why you should care what taylor swift thinks (10 weekly readings)
feelings, even in isolation, are always more real than facts and logic on their own
Special thank you to
Who inspired this post
more weekly readings:
discourse on our culture and girls
on finding and embracing ourselves
the magic of the night
perspectives on christianity & spirituality
related:
the propagation of teenage girl music as the antidote to american capitalism
olivia rodrigo for u.s. senate
you should care what taylor swift thinks for a simple reason: through her art she manifests as a higher being in that she is in touch with her own feelings and the feelings of others.
here is a quote from 2 billion men (and women):
“women are too emotional to be president.”
too emotional to be president! we know what the president must possess.
intelligence, logic, calculation: these our culture dumps into the man box, so intensively that even when a man is acting crazy he may be considered rational. even when a man is completely overcome with anger: even then his manhood — which depends so much on repressing his own feelings — is in no danger whatsoever.
there are “public intellectuals” who say national redemption is to be found in the restoration of “manliness.” we need “true men” again, and the “true man” is defined by groups of self-proclaimed “true men” who are diligently reading books written by many other men they deem to be “true men.”
source: wikipedia
they look back to the glory days of the roman empire when manliness prevailed.
by design, the “real man” neither sees nor expresses feelings beyond a surface level manifestation of those feelings. as a result, the “real man” is so fundamentally divorced from reality that no matter how many books he has read about world history, no matter how many facts he can pull out of his ass from the new york times, and no matter how many hours / how many hundred dollar bills / how many guitars / how many subscribers / how many cars / how many book deals / how many degrees / how many books he has and has read: regardless of all these meaningless things, the “real man” knows absolutely nothing about reality.
if the man is a “real man,” he does not see feelings, and so he does not see reality.
he clings to his precious dictionary. he has no idea that the definitions in the dictionary do not reflect reality. he has no idea that words are made up and mean nothing. he sees words and he thinks they are reflections of the real world, and in his thinking — no matter how logical, no matter how calculating — he sinks deeper and deeper into a bottomless web of ultimately meaningless concepts which he uses to define his entire world view.
when he sees beings who are suffering, he does not see beings who are suffering. although his head is full of facts and logic, these all swirl around the emptiness of the socially constructed concepts which he delusionally divides into narrowly defined and artificially constructed terms: man/woman; magic/science; appropriate and inappropriate methods of self-expression; acceptable and unacceptable modes of writing; right and wrong grammar; right and wrong dialects; night/day; light/dark; he never sees the wiggly reality, never sees all the colorful emotions swirling through his own soul.
he has precise definitions for every made up concept in his mind, and he tests everything he encounters against them, never once realizing that he is spending his whole life outside of reality, never once understanding that he is
not
seeing
fucking
anything.
he sees a black person murdered by a police officer and he thinks, “probably deserved it.” he sees brown children being taken away from their parents and lost forever and he thinks, “they should have followed the law.” he sees generation after generation of an impoverished family and he thinks, “take away their food: teach them about the real world.” he sees children growing up without learning how to read beyond an elementary school level and he thinks, “if only they’d work harder.”
the real world for the man is nothing more than a collection of socially constructed fabrications: professional, successful, mature, orderly, intelligent, informed, well-behaved, adult, child, worker, bum, lazy, hard-working. in the man’s mind, he himself is not even a being; he himself is his job, is his house, is his yard, is his money. even when he cares for his children, he cares for them like precious objects he loves.
because this is also how he sees other beings. when he sees a being who is suffering, he does not see a being who is suffering: he sees one of the constructs he keeps in his head. he is walking through the world as if in an augmented reality, but the augmentation is so intense that the true reality is invisible behind it.
to justify his positions, the most serious of the “real men” can often deploy overwhelming quantities of facts and piercing lines of logic. he is surrounded by dense history books. he is listening nonstop to podcasts about the latest polls. he is up late at night analyzing whether the debate questions were fair or not. he lives nowhere near arkansas but he can tell you how every voter feels there (“how voters feel” is something that men who otherwise never discuss feelings often like to say). he spends half his free time arguing with random people on the internet.
he wonders, “why do people care so much what taylor swift thinks when there’s a serious man like me right here, his head so full of scholarship?”
