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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   31757 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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Taylor Swift seems, to my limited knowledge, to have navigated the problem of getting older and remaining popular/a star without resorting to the "oops, all my clothes fell off!" stage.

Look at Pink, who was big, and now is not so big. She, too, went through the "yeah I'm empowered" unconventional fashion choices. She's still touring but is not, I think, as relevant as she was; her audience is getting older along with her. They're loyal, but the 20 year olds aren't flocking to her (if I'm wrong, please correct me). Whereas Swift seems to have managed to get those 20 year olds to be her audience as well.

Look, I don't think pop stars are very smart, and the managers and record producers do tend to older guys. See the 80s line of manufactured boy bands and girl singers churned out by the likes of Stock, Aitken and Waterman as songwriters/producers. And I do think that the career trajectory for the disposable pop girly does go through the "slutty is empowered" stage on the way to "you're 30 or older now, the teenagers aren't buying your records any more, the exit is that way" ending, because Sex Sells and 50 year old men know that hot slutty 20 year old girls will get press attention and publicity, and even better if it can be sold on the back of fake feminism.

Whereas Swift seems to have managed to get those 20 year olds to be her audience as well.

Taylor Swift is kind of sui generis because she’s the last mega-celebrity that the mono-culture ever produced. She got in right under the line, just before social media fractured the attention economy into a million little bubbles. I don’t think it’s possible for any new pop star today to reach that level of name recognition.

I don't think Taylor Swift or Pink ever had an early good modest girl image though.

Taylor Swifts early image was 1000% good girl modest. You could argue that her audience was trivial compared to what it is now, and that would be true, but it's unmistakable that she was a polite good girl country singer first.

Polite, yes. Country girl, yes. Modestly dressed, sure (back then, that is). Going through a string of guys, presumably sleeping with them at least once? Absolutely.

Taylor swift started out with(and still makes money off of) a ‘girl next door’ vibe which is close enough.

See my reply to FiveHourMarathon below.

Pink is kind of unusual in that she started with a highly sexualized aggressively edgy punk style and then in the mid 2010s aggressively pivoted to much more middle of the road family friendly pop-banger mileu.

Have you ever heard the song, “You Belong With Me”?

You're on the phone with your girlfriend, she's upset

She's going off about something that you said

'Cause she doesn't get your humor like I do

I'm in the room, it's a typical Tuesday night

I'm listening to the kind of music she doesn't like

And she'll never know your story like I do

But she wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts

She's Cheer Captain, and I'm on the bleachers

Dreaming about the day when you wake up and find

That what you're looking for has been here the whole time

If you could see that I'm the one who understands you

Been here all along, so why can't you see?

You belong with me, you belong with me

Walk in the streets with you in your worn-out jeans

I can't help thinking this is how it ought to be

Laughing on a park bench, thinking to myself

"Hey, isn't this easy?"

It’s hardly even subtext. It’s just text.

That is the female equivalent of the Nice Guy: I'm Not Like Other Girls. Both of them complaining about being friend-zoned and when will the object of their obsession wake up and realise that the partner they're currently with is wrong for them and if they'd only just look at me, they'd see how much I love them, and how good I'd be to them.

Someone quoted a song by a male artist which was about "that jerk beats her up, why does she stay with him, she should leave him for me" and it's the same energy.

Pink no, but that was Taylor's whole thing. Kinda still is.

Quoting two comments from a Manosphere blog in 2012:

If you've ben following along, since Swift became "legal", she's been riding the carousel with abandon, going through men like water and using them as fodder for her songs. This is the essence of her popularity -- not purity, far from it, but because she writes about her real experiences riding the alpha carousel, and other women her age range (let's cast that net broadly at 15-30) relate to what she is singing very much.

It's hard to call her a slut, really, because she represents the new normal for women her age. Now granted she is far, far prettier than normal (she has truly model-level looks and would have clearly been a quasi-supermodel (or a full-blown one) had she not been musically talented. And I don't think her "innocence" schtick was an act, either -- I think, again, it reflects the mindset of many women in that age swipe who see themselves as being fundamentally innocent yet very sexually active -- which is the way Swift portrays herself.

In short Taylor Swift is the poster girl for the contemporary young woman -- a very supermodel-ish poster gitl, to be sure, but her popularity among her female fans (who are the overwhelming majority of her fanbase) has to do with her singing about experiences that are similar to their own, which has been the case for many of her songs, not just this one. This is the first big one about a ONS with an alpha, whereas the others have been about serial monogamy with alphas, but, as Dalrock points out well, these are really two sides of the same coin, and the former is something that most women who are doing the latter engage in a couple of times (or more, for some).

See, I don't think that the culture in general considers young women who have an occasional "it just happened" animal attraction ONS to be sluts. Nice girls do this, and remain nice girls as long as they don't do it regularly. That is, as long as the ratio is 70%+ serial monogamy and 30% or less animal attraction ONSs, your "nice girl card" isn't revoked. Taylor Swift is still a nice girl, therefore, who has the occasional ONS, and writes about it (just like she writes about her serial monogamy stuff with alpha males).

She's still not a slut, really. A slut is Ke$ha, not Taylor Swift. The threshold for sluthood is very high in this culture, which means Swift can still be a nice girl and engage in occasional promiscuous behavior -- because in 2012 that's what nice girls do. As long as a certain threshold isn't passed, she's still a nice girl and not a slut -- like Taylor Swift. And a huge proportion of 15-30 age women relate 100% to this.

So...yeah. According to the "new normal", she isn't a slut per se.

And of course men never went through a series of women as muses, and engaged in serial monogamy? That's the double standard in action: I am a man of the world, experienced and tempered by time and wisdom, who has loved many women but never been tied down by one. She is a slut riding the alpha carousel.

Men who say such things about themselves rather pointedly don't care to cultivate an image of themselves as dutiful, modest (boring) family men.

Odd that they consider her so attractive. De gustibus non est disputandum I guess? But I'm going to anyway: a big part of Swift's success is that she isn't that hot. She's good looking, but she's the exact level and type of woman where most women within one standard deviation of the median can relate to her. She's built like a romance novel protagonist, like a hollywood version of an everywoman.

I'm not going to fundamentally disagree but I ask you to consider what % of women "within one standard deviation of the median" are fat or frumpy.

A huge portion, that's sort of what median means.

But Swift isn't a Sydney Sweeney or a Margot Robbie or a Marilyn Monroe, or a Britney Spears or a Madonna in music, a gorgeous and unattainable figure of perfection who men want and women want to be. I don't think her schtick would work if she were that hot.

Swift is above average, but at her most made up, she's still built like an ironing board with no sexual charisma.

True. I'll point out though that, to refer back to the comment I quoted, were it fashion modeling that she set out to do instead of pop music, she's certainly tall and slim enough for it.

Modeling is a whole nother kettle of fish on this one. I'd need to tag in Mrs. FiveHour to dissect it properly, but fashion models have shifted from hot to "interesting" a long time ago.

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