The limits of Taylor's power

Beauty is a beast that roars

Welcome to Swiftian Theory, a collaborative newsletter all about Taylor Swift. Writing for you today: Satu.

This week, Taylor went on her annual big night out to the VMAs. She loves going to this awards show and who can blame her: it’s her equivalent of being crowned prom queen, every single year. She took Jack, Margaret Qualley and Suki Waterhouse with her, and you can see their irrelevant ears peeping into all the shots of Taylor dancing. Swifties inspected her outfits for clues just like we always do, wondering if that tartan stripe was black enough to qualify as a Rep TV clue – the flying saucer beaded onto her Monse Maison dress indicates instead that Down Bad will be her next single (yay!)

The other big news was that Taylor endorsed Kamala Harris for president. Her statement was so Taylor: thoughtful and cheeky (reclaiming “Childless Cat Lady” was an all-time great TS moment) and unsurprising. Attempts to colour Taylor as a secret Trump voter or claim her for the far right have faltered. Taylor got lots of nice write-ups for encouraging people to vote but as always I think the discourse around her political activity is mostly plain wrong. She won’t win or lose this election for Kamala (unless she gives her a billion dollars I guess). Trump voters aren’t swayed by Taylor’s opinion on this, not even her own friends. I wouldn’t take Taylor’s opinion on the British democratic system into account when casting my own vote. For a start, I’m pretty sure someone with this many VMAs would be fine with our current “first past the post” system, when really we should consider proportional representation. There are just limits to Taylor’s power.

I was struck by these limits as I was staring devotedly at Taylor in her VMAs outfits. I loved the Dior tartan getup, and as Swiftian Theorist Kate says, quite enjoyed her “arm sandals”. Her clothes this past fortnight have suddenly, out of nowhere, been very sexy and womanly, by which I mean we’ve been seeing a hitherto unknown amount of Swiftian cleavage. I have been wondering when she’ll make the decision to part from the girlish skirts and prom dresses and step into the next phase. I know that for some people, especially country era fans, this is going to involve a form of grief. But the girly jig had to be up at some point. As Taylor knows full well, she is no longer 17. 

To say society has an uneasy relationship with the combination of time and women’s bodies is an understatement. The conversation around women’s insecurities about their looks is usually too boring and never-ending to indulge – yep well done on your 1g weight loss or whatever, seen any good movies lately? There’s a Taylor song on this topic that might help:

But this week the pressure played out across the face I spend more time contemplating than my own. Under a set of Taylor pictures on Deuxmoi, someone commented “is it just me or does Taylor suddenly look really hot?” and someone replied to say “it’s botox!” At first I was amused at the naivete of what I assume are very young commenters: sorry to disappoint, but a $200 shot of botox can’t magically turn you hot (now I’m imagining botox shots in the next teen movie makeover montage). I quickly leapt to the conclusion that they were responding to the new skintight corset looks Taylor is wearing, a tonal shift rather than a physical one.

But on the other hand, she has clearly had significant cosmetic work done. I’m not an expert but people say she has had fillers injected into her cheeks, jawline, lips… injections all over this familiar, beloved face. I kept looking closely, trying to spot where the change had occurred but it was all over. Choose your choice any everything but altering your face surgically is a kind of psychological death. I mean, it’s your face – it’s how other people know it’s you. Her clothes are training us to understand her as a sexy grown woman, not a winsome girly. But the facial fillers are an attempt to look younger, right? Cognitive dissonance descends and I become obsessed with understanding. I discussed with my Swiftie pals; I brought it up at galleries and parties. Everywhere I went, I forced the conversation into a hard left turn onto my new pet topic: why would you change your face? As you can tell from my dismissive attitude to people’s weight loss journeys above, I’ve been studiously avoiding what I see as a dry and tiresome topic for years. But I’d missed something deeply felt. Some people told me that they just hate their appearance fullstop and wish they could wave a magic wand and look totally different. Others feel anxiety about being photographed next to friends who have had work done. A couple of people claimed I’m in a minority for not having botox (the stats don’t bear this out, in fact it’s a small minority of people who have any kind of aesthetic intervention). I don’t want to plant in your head the idea that everyone in the world is agonising over their appearance – quite a few people also seemed mildly curious about the topic at best and didn’t reveal that they have a constant inner monologue that sounds like their mother telling them their body is bad and wrong. I found these conversations heartbreaking and exhausting. But most of all, they revealed an intersection between my two favourite topics. 1) Patriarchal oppression 2) Taylor Swift.

