Leave Taylor Swift's Uterus Alone
This baffling obsession with one pop star's biological clock is an indictment on our culture
Over the past few years Taylor Swift has risen to become, apparently, the most influential celebrity in the world, and this is a great benchmark for me to use to finally admit that I am old, because Taylor Swift marks the first time in my life that the most influential celebrity in the world is somebody I know absolutely nothing about.
I’ve never knowingly heard a Taylor Swift song, although I’ve most likely heard one incidentally if she really is that ubiquitous, maybe in a shopping centre or movie soundtrack. That’s not a humble brag, it’s not any kind of brag, I just don’t listen to new pop music. If you ask me about Taylor Swift there are only three things I can tell you off the top of my head: She’s dating a popular football player who I also know nothing about; People make fun of how often she flies in her private jet; But more than anything, she’s a frequent target of criticism for the toxic influence she has on young girls as a role model, with specific regard to her sexuality.
As silly as it seems that Tay-Tay would be the one on the receiving end of all this criticism while people like Drake and Kendrick Lamar are engaging in rap feuds over whether or to what extent each other is a violent sexual predator, the offense Swift is charged with is being in her 30s and still yet to reproduce even once.
Far be it for me to spend too much of my emotional budget worrying about the feelings of the richest and most powerful people on the planet, but the amount of escalating panic and associated anger being levelled at Swift about this one specific issue is baffling and gross as fuck. The most recent example in Newsweek, a worthless opinion column by John Mac Ghlionn that makes you wonder who the hell asked, is just the latest in a long line. It’s not only men who are losing their minds about this. Back in February there’s this one by Sophia Worringer entitled “If Taylor Swift cares about the future, she should get married and have kids.”
While this is pretty bum standard Country Farmers brand traditional misogyny™, it’s also more than that. I know that it’s annoying and reductive when people insist everything comes down to white nationalism, but this does come down to white nationalism, at least largely, in both its explicit and more sedate manifestations. Taylor Swift isn’t just your average white pop star. Through no fault of her own, she’s White-white in a way that gives Mike Pence hypertension. And although she’s given absolutely no indication that she has political sympathies for the 1488 Squad, the alt-right has been obsessed with her since at least 2016 during Donald Trump’s first campaign.
Taylor Swift—her mystique, that is, not her actual politic—sits at the heart of a venn diagram that intersects the alt-right, white ethnonationalists, traditionalist conservatives, and the pronatalist movement. Again, none of this is due to anything that she has said. Politically, she’s a standard liberal, on the very rare occasion that she mentions politics at all. But the fact that her actual views can be so readily written off and ignored and she can still be dismissed as apolitical or even conservative despite the fact that she’s an open Biden supporter adds fuel to my point: We don’t treat women celebrities as individual agents.
The people wringing their hands over Swift’s biological clock—with all the slow-boiling panic of a medieval court of an aging heirless monarch—aren’t necessarily all conservatives but there are patches of common ground. Above all, the world must stay familiar; progress, where it occurs, should be paced and measured; the status must always remain quo. The alarm that society is raising over Taylor Swift’s reproductive status is happening at the same time as a perceived crisis in male role models, wherein young boys are turning to human waste like Andrew Tate for mentorship.
Tate, a proud misogynist anti-intellectual human slaver who trapped women into porn factories, is praised by many in the same far-right sphere of influence that yearns to subdue Taylor Swift, from Charlie Kirk to Nigel Farage. On the other side of the political spectrum, liberal boys’ and men’s advocates are struggling to counter his messaging with more wholesome visions of positive masculinity while the MAGA crowd scoff and call them soycucks. In either case, there’s a distinction between the moral panics we have about our male and female role models.
When it comes to the culture and the role models that we expose boys to, we worry over how it’s developing their growth into men. Depending on your opinion of Andrew Tate, you either approve of the thought of a generation of boys growing up to be Just Like Him or you desperately abhor it. When I worked for Cracked we used to write these pieces occasionally about famous men, the lede essentially being that they’re secretly just these really great guys, and I didn’t realise at the time that what we were doing, probably unconsciously, was advertising positive masculinity to our audience. We want our sons to carry our legacy, yes, and become good leaders for our communities, but we also want their lives to have meaning for themselves and not become victim to some toxic ideology or another. We want them to carry pride in themselves.
And we were liberals and we were feminists, and we would never write an article like this about famous women. It was an actual policy, I remember one of the higher editors explaining that the reason we wouldn’t write an article about badass women was because the hook of such an article would be “they’re badass even though they’re women.” The concern was with how out of touch and icky that was.
