Taylor Swift studies, contd.

tfw ur born to be the pawn in every lover's game

There is a niche but substantial subset of Taylor Swift fans called “gaylors”—that is, they are people, mostly I think lesbian and bi women, who think Taylor Swift is gay.¹ I am not exactly one of them—about Real Taylor I have no opinions, period—but I am interested in these people because I think they pick up on stuff other people don’t because they aren’t playing the “pin the song on the boyfriend” game.²

So here’s one of those things: Taylor Swift writes about men like they’re women. Or, conversely, Taylor Swift writes about herself like she’s a man. Sort of! Sort of.

What I mean by this is that Taylor writes about men as physically beautiful and herself as the desiring agent in her romances. She’s going after them, she’s obsessed with them, she’s plotting and scheming to make them hers, she’s overcoming odds and obstacles and so forth. She’s (mostly) more interested in exploring her own desires than exploring whether or not she’s desirable.³ (In “willow,” for instance: “as if you were a mythical thing / like you were a trophy or a champion ring / and there was one prize I’d cheat to win…”) In Taylor Swift’s world, at least as it’s presented to us, men are beautiful prizes, shiny toys with a price, the list goes on… Men are, frequently, termed “babe” (or “baby boy,” as in “Paper Rings” and “Bejeweled”). Even in a satirical song like “Blank Space,” she’s still doing everything—capturing men in her web of deceit and then tossing them aside.

This desiring quality is the quality that the Gen Z mini-Taylors mostly lack, incidentally. I listen to a lot of them—Olivia Rodrigo and Maisie Peters and Sabrina Carpenter and Blü Eyes and whoever else—and I like em fine but thus far they seem exclusively focused on the sad/angry breakup anthem and not the rest of the package. What Taylor got from the beginning (“he’s the reason for the tear drops on my guitar,” etc) was that a sad song isn’t worth much without really losing something worthwhile, and that loss involves desire. So even in her most “good riddance, you piece of shit” song (“Dear John”), what gives the song its pathos is the part where she says “I loved you so.” Without that, the song doesn’t land—she’s just well out of it.

Now, if you’re a gaylor, there’s a very simple explanation to why she’s like this (she’s gay), just as there’s a simple explanation as to why most of her love songs are addressed to a gender unspecified “you” (she’s gay). You read a lyric like “what must it be like to grow up that beautiful / with your hair falling into place like dominoes” in “gold rush” and you think well that’s not something straight women say about straight men and go from there to the obvious conclusion (she’s gay). To this the normal response is something along the lines of “what? Taylor Swift is painfully heterosexual.” And then you’re stuck arguing about a stranger’s sexuality, which is both boring and a little weird. You are never going to know anything about her private life—and I mean that for both sides here.

Here’s what’s more interesting to me: regardless of whatever is going on with Taylor Swift personally (again, about Real Taylor I have no opinions), her fanbase is overwhelmingly straight women—i.e., they are vibing with what she’s saying and it describes their desires. Taylor Swift could “actually” be a gold star lesbian who’s been secretly married to Dianna Agron for the past however many years—it wouldn’t change the fact that straight women are hearing these songs and thinking “it me” about them, that she’s representing something about how they want the people they want in representing how she does. If it’s true that straight women don’t talk this way about men, it’s not exactly because they don’t want to, or don’t relate to it, but because it feels foreclosed somehow. But here, it’s opened up.

And so if straight women, as a category, don’t generally say things like “you’re so gorgeous it actually hurts” or “don’t you worry your pretty little mind” to their male love objects, it’s not because they aren’t thinking and feeling this way. When Taylor sang “you’re just so cool, run your hands through your hair / absent-mindedly making me want you” in “Fearless,” her teenage peers felt like that about guys, too. But Taylor was the one vocalizing it for them. She’s the one who’s willing to be wonderstruck with wanting somebody else, not just wanting to be wanted. She’s the one overwhelmed with beauty and with her own desire.

A comment I tend to see pretty often, from fans and haters alike, is something along the lines of “Taylor Swift is sexless.” On one level, this kind of statement is just a vibe thing—it’s like beauty or any other intangible quality. There’s no ten step proof to show the contrary. And to be totally honest I do not really want to hear if people are horny for Taylor Swift or not. That is as it were between you and God, you can leave me out of it. But it’s also interesting because I think what people generally mean is something like, Taylor Swift isn’t sexy, she doesn’t do it for me. Her desire is illegible as such because it’s asking you to look with it and not look at it.⁴

The high point of women’s desire for men in art, to me, is the screwball comedy, because there you’re seeing women scheming and chasing after men that they want. They don’t need these men for their material survival (we’re not in Jane Austen territory), but they want them. They want them even when the men in these comedies are high-handed, faithless, drunk, already taken, their ex-husbands, or otherwise represent a bad prospect. They want them in ways that are frankly a little scary. As Barbara Stanwyck says in The Lady Eve, with real hunger in her eyes: I need him like the axe needs the turkey.

As with anything I write about Taylor Swift on here, I’m never making exclusive claims for her. There are a lot of women artists, straight and gay, out there exploring their desires in their art, and many of them are more sophisticated in this than she is! She didn’t invent this or anything. Obviously. What makes Taylor interesting is not just that she’s writing these songs but that she’s doing it while being incredibly, incredibly famous.

Taylor Swift sings about men like they’re beautiful and that’s so unusual that a significant minority of her fans think she can’t be singing about men at all. But there are millions of people screaming along to these songs, and whatever Taylor’s thinking, a lot of them do mean men. The math suggests that what she’s singing about cannot really be all that unusual, experience-wise. Either they’re all stupid or she’s giving them something they haven’t found somewhere else. If only for reasons of personal vanity, I like to think it’s the latter.

If you want to read the other Taylor Swift posts for some reason, they’re here.

1. This article puts them at about 9% of the online fandom.… which is a surprisingly large number.

2. Though sometimes they are playing the equally tedious “pin the song on the girlfriend” game.

3. Though she does represent herself as beautiful in her songs, generally. Standing in a nice dress and so on.

4. Hence also the invocations of privacy, of secrecy, of not being understood or being understandable: these all do code a certain way to the gaylors, and I get it, but it also sort of strikes me as literally true. However this train of thought ventures a little too close to “fellas is it gay to be straight” territory for me, so it’s down here in this footnote.