hobblepot, man, go outside. Walk a dog. Go to the gym. You shouldn't be getting this worked up about a popstar.

Yeah she's a bit of a smug juvenile hypocrite but of all the people in the US who deserve to hang she's really not one of them

And I love how she gets under MAGAs skin (which isn't hard to be fair since its paper thin)

dating a minor is yikes tho

The Fate of Ophelia is ace. Didn't expect that...

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> And I love how she gets under MAGAs skin (which isn't hard to be fair since its paper thin)



Literally anything that doesn't swear undying fealty to their cult does this.

True

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Read the lyrics of this album, even for pop, they are serious garbage.

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agreed!

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She could have sung completely unintelligible and indecipherable Sims-like words and it would have been less offensive than the actual lyrics. Bottom of the barrel slop

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This is the musical equivalent of 10000 jets of pressurized donkey shit spraying me in the ears nose mouth and eyes.

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It's truly terrifying what an absurdly gargantuan of popular culture icon she is. Goes to show the power of the mass marketing/media machine. No wonder unfiltered unhinged lies pass so broadly in the fields like politics.

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@solrage —



No offense taken; I knew this take would rile you all up. Are you having fun? I'm having fun.



But you’re mistaking my argument for moral policing when it’s actually about cultural positioning. The question isn’t whether domesticity or motherhood are legitimate choices, they absolutely are. The issue is how those choices are being framed, sold, and aestheticized by the most powerful woman in pop during a political moment obsessed with “returning women to their natural place.”



When a billionaire artist rebrands her image around “settling down,” “having a couple kids,” “pledging allegiance,” and “leaving the world alone,” that’s not simply personal fantasy. It’s an ideological aesthetic: a retreat dressed as empowerment. You’re right that feminism was built on freedom of choice, but marketing domestic surrender as the aspirational ideal in an era of collapsing reproductive rights isn’t neutral. Power contextualizes choice.



As for the irony argument, sure, Wi$h Li$t can be read as satire. But irony functions differently when it’s part of a luxury brand. Taylor doesn’t perform hypocrisy to expose it; she performs it to profit from both sides of it. The trad-wife fantasy works as irony for those who “get the joke,” and as aspiration for those who don’t. That’s precisely how soft reactionary messaging spreads, by being plausibly deniable.



On Ophelia: yes, in Shakespeare, Ophelia is undone by obedience and betrayal, caught in patriarchal traps she can’t escape. That’s exactly why Taylor’s rewrite is politically loaded. Turning Ophelia’s drowning into a happy rescue by a man doesn’t “correct” the tragedy, it erases its feminist meaning. It tells women that the cure for isolation isn’t rebellion, but the right kind of submission.



This isn’t about saying “trad life is evil.” It’s about recognizing the cultural shift when pop’s most famous feminist brand starts mirroring the aesthetics of a political movement built on control. The Life of a Showgirl doesn’t announce fascism but it does fetishize its emotional logic.

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@Asdfp277



Yes, it would still be corrective allusion even if it was done on accident. Of course, the problem is nobody has the ability to see inside Swift's mind to know if she "missed the point." I doubt she did since Ophelia isn't a particularly complex/obscure reference, and Swift has shown she knows how to get literary allusions right (cf. Cassandra).

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@letsgofishing



It's not that I don't understand your point about there being a "political moment obsessed with 'returning women to their natural place;'" what I object to is the notion that a nearly middle-aged woman who's made her entire life about becoming the most successful "girl boss" in the world, who's written more about the dangers of devoting yourself to the wrong kind of men than anyone, is "selling" that political viewpoint in a prescriptive "this is what all women should do/be/aspire to" sense that would be required to make it political rather than personal. You haven't really offered an argument as to how you distinguish between the two in this case other than the larger socio-historical context; but such contexts don't trump (npi) personal particulars. I see nothing in these lyrics that mark them as ideological as opposed to personal, the same kind of personal that Swift has always written about.



It's even rather funny to hear you talking about this being a "rebrand." To me, it's 100% in keeping with her entire career spent writing about female fantasies. The fantasies of teenage girls aren't those of 35-year-old-women. That's not a "rebrand," that's called growing up.



Then you just go into mind reading with the "she performs (hypocrisy) to profit from both sides of it." Stephen Colbert used to profit from "both sides" of those who got his use of satire and those who didn't. The fact that he did that doesn't speak to intention, just result. A lot of people (conservatives, especially) are irony impaired. That's not the fault of artists using irony when the target of their irony doesn't get it.



Corrective allusion doesn't "erase (the) meaning" of the original. That's just not how literary allusions function. Allusion, in general, works when an audience knows/understands the meaning of both and can compare/contrast. Corrective allusion works by contrast. If someone doesn't understand the feminist tragedy of Ophelia, then Swift's corrective allusion doesn't work (for them, at least). It also doesn't "tell women" anything so general. Swift, as much as anyone, had made a career out of writing about both the potential good and bad in relationships, and the dangers of trusting/committing to men who don't have the same level of devotion. The notion that she has to do this in every song, that she can't write about the good that can come from devoting yourself to the right person, without betraying some feminine ethos and schilling for conservative tradwife aesthetics is nonsense.

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Oh look, an article from the romantic partner of the Director of the FBI making my point:



https://thenationalpulse.com/analysis-post/wilkins-taylor-swifts-life-of-a-showgirl-is-a-love-letter-to-home-family-and-commitment/

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I fucking love this website

I never cared about her but apparently she is racist now? I mean she was a country artist, are they not conservative at least? Excuse me for my oversimplification, i'm not 'murican, i'm just here for the tea

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Great thread

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lol wtf

Wtf is going on in the tswifty thread