this is me trying

So Harry gets papped with America’s sweetheart and his fangirls cannot take their fantasies being shattered. Enter: “Taywhore”, Lists of Supposed Ex Boyfriends of Swift (some real exes, others male friends and colleagues and random names of men who starred in her music videos or were otherwise simply adjacent to her), horrible, nasty rumors and lies being spread about her, some kind of goofy and ridiculous in hindsight, (“Taylor called Niall a fat ugly Irish pig, spread the word so Harry sees who she really is and breaks up with her!!!”) to playing on really disturbing and misogynistic tropes (one I saw get spread around a lot on social media in 2012 was “When Taylor and John Mayer were dating he got her pregnant and she got an abortion to protect her good girl image. Spread this around to show the world she’s really a whore!!!!”). They couldn’t decide if Taylor was a femme fatale vixen who was going to “break Harry’s heart and write a song about him” or if she was a “crazy stalker ex gf”. Body shaming her was rampant, which is harsher in hindsight considering we know now that she was suffering a painful restrictive eating disorder during this time.

Of course the rest of the world follows suit because nobody likes anything more than picking a young woman in the public eye to scapegoat and use as a sacrificial lamb.

And then two years pass by and it’s 2014 and feminism is the new trend. Only not really. Cherry-picking certain pop-feminist talking points is. It’s no longer “in vogue” to call a woman a slut. “Sluts” are heroes now. Porn is like, totally empowering (or so they say…) and “I’ll fuck your dad” is a go-to comeback in internet arguments. Kat Von D lipstick is blowjob proof and Nylon is the epitome of feminist theory. We can’t call Taylor Swift a slut anymore. We can’t say she’s got too many ex-boyfriends. Oh no! When pressed for comment in a ten second soundbite, Swift has said she believes in feminism! Whatever can we do? Can we admit we were wrong to slut shame her? Can we admit it was silly to invoke insanely misogynistic and cruel tropes out of jealousy and insecurity? Nope! We’ll just bastardize and mis-appropriate a term coined by a Black woman academic and activist, Kimberle Crenshaw Esq., to describe a very specific issue within activist spaces and misuse it to show how totally woke we are and how totally righteous and justified we are in our hate campaign of this pop star. (Regardless of what Crenshaw herself meant by coining that term or how she wanted it to be used. Not only does that not matter to us, but the hypocrisy is also completely lost on us.) “Taywhore with too many boyfriends” became “Taylor the white feminist who weaponizes feminism to benefit herself” regardless of the fact that A) none of these internet warriors were great, intersectional feminists who were standing up for marginalized groups of women such as Black or trans women, or really doing any feminist activism outside of posting hashtags, wearing shirts that said “intersectional feminist” or posting about how people who don’t wear makeup are the “real” anti-feminists and B) no other white American pop star at this time was really doing more or less than Taylor either, outside of maybe posting a selfie drinking out of a Hillary mug.

And then the 2016 Snake thing happened, and, you know…

Of course, the irony of bastardizing and stealing what was a very specific term used by a Black woman activist to describe a very specific phenomenon in activist spaces, while not taking care to give a platform to Crenshaw, or promoting the reading of her work and theory for the sole purpose of making fun of a pop star online and winning arguments on Twitter, still hasn’t been properly unpacked, but remains very disturbing to me.

We watched the same people disparaging her for not being “feminist enough” make excuses for the man who sexually assaulted her, the men who took advantage of her when she was a teenager, the man who lied on her name and created a global smear campaign against her culminating in literal revenge porn of her, and the men who stole her life’s work from her in some weird, twisted uno reverse game of internet discourse.

We watched her literally be pushed to the brink time and time again, to the point where she was suicidal, struggling with an eating disorder and literally hid away for six years not only out of the need for escape and respite, but also out of her own fear for her life due to the constant threats, stalking, and harassment.

People are so addicted to making her the idol of their vitriol that they can’t even decide who they want to hate. They can’t decide if they want to hate a manipulative, calculated mean girl, or an overly-emotional sensitive crybaby, or a cringy and overly earnest optimist, or a spoiled brat nepo baby who doesn’t work hard enough or a desperate woman who works far too much, or a Princess Diana-esque figure with a savior complex, or a covert conservative opp or an overly zealous liberal millennial with a cringe RBG tote bag, or a fake feminist, or someone who speaks out about misogyny too much, or a vapid airhead or a pretentious weirdo who thinks she’s smarter than she is, or a Barbie doll, or an awkward, gawkish tall girl who isn’t “glamorous enough”, or a too-skinny too-perfect too-statuesque arbiter of unfair beauty standards, or a slut, or a virginal prude, or a stupid girly girl who needs to grow up and stop being so girly. It doesn’t matter that these things all contradict each other because they don’t actually care about that. Anything that will dehumanize her because it was NEVER EVER about genuinely making a critique on her. It was NEVER about merely “criticizing” her.

People saw someone who fought tooth and nail every day to be the kind of exemplary figure who represents everything a young woman was “supposed” to be because she saw the ways in which the media and the court of public opinion chewed girls with a dream just like hers up and spit them out, and because of this, people wanted to see her crack, and despite struggling at times, she never gave them quite what they wanted, so they sought out to punish her for it. They want to see her crack, she never cracks, they try something new.

a)The specific context of WHY you made this post is all the travis praise, thats why you referenced him in the tags

b) The “casual” example of accusing him of thinking of women as a whole is breeders…girl come on lol you chose this because you knew it would get people mad and engage on your posts.

a)The specific context of WHY you made this post is all the travis praise, thats why you referenced him in the tags

b) The “casual” example of accusing him of thinking of women as a whole is breeders…girl come on lol you chose this because you knew it would get people mad and engage on your posts.

Thank god he dumped her ass, its what that bitch deserves.