“if they would only listen to experts like me,” he thinks, “then they would understand how many reasons there are to look at something else besides these suffering beings. i have so many facts i can share, i have such incredible logic with which i can dazzle! i am the ultimate man! i am a scholar and yet: they want to listen to celebrities.”
the “real man” wants to take us into his world, which he claims to be the ultimate reality, but the world of taylor swift is closer to the real world than he will ever know. this man spends his life coasting along the surface, taking the waves in front of him for the depth of the ocean itself — not ever realizing, not even once, that there are 13,000 feet right beneath the ship he made, the ship he fancies gigantic and godlike, the ship that will sink to the bottom of the true reality and rot into nothing.
the world of taylor swift is the world of feelings and emotions and connection. the art of taylor swift exists in the depths of the ocean beneath the real man’s ship, and he will only glimpse it, just a little bit, just briefly when he passes into the next life.
the art of taylor swift testifies to a being who is in touch with her own feelings and the feelings of others, who understands that feeling on its own is more important than fact on its own, and who looks at other beings and sees them for what they are:
beings who are suffering and who require our assistance.
“you should not go along with something because of what you have been told, because of authority, because of tradition, because of accordance with transmitted text, on the grounds of reason, on the grounds of logic, because of analytical thought, because of abstract theoretic pondering, because of the appearance of the speaker, or because some ascetic is your teacher. when you know for yourselves that particular qualities are unwholesome, blameworthy, censured by the wise, and lead to harm and suffering when taken on and pursued, you should give them up."
(the buddha, from: an introduction to buddhism by peter harvey)
so again, you should care what taylor swift thinks for a simple reason:
through her art she manifests as a higher being in that she is in touch with her own feelings and the feelings of others.
special credit to
, a romance novelist, for first awakening me to the realities of our culture’s contempt for taylor swift.please enjoy these 10 readings about taylor swift and the world her fans created.
it’s a world far more real than anything the “real man” will ever encounter.
This brings me to a bit of realization of why a majority of cis hetero men typically hate astrology. Astrology asks us to dig deeper into our psyche. To identify reasons why we might act irrationally or without boundaries. And I would argue that women practice reflection a lot more. Women receive more feedback on the daily, both asked for and not. We’re used to analyzing the pieces and putting them back together according to the instructions or much more efficiently. I don’t think that is the experience of the percent of the population who maybe has never been asked to evaluate how their behavior directly impacts the other half of the population. Anyway, I don’t want to make this post all about that. But it does annoy me when I talk about astrology, and I’m met with, “That’s so stupid.” It’s the same tone used on teenage girls when they talk about boy bands or Taylor Swift. It’s tiring and childish and completely disregards the fact that astrology has been practiced seriously for many decades.
Taylor Swift, una cantante a la que me referiré como poeta en esta ocasión, escribió un álbum sobre un amor como lo que fuimos. De esos explosivos, intensos, recíprocos y efímeros. Hechos para existir pero no para permanecer. Con esa maldad que tiene la vida de enseñarte que lo que quieres existe, que siempre caminó contigo. Una lección sobre el tiempo y la inmadurez de alguien que tiene veinticuatro años.
This community is so full of Swifties and I love it! I wasn’t totally sure if people would be interested in reading my rankings of all the songs from each album, but there was such a great response to my folklore rankings, so thank you all so much for that!
Today I am back with part two in the series, starring none other than 1989.
