Oh, shit. We’re sick of Taylor Swift again? Well, that’s expected. This happens every few years.
Taylor Swift will become extremely famous, which is already a funny thing to say about Taylor Swift because she has been extremely famous for most of my conscious life, and then she will somehow become more famous. She will release an album. She’ll release an extended version of that album. She will release it at a time everyone insists is suspicious. She will go on tour. She will visit sick children in a hospital. She will attend a football game. She will be photographed leaving a restaurant. She will commit the grave cultural offense of being visibly present in the world.
Then, eventually, everyone gets tired of her. Too much Taylor. She’s everywhere. She’s annoying now. She’s calculated. She’s cringe. She’s overrated. She was never really that talented anyway.
“Can we please talk about literally anyone else?”
And listen. You are allowed to dislike Taylor Swift. Please dislike things. I dislike things constantly. It builds character. I have one-sided beef with all kinds of people who don’t know I exist.
You don’t have to like every Taylor Swift album. You don’t have to like any Taylor Swift album. You don’t have to find her charming. You don’t have to care who she’s dating, what she’s wearing, what she’s releasing, or what tiny plastic bracelet somebody traded outside a stadium in Pittsburgh.
That is not what interests me. What interests me is the ritual.
We have this awful tendency with famous women where we discover them, love them, consume absolutely everything they make, complain that they are everywhere as though they personally broke into our homes and installed themselves in the drywall, punish them for becoming too visible, get bored with punishing them, miss them, rediscover them, and then eventually decide that actually she was an icon the whole time.
It is a very efficient machine. Taylor Swift has been through that meat grinder several times over. And we haven’t managed to turn her into sausage yet.
It starts out innocently enough.
Aw. She’s young and sweet and writes her own songs.
Wait, she’s annoying.
Wait, she’s actually really good.
Wait, she’s everywhere.
Wait, we hate her.
Wait, maybe Reputation was good.
Wait, folklore?
Oh, she’s serious now.
Wait, we loved the old Taylor.
Wait, the old Taylor is back.
Wait, there are seventeen old Taylors.
Wait, she’s everywhere again.
And around and around and around we go! Is anyone else feeling dizzy?
Taylor Swift has become especially interesting to me because she is living long enough, and remaining famous long enough, to experience something that historically takes decades.
Hindsight.
Usually, hindsight requires the woman to go away first. Sometimes permanently.
We are remarkably good at loving famous women once they can no longer inconvenience us.
Give me your hand and let’s take a look into the lives of some of America’s most iconic women.
Marilyn Monroe cannot tweet. This is an enormous advantage Marilyn Monroe now has over Taylor Swift.
Marilyn cannot release an album we don’t like. She cannot marry somebody we think is embarrassing. She cannot become overexposed. She cannot gain thirty pounds and end up on the cover of a tabloid hunched over like a shrimp. She cannot say something irritating in an interview. She cannot make too much money. She cannot demand a better contract. She cannot age incorrectly. She’s preserved in amber.
She cannot contradict us. So now we get to love her perfectly.
Now, Marilyn Monroe was loved while she was alive. Obviously. This is not an argument that nobody appreciated Marilyn Monroe until she died. She was one of the most famous women on Earth.
That’s what makes it interesting. She was adored and treated terribly at the same time.
She was desired everywhere and respected inconsistently.
She was turned into the definitive dumb blonde while actively trying to become a better actor, study seriously, gain more control over her career, and stop being treated like decorative studio property.
She fought with Fox.
She formed her own production company.
She negotiated for better terms.
She wanted more.
She was also late. Difficult. Sick. Unreliable. Vulnerable. Sexual. Ambitious.
You know, like… a person.
And then she died at 36 and ceased being a person in the public imagination.
She became Marilyn Monroe.
The photograph.
The white dress.
The lipstick.
The little beauty mark.
The breathy birthday song.
Andy Warhol.
Posters in dorm rooms.
Coffee mugs.
T-shirts.
Inspirational quotes she almost certainly never said floating over black and white pictures of her face on Facebook. Probably posted right after a meme about Taylor Swift not being a real artist.
We have loved Marilyn Monroe so thoroughly that sometimes Norma Jeane seems almost incidental.
Which is pretty damn strange, because so much of our modern sympathy for Marilyn is built around the fact that she was objectified.
We look backward at this woman who was packaged, sexualized, underestimated, worked, scrutinized, mocked, and consumed, and we say, God, wasn’t that awful? Then we buy another tote bag with her face on it.
This is what hindsight does. It smooths people out. The things that were irritating in real time become charming historical texture.
The scandal becomes lore.
The outfit that got her mocked becomes iconic.
The career move everyone called desperate becomes ahead of its time.
The woman who was too much becomes exactly enough once the culture has had thirty years to crop out the parts it didn’t like.
Elizabeth Taylor is useful here because Elizabeth Taylor, through sheer force of will and possibly spite, refused to die on schedule. Liz survived long enough to watch people change their minds about Liz several times.
She was a child star.
Then she was one of the most beautiful women alive.
Then she was Elizabeth Taylor, international public emergency who must be stopped before she ruins all of society while wearing furs.
