#jethrocane

i want you to know i hated this

you are repulsive, chicken granules

Yeah, I understand why you might feel that way, especially wrt like… capitalism…… since literally everything taylor does to further her career is on some level about that. like ultimately she wants to sell records and make money and she is definitely willing to, in a very calculated way, cultivate a sense of intimacy in her relationship with her fanbase as a way to get there. and it’s been wildly successful, that’s why she’s worth like $320 million or something absurd, and yeah of course that’s problematic in the way that it’s just… fundamentally immoral for any individual person to have that much wealth, same as any obscenely wealthy person who can afford to own a private jet and a dozen mansions around the world.

People have talked about this at length much more articulately than I can, and people have also talked a lot about corporations realizing that The Gays are a lucrative and, until recently, relatively untapped market and that we’ll buy anything if you put rainbows on it, so all these pride month campaigns are definitely hugely profitable for them. But the thing with that is like, even if they don’t actually ~care~ about us beyond our wallets (and honestly what does it even mean for a corporation in a capitalistic society to truly care about anything in a way that is divorced from some consideration of potential profitability?), I think it does still have some value for lgbt people to see things like that—to be visible, to realize that okay yes I guess we’re finally seen as valuable in some part at least because we’re a market that they can exploit for profit, but still we exist, and other people will know that we exist and we are valued (even in a fucked up capitalistic way).

BUT this is ALSO not entirely the same as art that includes lgbt symbolism and themes, since art has always been a form of expression and representation and political protest, and art that highlights the experience of coming out or just being an lgbt person in this world is empowering, even though in a lot of cases (e.g. hollywood, or taylor) there really is no such thing as “pure” art that can be entirely separate from art as a salable commodity. that’s just the way we have built our world, and it sucks, but that doesn’t mean we can’t take whatever good we can get out of it and choose to be empowered by that.

and there is still ANOTHER level that separates what taylor is doing from other forms of art that are more blatantly ‘capitalizing on the ~trend~ of lgbt representation’ or whatever… she’s not including one (1) potentially gay cameo for 10 seconds on screen in a movie and asking to be rewarded for that. yes, she is an enormous brand, but she isn’t a hollywood studio crafting a work of fiction based on market research re: what will appeal to different demographic quadrants. this is her life—she is the brand. if a hollywood studio creates a movie that includes something potentially ~controversial~ like a gay character, they’re relatively insulated from the backlash. sure, some old white people might get mad about it, but usually no one individual person behind that creative decision will suffer because of that. their decisions are entirely calculated based on weighing potential profits, they don’t really have anything at all to lose.

Taylor, on the other hand, does have something to lose. she is putting herself on the line, along with everything she has spent her entire life and career building. For one individual person to come out publicly, there is still a HUGE amount of risk involved, and the backlash and cost to her could be enormous in a way that it wouldn’t be for a corporation or a movie studio or other entities that are purely concerned with exploiting lgbt audiences for capital. the world at large still is wildly homophobic—you don’t even have to look beyond taylor’s own goddamn fandom here on tumblr dot com. and if all she were really concerned with was making money, trust me there are much easier ways to do that than by going through all this to capitalize on the coming out experience. Chely Wright came out less than 10 years ago, and she was shut out of the country music industry almost entirely overnight. And of course things are different now, but they’re not that different. Coming out is still a huge risk for anyone, and especially for someone like Taylor, who is potentially one of the most scrutinized and criticized women in the country. Like. people fucking hate her for literally everything she does; they want to find reasons to hate her. People will for sure accuse her of just trying to capitalize on that “lgbt trend,” or they’ll criticize her for lying in the past and using men as beards to further her career, and she has definitely thought of this.

So in the end, what makes it worth it is it’s not about all of that—the money or the publicity or her reputation or whatever—it’s about her. it’s about surviving, because hiding for so long is fucking painful and it eats away at your soul. And so she’s built her career up and constructed her fucking empire so that she can insulate herself from that potential backlash as well as she possibly can—the whole point of reputation was to prove that she could burn everything to the ground and come back again stronger than ever and still sell out stadiums and break every record there is—but that doesn’t mean this process is any easier; in fact, it only proves just how fucking difficult coming out is, even for someone who is as fucking powerful and seemingly insulated from harm as taylor swift. She had to do all this to make it safe for her to take the next steps.

this is honestly amazing