And they weren’t wrong. But when our media does write about women as role models, it isn’t about how they’re teaching our daughters values and skills that will help them develop as fulfilled and well rounded women. It’s about how well they’re persuading a generation of girls to help reach societal population goals.
When we’re concerned about our boys’ role models, it’s because we want to shape and inspire them. When we’re concerned about our girls’ role models, it’s because we want to manipulate and utilize them.
Sophia Worringer, who wrote the piece for Article, is hardly some Great Replacement fearmongering reactionary—her byline says she’s Deputy Policy Director at the Centre for Social Justice—but her piece is typical of how people write about Swift’s influence from outside the fandom:
“The Taylor Effect is widespread. In the run up to the last presidential election in 2019, Taylor posted a short message on Instagram encouraging her then 272 million followers to register to vote. Just this nudge was enough to send more 35,000 people through the website to register. Since dating the American footballer Travis Kelce, who plays for the Kansas City Chiefs, the National Football League (NFL) has reported an increased brand value of over $122 million in just a few months. Her influence on women is even more striking: 53 per cent more girls aged 12 to 17 are now watching NFL.
Taylor may be one of the most influential and successful women in the world, but if she really wants to influence the future of America, and the West, for the long term, she should employ the Taylor effect to tackle one of America’s biggest problems: the decline in marriage and birth rates.”
Taylor’s ability as a musician, her intelligence, or her self-taught business acumen are rarely given such high regard as her ability to be weaponised. How she’s viewed isn’t even as a role model so much as the Pied Piper of tween girls. Because they’re not really individuals at all, they’re a demographic. They’re a political entity.
The use of people primarily as tools or means to an end is something I find abhorrent to begin with, and celebrities are also human beings, albeit not necessarily always very good ones, so I’m generally against the weaponisation of celebrities in this way. Not all of them get famous due to genuine talent, but a hell of a lot of them do, and they don’t suddenly become public property.
With women like Taylor Swift it’s a double offense because we’re trying to manipulate her for the express purpose of manipulating a huge swath of other people—get these young girls into the business of cranking out kids as soon as humanly possible.
Worringer’s piece is a pretty tame exercise in gentle coaxing, but mostly the media tries to persuade Swift the same way we usually manipulate women—by shaming them. The useless sack of un wittingly queer-coded amphibian shit that is Matt Walsh has an opinion of Swift that “life doesn’t revolve around her family and kids so instead it revolves around TV shows and pop stars. Worst of all she’s too stupid to realize how depressing this is.”
In John Mac Ghlionn’s Newsweek piece he states that he’s not attacking Swift directly, but poses and judges her against the various men she has dated—at least a dozen!!—and rattles off their names of these eminently eligible bachelors like the disapproving king in a Disney movie whose daughter just keeps turning down every prince. Harry Styles! Joe Jonas! Jake Gyllenhaal for petesakes! He claims that she’s a hypocrite for chanting “down with patriarchy” during a concert while dating a football player—the implication that she’s stepping further out of line by betraying her chosen path as a childless woman (they’re supposed to live sad and alone and surrounded by cats).
These worry-slinging opinionists are all, through one method or another, through shame or ridicule or patronisation, trying to guide Taylor down the correct path of womanhood in order to show other girls what that path is, and right now (ideally ten or fifteen years ago, in fact) that means baby time. But the Golden Path nonsense isn’t the only way that this insults women. It’s also bizarre that she’s considered the only influential female just because she’s leading the raw numbers right now.
Traditional relationships aren’t absent representation among women role models, not even in Taylor Swift’s specific niche. Katy Perry is married with kids. Beyonce is married with kids. Taylor Swift isn’t ending the nuclear family and she hasn’t done or said anything to suggest that she wants to. So what if there’s a childless woman in the teen pop genre? We should be celebrating that—not every single girl is going to want (or be able!) to settle down with a husband and reproduce, and to neglect strong role models for those girls is all sorts of erasure.
And when you think about it—if marriage and children is such an unattractive idea that we have to maintain the illusion at all costs that it’s the only idea—if there’s a genuine concern that a single visible alternative will poison the entire concept for an entire generational cohort—then we have bigger problems as a society and as a species than this. If we need to treat Taylor Swift and her football boyfriend like pandas in a zoo, coaxing them together as a last desperate bid to teach all the other pandas how it’s done, then I cannot stress this enough, we are already toast.
I honestly do not think we’re anywhere near that point.
I hearted this post when I got to the phrase, "...the status must always remain quo."