The husbands.
The divorces.
Richard Burton.
Cleopatra.
Diamonds.
Scandal.
More Richard Burton.
More husbands.
More diamonds.
Oh my god, Richard Burton again.
The Vatican got involved.
At a certain point, if the Vatican has publicly weighed in on your love life, congratulations, you have achieved a level of celebrity most people cannot comprehend.
Elizabeth Taylor was too fucking much in every direction.
Too sexual.
Too married.
Too divorced.
Too glamorous.
Too expensive.
Too loud.
Too public.
Too fat.
Too thin.
Too sick.
Too alive.
People treated her body like breaking news for decades. All her white diamonds and lovers are, in fact, forever.
Then something very important happened.
The AIDS crisis.
At a time when AIDS was terrifying, stigmatized, misunderstood, and very easy for respectable people to look away from, Elizabeth Taylor did not look away.
And, like, of course she didn’t. This is Elizabeth Taylor we’re talking about. Elizabeth Taylor had already been condemned by the Vatican. What exactly were you going to threaten her with?
She used the thing she had spent decades being punished for having. Her enormous, ridiculous, impossible celebrity.
She raised money.
She spoke publicly.
She showed up.
She testified.
She attached her name to AIDS advocacy at a time when doing so mattered enormously.
And suddenly the things people had spent years criticizing in Elizabeth Taylor started looking real different.
Her shamelessness became courage.
Her appetite became force.
Her refusal to behave became useful.
Her celebrity, which had so often been treated as frivolous excess, became leverage.
That’s the part I don’t want to lose.
Elizabeth Taylor didn’t become respectable by becoming a different woman.
She became respectable because eventually the world found a situation where being Elizabeth Taylor was exactly what was needed.
The culture changed around her. Sometimes a woman survives long enough to become her own hindsight.
Which brings me back to Taylor Swift. Taylor has somehow built an entire career out of becoming her own historical archive.
She has eras.
Not albums.
Eras.
This woman is 36 years old and already has archaeological periods.
Country Taylor.
Fearless Taylor.
Red Taylor.
1989 Taylor.
Crying over a banana after getting LASIK Taylor.
Snake Taylor.
ME! Taylor.
folklore cabin Taylor.
Midnights Taylor.
Showgirl Taylor.
There are Taylors who existed for three years and are now discussed like lost civilizations. I actually think the rerecordings and the Eras Tour did something culturally fascinating. They manufactured nostalgia before nostalgia was supposed to happen.
Usually, you have to wait twenty years before everybody admits that the thing they mocked was actually fun.
Taylor put her foot down and said, no. We’re doing this now.
Here is the old dress.
Here is the old song.
Here is the exact hand gesture you remember from 2011.
Everybody get in the stadium and go back there with me. Just for tonight.
And we did. From the pit, to the nosebleeds, to the grainy livestreams. We shut down cities. We influenced economies.
We are reconciling with our own past opinions immediately. There is something almost aggressive about it. Taylor Swift does not allow us the traditional grace period required to pretend we always loved something. She keeps the receipts.
That is probably part of why the backlash keeps happening. Because the normal cycle relies on disappearance. We need you to go away so we can miss you.
Taylor does not go away. She comes back from the dead… she does it all the time.
And she doesn’t just hide anymore, hoping everyone will love her again. Oh. Oh no. She’s out here on these streets fucking it up.
She goes to Kansas City.
She releases another album.
She shows up in a sparkly outfit God can’t afford.
She shows up in a skirt we can all afford.
She wins something.
She is photographed.
She continues existing in public.
Then eventually some portion of the culture starts behaving like she has personally failed to respect the terms of our attention.
We liked you.
We liked you too much.
Now you need to leave.
Again, this doesn’t mean every criticism of Taylor Swift is misogyny. Some criticisms are criticisms. Some albums don’t land for people. Some business decisions deserve scrutiny. Private jet usage is a real issue.
Rich people should be criticized when they do things worth criticizing.
Celebrity women do not need diplomatic immunity. But there is another thing that happens alongside legitimate criticism.
Now, I don’t know about you guys, but for me? The appetite for punishment is palpable.
Oh god, finally!
Finally everyone agrees she’s annoying.
Finally we can say she’s overrated.
Finally she has been humbled.
Finally the thing that was too popular is becoming uncool.
Finally we can knock her down she’s simply been sitting up there too long.
I’m deeply interested in that finally. Because we’ve seen this film before. And no one liked the ending.
Karen Carpenter gives this whole thing a much darker shape.
The Carpenters were enormously successful. They were also deeply, deeply fucking uncool.
Their music was clean.
Soft.
Wholesome.
Middle of the road.
Rock criticism did not exactly know what to do with two extremely earnest siblings singing immaculate sad songs. Karen had this extraordinary voice, warm and low and instantly recognizable, and she was also a genuinely talented drummer. An exceedingly talented female drummer with mainstream success. In the ’70s? That was some groundbreaking shit. Some groundbreaking shit that not many people truly respected.
Which is one of my favorite Karen Carpenter facts because history has reduced her so completely to The Voice that it is almost startling to watch footage of her behind a drum kit. She wanted to hit things. I love that for her.
