shining just for you

my top artists of 2024

It exists in a world where a joke about bringing a nail gun to the Eras tour to shoot fans gets 400k likes on TikTok, or where a reel about crashing a plane full of Swifties gets 200k likes on Instagram. It exists in a world where, on this very website, the one that promotes itself as rational and reasonable, someone says that "Taylor Swift and her fans should all die violent horrible deaths" and people applauded it. It exists in a world where, during TTPD release week men were in Swifties' comment sections declaring they would beat their daughters and girlfriends if they ever so much as listened to one of her albums. And it exists in a world where this week, fans of a TV show (which I will not name because that is not the point) sent death threats to a girl on Twitter for daring to be a fan of both their beloved show and Taylor Swift.

I don't give a fuck what your opinion of Taylor Swift is. I don't care if you think her music is grating, I don't care if you think she is the worst thing to happen to humanity since Eve ate the god damn apple. This is the dark side of stan culture that no-one talks about; where dislike of an artist becomes so obsessive that it becomes normal, even funny, to joke about killing their fans, because "it's just online, it's just a joke". It isn't. It is rarely ever "just online".

And yes I am going to be That Person and say that you can complain about Swift's brand of feminism and debate her position as a feminist icon all day long, at the end of the day, her name is still synonymous with girls. It doesn't take a genius to work out who this event was geared at.

I am not going to sit and claim that by simply not liking Taylor Swift you directly caused this. I would encourage you to step back, look at the bigger picture of stan culture, including obsessive dislike of an artist, and ask yourself how much this culture has enabled this. If making jokes on tiktok about killing someone over a pop star is normalised, how much of a leap is it to attacking kids with a knife at a fan event?

you don't get to demand ANYTHING of a woman who is stalked by deranged men so frequently that it's a regular occurrence to her team. a woman who the entire fucking internet has deemed it appropriate to make tweets and tiktoks calling for murdering her or her fans on a daily basis. i've seen posts get hundreds of thousands of likes calling for "exterminating Swifties," videos with millions of views with a picture of a utopia and the caption "society if Taylor Swift was publicly executed," quote tweets TODAY of the news article about the attack making fun of it with stupid reaction memes and gifs.

surprise! calling for violence towards a woman and her overwhelmingly female audience results in actual violence! this shit is not a coincidence and it doesn't exist in vacuum. the internet has made it acceptable to make a target out of Taylor and her fans, it has made it "cool" and "funny" even. and when the artist in question is a woman who's synonymous with femininity and girls and being the default artist of women misogynists call "basic bitches" then this automatically becomes GENDERED violence towards women and girls. the people committing these horrifying acts KNOW that the vast majority of their victims would be women and girls.

taylorswift: The Eras Tour has brought so many firsts with it… for example, I’d never been to Switzerland before. This place is stunningly beautiful and I loved playing for those 2 wonderful crowds in Zurich. Pretty wild to think we only have 7 cities left on the European leg of the tour. Up next is a city I’ve been looking forward to playing for so long: Milan!! 🇮🇹