The uncanny parallel between Taylor/Kelce and the incel fantasy hate-couple of Chad and Stacy are too strong to pass without comment. In the incel fantasy, Chad is the highschool alpha football jock quarterback and Stacy his homecoming queen cheerleader girlfriend. As a couple they represent the epitome of normie alpha male heterosexuality. Kelce and Taylor are like Hollywood stole the incel script and are directing it on the national media stage. That should be an entirely niche cultural phenomena. That it's not is an index of how incel-pilled the US RW actually is
Excellent critique as usual; but I think it's pretty simple. She has 94 million Xitter followers, 280 instagram followers, billions of global fans. That's power. They'd be fine with all this if she was MAGA. She is the McDonalds of feminism.
I think there's also a sense of betrayal at work. She started out in the right wing world of country music, gained some fame, and left for the bigger brighter lights of the pop world with all of its fluffy leftish values. And now she's made a high profile convert and brought him into the fold. And has the gall to contaminate the sacred space of the football field by carrying on there with this new conquest.
Hasn't this been going on for quite a while? Remember the "Illuminati Confirmed" videos from a decade ago. QAnon and their fellow travelers engage in an analysis of culture as a means of reproducing the dominant ideology, except it comes out as "this photo of Tom Hanks wearing red shoes proves he sacrifices babies for Adrenochrome," "there's something sinister about every photo where a celebrity covers one eye" and "Miley Cyrus is an MK Ultra-controlled sex puppet."
Didn't this whole psychodrama just metastasize because Kelce committed the original sin of endorsing vaccines? Maybe that got lost in the collective psychotic breakdown, but I had the impression none of this would be happening without that and the rage transference to Swift naturally followed from Kelce's fall from American manhood grace.
There have been a hundred versions of this column written in the last 72 hours, but only one featuring "anti-Taylorism is the critical theory of fools". Ganz FTW.
But seriously, I really like highlighting Douthat's different-but-still-weirdo reaction. People with a primal disgust for actually existing America are around in the discourse on both sides of the aisle, but whereas an army of lanyards exists to beat down that tendency on the left, that reflexive hatred for looking the country in the face is the part of its looney extreme fever swamps that the institutional professional right AGREES with.
God help me, but this piece made me realize that right wing Swift conspiracies are the warped reflection of Gaylor. Both recognize that Taylor Swift's very public relationships inevitably feel performative and artificial. That's just the reality of celebrity couples, magnified by Swift's giga-fame. But while queer people project onto that their own experience of performing heterosexuality and imagine Swift to be secretly queer, the right wing version is to span a vast inchoate conspiracies involving the CIA and Big Woke. So it becomes easier to believe that the NFL rigged football games to send a team who recently won two super bowls back to the super bowl instead of the more cynical but less unbelievable idea that Taylor Swift only dates winners.
To be fair to Douthat, his (actually pretty funny) new column "Taylor Swift, Donald Trump and the Right’s Abnormality Problem" makes similar points to the ones you raise here...
Adding to this, one problem I think lots of right-wingers have with the Taylor-Travis phenomenon is that she's actually richer, more successful, and more famous than he is. It's all well and good for the manly football man to parade around with his pop singer accessory, but reactionaries REALLY lost their minds when they realized that the athlete was an accessory to the pop star in the public's understanding of this relationship. Taylor Swift's prestige, capital, and fanbase have flipped the normative gender dynamics that they cling to. As such, the Taylor-Travis relationship brings together not just right-wing anxieties about the collapse of traditional gender roles but also "woke capitalism" cannards about a rigged system that rewards the undeserving with power that they can then use to transcend or even destroy the "natural hierarchies" that the right clings to. These conspiracies *cannot hold together* without some shadowy figure behind the curtain who bestows power and riches on the undeserving, so it's not at all surprising that right-wingers have latched onto Taylor Swift, CIA asset in order to make sense of what they're seeing.
The parallel with a David Lynch universe is perfect.
I've heard this bizarre rightwing response to the Swift-Kelce coupledom linked to the growing discontent of single men unable to find girlfriends or wives. Don't know how valid that is. But more broadly, what is interesting to me: I seem to remember that the economistic approach to marriage and coupling (ala Gary Becker) asserted that when there is a pool of single men that was larger than the pool of available women, then women are able to successfully ask more from male partners––more balanced labor, more respect, more desirable treatment, etc. But things don't seem to be working that way at all.
The men who are unable to attract female partners seem to be behaving in ways likely to make themselves more undesirable to a lot of women––and seem to have more contempt and loathing for the women they claim to want to win over.
In a bizarre way this is funny, a kind of 'you don't know whether to laugh or cry' kind of way, but the real question for me is now, where does that leave guys like me, who have frankly speaking always been to snobbish to care about Taylor Swift and her boring music, how do we fit into this?
The uncanny parallel between Taylor/Kelce and the incel fantasy hate-couple of Chad and Stacy are too strong to pass without comment. In the incel fantasy, Chad is the highschool alpha football jock quarterback and Stacy his homecoming queen cheerleader girlfriend. As a couple they represent the epitome of normie alpha male heterosexuality. Kelce and Taylor are like Hollywood stole the incel script and are directing it on the national media stage. That should be an entirely niche cultural phenomena. That it's not is an index of how incel-pilled the US RW actually is
Excellent critique as usual; but I think it's pretty simple. She has 94 million Xitter followers, 280 instagram followers, billions of global fans. That's power. They'd be fine with all this if she was MAGA. She is the McDonalds of feminism.
