Taylor Swift, Feminist Heroine and Human Idol

Back in the day, in a time before time, young girls swooned over heartthrob male entertainers. They formed cults to Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and the Beatles. They professed undying love to the objects of their adolescent lust, but eventually outgrew their infatuations. It has something to do with putting away the toys of childhood.

Today’s young women, however, no longer become hysterical at the feet of guitar heroes. They are going positively berserk over a young woman named Taylor Swift. The phenomenon has even generated a huge amount of economic activity, from ticket sales, hotel rooms and other assorted merchandise. 

If you thought that today’s American girls were disempowered and oppressed, they are flexing their wallets over Taylor Swift.

New York Times feminist Michelle Goldberg thrills to it all-- and especially to a world without men. She sees it as the triumph of the revolution. She comments on Swift's Eras tour:

Eras is set to become the highest-grossing musical tour in history, boosting the economy of the cities in which Swift alights. More than just a series of concerts, it’s become, like Barbie, a major cultural event, with fans also showing up in carefully curated outfits and then making TikToks of their ecstatic tears. 

As you doubtless know, Swift defines a girls’ world, a world where men are an unnecessary encumbrance. This means that I, for one, do not belong to the demographic that tunes in to Taylor Swift. She represents a woman who does not need men to define her. She is independent, autonomous, authentic and rich. As best I can tell, her music is undistinguished. Bob Dylan she is not.

It's more about what she is than about what she does. By the terms of feminist ideology, she is what women would become if they had not been trying to please men, and if they had not been not been defining themselves in relation to men. 

Swifties are not mooning over men in the high school corridors. They are not worrying about getting a date for the prom. They do not need men, except for the occasional hookup. 

Taylor Swift is a human icon, an idol, supremely wealthy and manifestly cool. The only problem is that she is most often alone. That is, she is unattached, lacking in male companionship.

True enough, she has often been linked to various men, most of whom never stayed around for very long. She has been writing music about her breakups, about rejecting or being rejected. It is almost her signature. Girls love these songs, because if you are a budding feminist, being alone and unattached is very likely going to be your destiny.

Fair enough, if a 33 year-old Taylor Swift wants to hook up, more than a few young men will volunteer for duty. Then again, we ought all to know that it is no great challenge to find a man who is willing to hook up with a comely young lass. Developing a relationship, getting married, having a stable home life-- when young men think in those terms they do not think of Taylor Swift.

Whereas Michelle Goldberg continues to denounce the patriarchy and foment the revolution, nothing really spells female empowerment than the Taylor Swift phenomenon. 

But, Swift also spells the failure of boys and girls to get along, to develop relationships, to settle down. Feminism has won, you might say, and Taylor Swift is the face of victorious feminism. 

We can say the same of Greta Gehrwig’s enormously successful film about Barbie. 

One suspects that in the feminist mind, Taylor Swift cannot sustain a relationship with a boy or even a man because the patriarchy thinks ill of her independent autonomous spirit.

And yet, we live in a world where women are increasingly empowered. More and more television shows have turned into feminist fairy tales. You need but look through the Netflix catalog. To choose a show at random, check out the new British detective show, Karen Pirie. 

It is no longer possible to find a show that does not promote feminist ideology-- strong women, women in charge, women committing crimes, women underestimated by men, women solving problems. In nearly all of these shows the strong empowered female characters are also irresistible to men, regardless of their age or their appearance. If feminists told young women that the cost of joining the vanguard of the revolution is loneliness, they would have a more difficult time selling their ideology.

The age of the strong male lead seems to have ended. One does not want to make too much of it, but J. Robert Oppenheimer counts as a male lead whose work does not involve women. Whatever he did in his private life, Oppenheimer did not recruit females for the Manhattan Project.

Naturally, as a new age of female empowerment dawns, the Michelle Goldberg’s are still suffering from chronic discontent. They are awaiting the Revolution, mindlessly, one must say, since the twentieth century-- it was not too long ago-- saw a sustained effort to translate leftist ideology into governance and political economy. The result was one of the most colossal failures in human history. Communism only excelled in producing mass starvation.

For all its talk about political economy feminism seems more dedicated to producing a world where men will not want to marry women who might be good wives, but where they will want to marry women like Taylor Swift.

As of now, the net consequence of the feminist rebellion against traditional marital customs has been far too many broken and fatherless homes.

Women have learned to seek independence and autonomy, but they will especially fulfill a longstanding feminist wish, articulated by none other than Friedrich Engels, in his book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

The Engels goal is a woman who has her own fortune, who does not depend on a man financially and thus who will be loved for herself alone. In reality, men are often happy to hook up with such women-- the hook-up culture is an unfortunate excrescence of feminist agitation. Very few men will turn down free love.

But, very few men are looking to marry a human idol, a woman who has become the role model for independence and autonomy, who does not need a man for much of anything beyond the occasional hookup. To the male mind, a woman who does not need a man to protect and provide for her is not wife material.