The final line in the second verse is perhaps the most devastating line in the entire song. We know Taylor got into this relationship when she was 26. By the time the relationship ended, she was 33. She wasted the last few years of her 20s in a dead-end relationship. When you’re a woman, your 20s are sacred. Once you reach your late 20s, that’s when you start to hear all these societal pressures of your “biological clock” and settling down before you’re 30. Taylor has spoken before about the way society tends to discard women as soon as they hit 30, especially in the entertainment industry. So by 26, she was definitely starting to look for a more permanent relationship.
I tip-toed into my Jeep barefoot and popped the folklore cassette tape in. (This was a big part of summer 2021 for Anne and me. Regardless of your thoughts on Taylor Swift, folklore is a special, whimsical, wonderful album that deserves to be the soundtrack to an early-morning drive to the ocean.) You already know which song I played. (Hint: Track 8)
On my drive to the beach, seeing the sun for the first time in days, feeling my bare feet on the gas pedal with the ocean in the distance, I started to cry. I wasn’t going to include this in here because my brother said I’m So Dramatic, but I felt so at peace that morning of August 11. It felt ceremonial.
I was home.
“And then, just two weeks before Swift returned to London, we experienced the fatal attack on a children’s Taylor Swift dance club, where three young girls were killed again. The following week, an attack on Swift’s concerts in Vienna were foiled and all the shows were cancelled.
Regarding the Southport attack, the far-right were quick to jump in and create their own reality — it became a conversation about the UK’s intolerance and fear of immigrants and asylum seekers, and misinformation online. A conversation that very much needed to happen, as the riots have demonstrated. But the conversation that slipped under the waves was the one about violence on women and girls. To attack a Taylor Swift themed event is to once again know your targets.”
we sat quietly, laughing at inside jokes, forming new ones, and looking into the windows. taylor swift started playing over the speakers and i don’t know if sofia or i noticed first, but once we did we couldn’t stop laughing. in no world was taylor swift meant to be playing in my hometown bar, especially not the version of it sofia had heard stories of. we made our way inside and sat at the bar, a group of girls close to us in age sitting across from us. “miss americana and the heartbreak prince” started playing and i looked up, meeting the eyes of one of the girls sitting across from me.
“Please don’t yell at me for this, but I went to the Eras Tour five times: in East Rutherford, Paris, Amsterdam, Gelsenkirchen, and London. I had four of the shows scheduled and planned months in advance as trips with different groups of people, which turned into such precious memories. I don’t know how I was so lucky, but I got my face-value Amsterdam ticket a few hours before the concert off of someone on Twitter after being on the verge of scams all day. Because I went to that one by myself, I talked to the people around me and we bonded over the show. With each concert, I got to watch from a different place around the stadium, from the floor to the nosebleeds. I’m really glad that I got to hear both the original setlist from the US tour and the updated one; in fact, I was at the first TTPD show in Paris. This honestly felt like watching the Eras Tour for the first time again since so much had changed, and it kept me on my toes the whole way through.”
“I’ve been a fan of Chapell since her debut album came out in September of last year. Seeing her get more recognition this year made me so happy at first, but then I slowly started to feel sorry for her. Stardom always comes with a cost, and as a long-time fan of Taylor Swift, I know how awful fame can be for a person’s sense of self. In the last couple of years, Taylor has been very vocal about how much her success has been detrimental to her relationships with others and to herself.
When people on Twitter started to use an old video of Taylor to support their claim that Chapell was ungrateful and not made for stardom, I was confused. In the video, Taylor says she is cool with losing her privacy due to fame because “this is what I wanted and I'm one of the lucky ones who actually got what they wanted in life.” What these people forgot was that the Taylor who said those words doesn’t exist anymore. She now travels hidden in boxes and walks inside huge umbrellas that hide her entire body because she can’t go anywhere without being photographed and stalked. Not even to her friend's wedding.”
This was an awesome post! Thanks for diving into this topic
As a swiftie, this was so fun and knowledgeable to read!!
I agree with every singe thing you said in this.
Keep up the good work!!😊