Do I have to write a post about the Dreyfus affair now…
I think there's also a sense of betrayal at work. She started out in the right wing world of country music, gained some fame, and left for the bigger brighter lights of the pop world with all of its fluffy leftish values. And now she's made a high profile convert and brought him into the fold. And has the gall to contaminate the sacred space of the football field by carrying on there with this new conquest.
Hasn't this been going on for quite a while? Remember the "Illuminati Confirmed" videos from a decade ago. QAnon and their fellow travelers engage in an analysis of culture as a means of reproducing the dominant ideology, except it comes out as "this photo of Tom Hanks wearing red shoes proves he sacrifices babies for Adrenochrome," "there's something sinister about every photo where a celebrity covers one eye" and "Miley Cyrus is an MK Ultra-controlled sex puppet."
Didn't this whole psychodrama just metastasize because Kelce committed the original sin of endorsing vaccines? Maybe that got lost in the collective psychotic breakdown, but I had the impression none of this would be happening without that and the rage transference to Swift naturally followed from Kelce's fall from American manhood grace.
There have been a hundred versions of this column written in the last 72 hours, but only one featuring "anti-Taylorism is the critical theory of fools". Ganz FTW.
But seriously, I really like highlighting Douthat's different-but-still-weirdo reaction. People with a primal disgust for actually existing America are around in the discourse on both sides of the aisle, but whereas an army of lanyards exists to beat down that tendency on the left, that reflexive hatred for looking the country in the face is the part of its looney extreme fever swamps that the institutional professional right AGREES with.
God help me, but this piece made me realize that right wing Swift conspiracies are the warped reflection of Gaylor. Both recognize that Taylor Swift's very public relationships inevitably feel performative and artificial. That's just the reality of celebrity couples, magnified by Swift's giga-fame. But while queer people project onto that their own experience of performing heterosexuality and imagine Swift to be secretly queer, the right wing version is to span a vast inchoate conspiracies involving the CIA and Big Woke. So it becomes easier to believe that the NFL rigged football games to send a team who recently won two super bowls back to the super bowl instead of the more cynical but less unbelievable idea that Taylor Swift only dates winners.
To be fair to Douthat, his (actually pretty funny) new column "Taylor Swift, Donald Trump and the Right’s Abnormality Problem" makes similar points to the ones you raise here...
we need to appropriate degeneracy as a concept from fascists because it is the best term to describe what is happening to conservatives
A most enjoyable read. “Anti-Taylorism is the …critical theory of fools.” God knows what these clowns would have said about Marilyn and DiMaggio.
Adding to this, one problem I think lots of right-wingers have with the Taylor-Travis phenomenon is that she's actually richer, more successful, and more famous than he is. It's all well and good for the manly football man to parade around with his pop singer accessory, but reactionaries REALLY lost their minds when they realized that the athlete was an accessory to the pop star in the public's understanding of this relationship. Taylor Swift's prestige, capital, and fanbase have flipped the normative gender dynamics that they cling to. As such, the Taylor-Travis relationship brings together not just right-wing anxieties about the collapse of traditional gender roles but also "woke capitalism" cannards about a rigged system that rewards the undeserving with power that they can then use to transcend or even destroy the "natural hierarchies" that the right clings to. These conspiracies *cannot hold together* without some shadowy figure behind the curtain who bestows power and riches on the undeserving, so it's not at all surprising that right-wingers have latched onto Taylor Swift, CIA asset in order to make sense of what they're seeing.
Poor Taylor Swift. Eight years ago, she was a "Nazi idol," and sus on NPR and Vice.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/05/27/479462825/taylor-swift-aryan-goddess
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ae5x8a/cant-shake-it-off-how-taylor-swift-became-a-nazi-idol
https://www.businessinsider.com/taylor-swift-denounces-white-supremacy-alt-right-websites-2019-9
Now she's a DNC op. Can't catch a break.
The parallel with a David Lynch universe is perfect.
I've heard this bizarre rightwing response to the Swift-Kelce coupledom linked to the growing discontent of single men unable to find girlfriends or wives. Don't know how valid that is. But more broadly, what is interesting to me: I seem to remember that the economistic approach to marriage and coupling (ala Gary Becker) asserted that when there is a pool of single men that was larger than the pool of available women, then women are able to successfully ask more from male partners––more balanced labor, more respect, more desirable treatment, etc. But things don't seem to be working that way at all.
The men who are unable to attract female partners seem to be behaving in ways likely to make themselves more undesirable to a lot of women––and seem to have more contempt and loathing for the women they claim to want to win over.
In a bizarre way this is funny, a kind of 'you don't know whether to laugh or cry' kind of way, but the real question for me is now, where does that leave guys like me, who have frankly speaking always been to snobbish to care about Taylor Swift and her boring music, how do we fit into this?
This just reinforces my belief that future colleges are gonna have to have entire gamergate departments.