The response felt almost as heavy-handed and misguided as the original piece. Male artists including Shawn Mendes and Harry Styles have in fact been the subjects of massive speculation about their sexualities: the NYT writer previously published a similar piece about Styles, while Mendes has spoken of the pressure of the constant discourse about his identity.
(“I thought, ‘You fucking guys are so lucky I’m not actually gay and terrified of coming out,’ ” he told Rolling Stone. “That’s something that kills people.”) And there is no way that gimlet-eyed Swift has made the many references listed by accident: if you lead a horse to water, don’t be surprised when it drinks.
Dignifying an overblown essay with such a severe response may in turn act as a rebuke to fans who have found identification and solace – or even just benign entertainment – in imagining, say, that Swift’s gaspingly sexy Reputation song Dress may be about her once-prominent friend, the model Karlie Kloss (“I don’t want you like a best friend”!), rather than its more likely subject, her then-boyfriend Joe Alwyn.
More than ever, pop stardom is an act of collective imagination. Swift may be one of the last monocultural stars – meaning your grandparents may have a passing awareness of who she is; her moves make tabloid headlines, not just niche gossip items, and prompt bland (but hardly offensive) jokes at awards ceremonies – but that monoculture is still a federation of distinct fanbases, each with their own interpretation of her.
Thanks to social media, members of each of these Swiftian sub-tribes can find each other and imagine and inhabit their own version of her reality, forming community (if sometimes descending into entitlement).
The Swift I enjoy is a little vindictive and surprisingly self-lacerating; others may value her loyalty to her friends, her honesty about her experiences with disordered eating, her goofiness, her assiduous capitalist instincts, or may have found in her some other prism through which to understand and appreciate some aspect of their identity – all of them valid parasocial relationships. Arguably, what Swift serves up is a constructed fiction with herself as the central character: why shouldn’t it compete with others?
It’s these playful and personal mutations that keep a star like Swift interesting at a time when her carefully managed media omnipresence and tightly plotted breadcrumb trails have started to feel a little tedious, laden with thudding predictability. (Does the snake-green dress she wore to the Golden Globes at the weekend mean that the serpent-referencing Reputation (Taylor’s Version) is coming?
Is the pope Catholic?) For many onlookers, that wearying feeling struck again when reading her lone recent interview, for Time’s person of the year cover, which seemed disappointingly uninquiring and intent on validating her version of events – namely that she was “cancelled” in the wake of her feud with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, when in fact it resulted in one of the most successful albums of her career – rather than pushing deeper into the fertile ground where her self-conception rubs up against public interpretation. The most abiding images of Swift this past year show pop’s biggest outlier standing alone on stage at the Eras tour, bedazzled with sequins. She cuts a formidable figure in her class of one – but it’s in the unruly exquisite corpse of pop fandom and stardom that the most meaningful rewards are found.