Via Youtube.

I ultimately don’t care what Taylor looks like, she’s welcome to sublime into a gas as long as she can still hold a guitar. It just makes me livid to imagine her looking in the mirror and thinking bad thoughts about her appearance, like my friends are apparently doing while I’ve been brushing off their concerns as somehow beneath me, as not political enough for my fine brain. And because celebrities move the (botox) needle (puke) on how we feel about ourselves, I also want to dispute that it’s a given that a younger and smoother face is better. What is beauty for if not to stir us emotionally and physically?

As Taylor’s favourite philosopher Aristotle would say, happiness is a goal in itself. People often talk about “hotness” like it’s also an end goal. The thinking stops there: hotness = good. But what does it actually get you – praise, validation, money, love? I have enormous respect for the canniness of little girls, because they have a real knack for seeing past what grownups claim they value to the stark realities beneath. This is why little girls want to be beautiful and marry a prince, but they also want a horse they can ride away on, and an ice castle to be alone in like Elsa. What little girls want is power. People often talk about women having “sexual power” when actually being conventionally hot just means you have access to different ways of having your looks exploited. Everyone who has ever been hot, or had a series of hot best friends (hi), knows that being a beautiful woman doesn’t get you very much power in reality. “What’s the point in being beautiful?”, I remember thinking as I watched my typically beautiful friends be mistreated by losers. But if you want to work in the entertainment industry, it’s a huge asset to be hot in the eyes of a 38 year old Nate or Oliver. That’s why popstar images still cater to male tastes even though it’s us who is listening to the music. They know we don’t really mind sexy images of girls because we walk this uneasy tightrope in our own lives every day. How much of our presentation is truly for ourselves and how much is for a mysterious scouring Sauron-like eye we must strike curious poses for every waking moment of our precious and finite lives?

[scream break]

In the past few days I’ve watched a bunch of movies and TV ranging from Jurassic Park: Dominion to the Vogue 1990s documentary. It’s not a new phenomenon that the majority of people over 40 had that balloon-like, immovable look to their face, but now I can’t unsee how everywhere it is. It’s gotten to the point where every movie and documentary feels like it’s populated by the unearthly Capitol citizens from the Hunger Games. A part of me thinks, youth is magical (and miserable) and it inevitably ends, just accept it? Alongside this, the total overhauls of actually young beauty icons like Kendall, Kylie, Bella Hadid etc have probably fucked up our normality compass beyond repair. These girls all look like a yassified fan edit of themselves, with big “foxy” eyes, ski jump noses, vacuum-pack effect bodies and chins shaved into points. A handful of old man surgeons in Hollywood are dictating what people all around the world think of as the pinnacle of beauty, probably their own mums in 1986. We’re all just trying to look like Donna from Sun Valley whose son grew up to be a successful surgeon and that would be screamingly funny if it hadn’t been iterated so many times it became a social norm that women talk about as if it’s been in place for 1000 years and is “just how it is”.

For a while now, I’ve had this feeling that although women are more independent and liberated than ever, it has coincided with the terrible triumph of the male gaze. “The male gaze” is a genius concept by filmmaker Laura Mulvey. She used it to describe the way that the movie camera is wielded by male filmmakers to objectify women. My guilty fave Alfred Hitchcock is a classic example, the camera itself feels pervy in his movies as it lingers on a full-body shot of another blonde. Our brains are consuming so many filtered TikToks and Jurassic Park: Dominions that we now look with the male gaze ourselves. The beauty standard gets enforced by not just your mum and one potential boyfriend, but a million people pressing like. Even the compliments act as a means of shepherding you in the right direction, reinforcing how good you look!! but only when you match the image in their head closely enough.

If you’re looking in the mirror and thinking you should be thinner or younger, you’re looking at yourself through Sauron eyes and as I know from The Rings of Power, Sauron is a guy, or sometimes a mass of black spaghetti. Women get too much flak for enforcing the beauty standard. Mothers and grandmothers were rational in trying to get you to maximise your appearance for the marriage market in a world that legally paid them less for the same work and patted their bum while asking if they were going to make the tea. They’re not more to blame than the men who actually benefit from the system. It’s 38 year old Nate who you met on Hinge. Although it’s much easier to reject this rigmarole when you have your own money, not even Taylor is more powerful than this system, it turns out.

