#darkbluetennessee

I don't mean to hijack @taylorswiftstyle's post and this is probably a different tangent and also not even fully formed but I have it in my head that a lot of the discourse about "privacy" is people conflating something they just personally don't care for with some sort of moral failing or gaucheness on the part of those they're judging. Like, people have lost the ability to say "that's not for me" and move on. Instead, every fucking thing becomes a thinkpiece about "this is wrong or unsavoury and here are reasons x, y and z why." It was never that serious, my dudes!

But I also have a half-brained thought about how it's also a reflection of the surveillance culture of the modern internet age and younger generations growing up being perceived online and therefore somehow confusing like, media coverage of a celebrity living their life with them and their friends sharing every moment of their day on tiktok or whatever. It's a very "old man yelling at clouds" rant from me and again it's not even fully formed in my head.

And then there's yet another tangent about how it's yet another thing people weaponize to try to put people like Taylor in their place. Taylor is the biggest star in the world, she's rich beyond belief, she commands attention without ever asking for it (and even more so when she does), and like it or not everyone is seated when she moves. So somehow, it's been spun that her every move being tracked on camera is her own moral failing, and is used as the stick by which some people measure every other celebrity or every other person, really.

Like the whole comparison between let's say, Taylor and Travis and Tom and Zendaya. Commenters have been praising Tom and Zendaya for keeping their wedding private and not confirming it themselves for like six months or whatever it was, whereas the same people might turn around and blast Taylor and Travis for the "spectacle" of their wedding. So firstly discounting that they're different couples with different preferences, and next discounting that again, the fame gap between the two isn't even comparable (I'm sorry, it just isn't)--imo Tom and Zendaya, for example, really aren't any more private than Taylor and Travis.

Sure, they seemingly had a tiny wedding that flew under the radar (good for them!), but they still had people talking about it FOR MONTHS. They didn't confirm their wedding, but people around them (e.g. Law Roach) did for them. Zendaya started wearing her wedding band. Tom finally confirmed it during their current press tour. THEY'RE ON A PRESS TOUR FOR A MOVIE THEY DID TOGETHER. Good for them for keeping everything as tight-lipped as they wanted, but really, we don't know that much more about Taylor and Travis' personal life as we do Tom and Zendaya's, but somehow they have become the paragon of "privacy" (read: some sort of weird internet moral purity) whereas Taylor and Travis are tacky or fame-hungry or whatever.

(also having people "tease" the engagement/wedding without coming out and saying it is its own form of publicity imo but that's a whole other conversation. And again I'm not saying this to judge one couple or another, I'm just using it as the example that I've seen most often used as a mirror to Taylor.)

People just have a really warped view of what privacy means and seems like, on a global scale, have started conflating privacy with secrecy. And that's the whole thing Taylor has pushed back against since 2023. There's a very good reason for it, which we don't need to get into here, but it's clear it's an issue that was weaponized for her for a long time and I think there's a growing trend of that in general in online spaces. Whether it's lack of critical thinking or social media rotting people's brains or the surveillance state being omnipresent and omnipotent, I don't know, but it's just a really weird evolution of modern-day society.

Kinda got influenced by watching the Werwulf trailer a billion times.