compared with Klingons and Romulans.
As for the shallow vapid sleb Katy Perry–sorry she broke up with Brand as they truly deserved each other–I wasn’t aware that Swift had had a feud with her.
Perhaps the feud was just with her tits–given that they likely outnumber Katy herself two to one on the intelligence “front”–and the whole thing was kept under their jumpers.
I think you mean centimillionaire…
As for misogyny, Taylor Swift has (nominally) tits and an axe wound which makes her female and therefore automatically the victim of misogyny.
Any claim that it doesn’t is misogyny, especially this one.
A pendant writes:
That would make her a hectomillionaire, a centimilliionaire would have a net worth of more than $10,000.
Both are correct SI usages, but mine is more common as used by both Forbes and Wikipedia. An Americanism perhaps, but correct nevertheless.
You say Potato….
If you run a pub and can’t tell the difference between centilitres and hectolitres you won’t be in business long.
I with Swift – Kanye West is a creep.
[pendant mode on]
SI doesn’t recognise centi- or hecto- as they prefer to deal only with powers of 10 that are a multiple of 3. But a centimetre is 1/100th of a metre, not 100 metres. And a hectolitre is 100 litres, not 10cc.
[pendant mode off]