How the eye of Sauron wishes Taylor looked. The work of Reddit user WildCardP3P.

It’s bitterly ironic to me that the male gaze has had this effect on Taylor, the world’s premiere poet of female subjectivity. The new facial fillers reveal anxieties about her appearance that ultimately no amount of money or female fan devotion can alleviate. The Red vault track ‘Nothing New’ showed that in her 20s, she was already worried about being replaced by new popstars with “the kind of radiance you only have at 17”. In ‘Clara Bow’ from The Tortured Poets Department, she gets into it more structurally, from the perspective of a woman now in her 30s: “Beauty is a beast that roars / Down on all fours / Demanding more / Only when your girlish glow / Flickers just so / Do they let you know.” Being beautiful is a double-edged sword: when you get older and a crucial component starts to go away, it reveals that you never had “power” at all. The person who does the looking and deciding has the power, not the object. That’s why we love Taylor’s female perspective. When do we ever get movies or music that makes us the ones who look, who hold the camera, who get to decide what’s worth lingering over?

A more worldly fellow Swiftian Theorist hit me with the devastating assertion that all of Taylor’s exes have since gotten together with younger women, in the classic way of famous men, who are apparently dead to the Freudian implications of dating women the same age as the daughters they had with their starter wife. Thrilled at the chance to hate Taylor’s exes in a new way, I crunched the numbers. In descending order of current age gap status:

• John Mayer is 46. His rumoured girlfriend Kiernan Shipka is 24.

• Jake Gyllenhaal is 43. His girlfriend Jeanne Cadieu is 28.

• Matty Healy is 35. His fiancee Gabriette is 27.

• Calvin Harris is 40. His wife Vick Hope is 34.

• Taylor Lautner is 33. His wife, the other Taylor Lautner, is 27.

• Tom Hiddleston is 43. His wife Zawe Ashton is 40.

• Whichever Jonas it was is 35. His current girlfriend Stormi Bree is 33.

• Harry Styles, prince among men, is 30. He recently split from his girlfriend Taylor Russell, who is also 30.

And for good measure:

• Jack Antonoff is 40. His wife Margaret Qualley is 29.

Some of these age gaps are so small they’re basically immaterial but it’s true that every female partner is younger and it’s this pattern that gives women the heebie-jeebies. Do we age out of being loveable while our male peers date diagonally down the age groups? Who are younger men dating, teenage girls? Who are teenage boys dating, no one? Is this why we have so many incels?

I understand why Taylor alters her appearance. We know she’s highly aware of the impact turning 35 could have on her career. She said in Miss Americana “We do exist in this society where women in entertainment are discarded in an elephant graveyard by the time they're 35. As I'm reaching 30, I'm like, I want to work really hard while society is still tolerating me being successful”. She’s smart. She’s aware of the rules and how to play by them in order to win big. I was discussing Sabrina Carpenter with a friend who used to work in the music industry and she put it plainly:

it’s not about the individual, it’s about the global system, they are a product being marketed to a mass audience which is going to use the thing that will best reach the most amount of people. She is not going to be like ‘no make me less sexy make me less male fantasy’. An individual petite blonde is not to blame for what the petite blonde represents on a macro level.

Obviously give this friend the Women’s Prize for Non-fiction for stating what it has taken me this many words to wrap my head around. My centrist queen is doing what she needs to in order to retain her mass appeal. But as ordinary people, it’s okay not to get Jurassic World: Dominion face. If we can ignore Taylor at the ballot box, we can ignore her at the aesthetician’s office.

The one thing I wish I could convey to my friends, among whom I count Taylor Swift, is how their beauty makes me feel. If I had Taylor’s way with words, I think I could single-handedly abolish the botox industry. It’s basically this, in a platonic way: “there’s a dazzling haze, a mysterious way about you dear / Have I know you twenty seconds, or twenty years?” I can’t wait to sing that line to Taylor on her next tour, when I’ll have been listening to her music for two whole decades. When I look at Taylor’s face, my heart lights up. She reminds me of thousands of moments of joy, of comfort, of fun times with my friends and lyrics so good I’m tempted to get them as tattoos on my skin, which will just keep getting more wrinkly as time goes on. I know for a fact I’ll still feel all these powerful emotions when I look at her at age 80. The pursuit of hotness is the pursuit of power, and of course I want her to gain as much power as she can. I just wish she already, truly, had it.