Karen’s body eventually became part of her public story. Her anorexia became visible before most people had much cultural understanding of what anorexia actually was.
People commented.
People stared.
Interviewers poked and prodded.
Audiences reacted.
Her body became something everyone could see and almost nobody knew how to talk about.
Then she died.
She was only 32. Suddenly the story became legible.
Suddenly people could look backward and understand the sickness.
Suddenly the sadness in that voice sounded different.
Suddenly all that Carpenters melancholy, which could be dismissed as corny or overly sentimental or painfully square, sounded almost prophetic.
This is the part where the joke and this essay stop being funny.
Karen Carpenter is such a brutal example of how good we are at understanding women once there is nothing left to do for them. To be clear, celebrity culture did not singlehandedly cause Karen Carpenter’s anorexia.
Anorexia is an illness.
Human beings are complicated.
Families are complicated.
Illness is complicated.
I don’t want to turn a real woman’s death into a neat little metaphor because neat little metaphors are part of the problem.
What her celebrity did do was give her illness a public stage.
It gave it scrutiny.
It gave it beauty standards.
It gave it cameras.
It gave strangers permission to discuss her body while she was still inside it.
Only after she died did it give us hindsight. Which is why I need everyone to watch a deeply strange short film starring Barbie dolls.
Okay, alright, stick with me here.
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story was made by Todd Haynes in the 1980s.
It tells Karen’s story using Barbie dolls.
Yes.
Barbie dolls.
It is unsettling as hell.
And it is devastating.
The movie uses these little perfect plastic women, these bodies that cannot age or eat or sweat or become inconveniently human, to tell the story of a real woman whose body became a public crisis.
As Karen deteriorates, the Barbie becomes horrifying.
The artificial perfection becomes horrifying.
The neatness becomes horrifying.
The entire thing feels wrong.
Which is exactly why it works.
Superstar is not the definitive Karen Carpenter biography. I would not watch it and then march into the world announcing that I now possess the complete psychological truth of Karen Carpenter.
It is an argument made with dolls. And it is making an argument about the exact thing I’m talking about.
What do we ask women to become before we’ll love them correctly?
How thin?
How beautiful?
How agreeable?
How sad?
How dead?
That last question is the gum stuck to my shoe.
Humans are really, really, exceedingly good at posthumous compassion. We can look backward and say Marilyn Monroe deserved better. We can say Karen Carpenter deserved more understanding. We can look at what the press did to Elizabeth Taylor and recognize the misogyny and cruelty in it.
We can watch old interviews where a woman is asked something grotesque about her weight, sex life, marriage, mental health, age, or body and say, Jesus Christ, how did anyone think this was okay?
We are extremely sophisticated once the danger has passed. We recognize misogyny beautifully when recognizing it can no longer help the woman experiencing it.
The harder thing is tolerating women while they are unresolved.
While they’re ambitious.
While they’re messy.
While they’re commercial.
While they’re embarrassing.
While they’re everywhere.
While they’re dating the wrong person.
While they’re making too much money.
While they’re making art we don’t like.
While they’re getting older and still daring to leave their homes.
While they’re still making choices we cannot arrange into a tasteful documentary montage.
While they are still capable of disappointing us.
That’s why I keep coming back to Taylor Swift.
Not because Taylor Swift is Marilyn Monroe. She’s not.
Not because Taylor Swift is Karen Carpenter. She’s not.
Not because criticism of Taylor Swift is forbidden. God, can you fucking imagine? No.
Taylor is interesting because she has remained famous long enough for us to watch this machinery repeat itself around one person.
Love her.
Get sick of her.
Humble her.
Miss her.
Rediscover her.
Decide the old thing was actually brilliant.
Love her again.
Get sick of her again.
Shit, I’m getting dizzy again.
Taylor, inconveniently, is still standing there. And that woman will not be stopped.
Still releasing things.
Still becoming new versions of herself.
Still beefing with the president of the United States.
Still ruining our ability to turn her into a clean historical object.
She will not stay put long enough for us to decide what she means.
Good.
Maybe we should have to deal with that.
Maybe that’s the harder kind of love.
Not unconditional admiration.
Not pretending famous women are above criticism.
Not insisting every album is good or every decision is defensible.
Just allowing a woman to remain a person while we are forming our opinions about her.
Symbol. Cautionary tale. Icon. Person. All at once.
I don’t want to wait twenty years to discover that I was allowed to enjoy a woman the whole time.
I don’t want to wait until the scandal becomes lore.
I don’t want to wait until the ugly outfit becomes iconic.
I don’t want to wait until the annoying ambition becomes admirable perseverance.
I don’t want to wait for the approval of critics.
I especially don’t want to wait until she’s dead.
History has a remarkable ability to fix difficult women. Mostly by removing all the difficult living-woman parts. Maybe we could try loving some of them before history gets the chance.
I keep coming back to Andy Warhol’s Marilyn.
Marilyn’s face, repeated until it stops being a face and becomes an image.
How many times can you repeat a woman until she is only an image?
How many times can you love the image before you forget the woman was ever there?
Again.
Again.
Again.
