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Ask the folks in your life to call a girl who’s acquired it good, with wealth and wonder and expertise and real love, and I’d wager at the least a couple of of them would identify Taylor Swift.
Ms. Swift, the 34-year-old pop icon, who made historical past final Sunday as the one musician to win 4 best-album Grammy Awards, checks most of the necessary bins. She is white and skinny and blonde in a world that continues to privilege whiteness and thinness and blondness. She’s a billionaire with an enviable actual property portfolio, a loyal coterie of girlfriends and, for the previous 5 months or so, a good-looking, cheerfully goofy N.F.L. participant boyfriend who appears smitten along with her. On Sunday, she could take a break from her worldwide Eras tour and fly in from Japan to observe him play within the Tremendous Bowl. Hashtag blessed, proper?
However should you spend 10 minutes on X or Threads, or eavesdropping on N.F.L. message boards or watching TikToks, you’ll discover that factions that don’t agree about something share an absolute certainty that Taylor Swift is hassle. She’s doing an excessive amount of, besides when she’s not doing sufficient, and he or she’s all the time doing it mistaken.
I’m not the first to observe {that a} fairly blonde relationship a good-looking soccer participant ought to, at the least for white folks of a sure age, evoke all of the less complicated bygone vibes (Friday-night lights, milkshakes with two straws, letterman jackets) that conservatives might need. Besides — oops! — the beautiful blonde endorses Democrats. And Travis Kelce, the soccer hero, seems in commercials for vaccines (unhealthy) and Bud Gentle (somehow worse).
And why does she hog the highlight at his video games? She’s Yoko Ono-ing him and jinxing his staff, the Kansas Metropolis Chiefs, besides when she misses a sport — and remains to be, one way or the other, jinxing the staff, which made it to the Tremendous Bowl anyway, proof proper there, one way or the other, of an unlimited left-wing conspiracy.
In fact, anybody subjected to that a lot distilled man-cave fury needs to be beloved by the opposing staff, the parents with dye of their hair and pronouns of their on-line biographies, proper?
Suppose once more.
Environmentally minded critics have known as Ms. Swift a local weather felony for often flying on a non-public jet. In 2022, she topped an inventory of “celebrity emitters” that blamed her jet for pumping 8,293.54 metric tons of CO₂ emissions into the environment. (A spokeswoman told the Washington Post that these figures had been deceptive, since Ms. Swift often lent the airplane to others.) They acquired even angrier when her representatives despatched a cease-and-desist letter to a Florida school scholar who tracked and publicized that knowledge.
If the jet is an issue, the cash that pays for it’s a fair greater one. Summarizing a complete lot of on-line chatter, an article within the Australian outlet SBS asks, who’s making Ms. Swift’s merchandise? “Are they working cheap hours and paid appropriately? Did she really want to launch that a lot merchandise? Are her tickets being bought to followers at an inexpensive worth?”
Ms. Swift gave the workers of her Eras tour $100,000 bonuses, for a reported total of greater than $55 million, and he or she quietly made large donations to meals pantries within the cities the tour handed by means of. However to those critics, an moral billionaire is a contradiction in phrases, and Ms. Swift’s at fault for attempting to succeed in the highest of oppressive energy buildings when she could possibly be attempting to dismantle them as an alternative.
In fact, race can also be a part of the controversy. Some individuals are angered by Ms. Swift’s failure to sentence her latest ex Matty Healy, the lead singer of the British band The 1975, who was filmed onstage giving what gave the impression to be a Nazi salute. Throughout interviews, he lobbed vile insults on the rapper Ice Spice and talked about watching pornography that degraded Black ladies.
“Whether or not she’s relationship Healy or that is all an elaborate PR scheme,” Kelly Pau wrote in Salon, “Swift has confirmed herself to be one other white lady who claims to be an ally, claims Black Lives Matter and calls herself a feminist — however solely so long as it serves her.”
Others level out that Mr. Kelce’s earlier girlfriend is Black and that in some quarters, his relationship with Ms. Swift is being celebrated as a type of wonderful return to sanity. In that state of affairs, Ms. Swift is defended as the appropriate’s “image of pure whiteness,” the MSNBC analyst Brittany Packnett Cunningham wrote on Threads. “And of their ‘alternative fears,’ defending her is defending whiteness itself.”
However wait, there’s extra. Some followers are disillusioned that Ms. Swift attended a Brooklyn cease on the comic Ramy Youssef’s Extra Emotions tour, an occasion that raised cash for Gazan aid efforts. “She owes Israelis and Jewish Individuals an apology,” stated the talk-show host Megyn Kelly. In the meantime, followers utilizing the hashtag #SwiftiesforPalestine have requested Ms. Swift to name for a right away cease-fire, minimize ties with Israeli corporations and to publicly assist Palestinians.
Followers with disabilities have complained that Ms. Swift’s accessible-ticket gross sales had been a multitude — and that her concert events didn’t supply sufficient A.D.A.-compliant seats.
Even Ms. Swift’s affection for cats has come underneath hearth. Specifically, critics say, her affection for her two Scottish Fold cats boosted the breed’s reputation, inflicting unscrupulous opportunists to over-breed them, which resulted in unlucky genetic mutations.
A racist ex! A pollutant-spewing non-public jet! White feminism! The sins of capitalism! Mutant cats! All her fault!
It’s a story as outdated as time: the way it’s not possible for any lady — whether or not famous person or mere mortal — to get it proper. It’s “Barbie” monologue (Taylor’s model):
You need to have cash, however you possibly can’t ask for cash as a result of that’s crass. You need to be a boss, however you possibly can’t be too highly effective. You need to be a profession lady however not formidable.
You need to reply for males’s unhealthy habits, which is insane, however should you level that out, you’re accused of complaining.
However all the time stand out and all the time be grateful. However always remember that the system is rigged. You need to by no means get outdated, by no means be impolite, by no means exhibit, by no means be egocentric, by no means fall down, by no means fail, by no means present concern, by no means get out of line. It’s too arduous! And it seems the truth is that not solely are you doing all the pieces mistaken, but in addition all the pieces is your fault.
Regardless of profitable just about all the pieces, it appears, Taylor Swift can’t win.
However in that sea of TikToks and X posts, open letters and petitions and calls for, there’s one thing heartening occurring, too.
After I was an adolescent, I’m undecided it might have occurred to me to consider how whiteness might need been at work on the pop charts or demand that Debbie Gibson seize the technique of manufacturing. It’s encouraging to see Ms. Swift’s younger followers speaking about race and energy and privilege and gender.
And it’s arduous to think about that these critics wouldn’t additionally take into consideration their very own lives, their very own feminism and carbon footprint, the stands they take, the pets they select. In demanding Taylor Swift do higher — even when there’s no consensus about what “higher” seems to be like — a complete lot of Swifties could find yourself doing higher themselves.
Jennifer Weiner is a novelist. Her most up-to-date guide is “The Breakaway.”
Supply {photograph} by Caroline Brehman/EPA, by way of Shutterstock
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