Not being a country music fan, I did not notice Taylor Swift in 2005, 2006 or 2007. I became vaguely aware of her when she crossed over to pop music. However, her music did not attract me as a fan.
I know exactly when she first captured my attention. In 2015, still only 25 years old, she did something extra-ordinary: Taylor Swift Wins Battle With Apple Over Free Music Streaming. I decided that she was a young woman worth keeping an eye on.
I am a fan of NFL football and I was entertained by her romance with Travis Kelce that began in 2023.
And I browse on X where the above picture is posted regularly by the Never Trump tribe.
I am aware of Taylor Swift emerging as one of the top influencers in the world today with approximately 279.5 million followers on Instagram.
I only became aware of Mary Harrington early this year.
All of this is background to explain why I selected Guest post: The Romantic Swifties from my overflowing Substack Inbox this morning.
Shakespearean experts have lauded her lyricism as comparable to the great Bard himself. Critics turn their nose up at the “over-rated” hype. But as Taylor Swift’s “Era’s Tour” engulfs the UK, anyone seeking to understand the inner workings of an entire generation of disillusioned female thinkers – and voters – ought to set aside snobbish prejudice, and dive into Swift’s two decade-expression of the 21st century female experience.
This grabs my attention. I am very interested in exploring the feminine spirit from as many angles as I can find time for. And I am pleased to be doing so in a small group that includes Claudia Dommaschk who writes Immediacy Forum.
Continuing with Taylor Swift, early in her career…
Her songs are made of the stuff that little girls dream of.
Then,
…as Taylor aged, we - the innumerable millennial cohort who had employed Taylor’s music as the soundtrack to our noughties high school heartbreaks - did too. In “1989” (2014) and “Reputation” (2017), her age-adjacent fanbase passed through university and discovered young adulthood – and a feisty feminism. Swift’s work both shaped and reflected reality. Records like “Blank Space” and “...Ready for it?” heralded a generation purportedly free from commitment, proud of their self-indulgence, revelling in notoriety.
Moving into her thirties, Swift has mirrored a seismic shift in the expectations, desires, hopes, and dreams of the generation around her.
And the story connects to a now familiar theme.
Emerging from the bare-reason season of the New Aetheist moment, young millennials too crave spiritual reawakening. Our desire for narrative over naked fact has meant that 2 in 5 of us now use TikTok as our primary search engine for information, rather than Google. Our thumbs ache with scrolling through the revolving storylines of “tradwives” and “cottage core” influencers. We want love back. On a survey conducted by Matchmaking website PlentyOfFish, over half of singles now think one-night-stands are a thing of the past. And we want to re-encounter the divine. We’re returning to traditionalist churches in droves.
We want re-enchantment, and Swift is our enchantress.
How was Swift so in touch with this reality? Human experience.
And something personal and important that I can relate to, a (mostly) stable marriage.
In throwing off the significance of marriage as an old wives’ tale, feminism has played a dirty hand to millennial women. As the demand for cheapened sexual encounters has grown as a cultural norm, the protection and commitment once sealed by a trip to the altar now has no guarantee. Both men and women miss out on the stabilising impact that a marriage can bring.
Swift’s generation was given a raw deal. But the weight of her influence on the GenZ girls coming up behind us could help direct them on a different path. Her story of triumph over the girlboss trope could have an impact in recultivating the value of marriage, and reshaping expectations for relationships from an earlier stage of life. Let’s hope for her happy ending. It might inspire many more.
I am hoping for a happy ending for Taylor Swift, but I am hoping for much more. I am hoping that someday soon some celebrity discovers and shares the metamodern way of making sense of life. Can you imagine what one post on Instagram by someone like Taylor Swift would do?
Over a round of park golf yesterday, after about an hour of discussing the zaniness of the US Presidential Election 2024, my friend and I landed on Taylor Swift as the person most likely to defeat Donald Trump this fall. Now, at this point, we were mostly joking around because, as far as I know, there's been absolutely no indication that she's even being considered or would consider the job.
My friend was more serious earlier on when he brought up Cory Booker, the Democratic Senator from New Jersey who ran for president in 2020. So we then decided that Booker-Swift had a nice ring to it, though I suggested it sounded more like something from Reconstruction-Era history, like some sort of teaming up between African-Americans and women to overthrow their white male oppressors, you know, the Booker-Swift Revolt of 1871!
Anyway, your article felt too timely not to share this silly anecdote on, John.
PS In all seirousness, while I know she's tremendously popular, I suspect that the way-too-many-fan shots of her at those Chiefs games last year soured her for a lot of people, myself included. I actually like some of her music, and have for over a decade, but the contrarian in me has always rebelled against media figures that get shoved into my attention too much, a la Michael Jordan in the 1990s. And her boyfriend, while a great football player, dropped in the estimation of many, myself included, by being a shill for a shady pharmaceutical company. I won't hold that against Taylor, it's just one of those annoying things about her relationship with him.
Substack Reads suggested this article which is of interest to me as I think about a metamodern healthy feminism. https://lkennedy.substack.com/p/women-are-supposed-to-want-to-be-576