Women Marrying Men is Normal

Taylor Swift's engagement shouldn't be shocking or political.

In case you’re a conservative from 2004, and you saw the title of this article and got excited that I was going to go on a screed about how “it’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” I regret to inform you this is about a topic you probably don’t find compelling: billionaire pop star Taylor Swift got engaged to her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, a hunky football player whose IQ is matched only by his height in inches.

I actually don’t really care about this. I like Taylor Swift and her music, but I wasn’t going to write about it because I didn’t feel like I could say anything new about it. Like the torso guy, this was one of those topics where people kept asking for my “take” on Twitter. At first, I didn’t have a take, specifically because I didn’t think it was that surprising or interesting that a woman in her thirties who has been dating a man for two years would eventually get engaged to him. Yes, he’s a bit of an oafish himbo and she’s a world-famous music sensation, but it’s certainly no crazier than plenty of other pop culture moments. This wasn’t “Will Smith slaps Chris Rock” tier. It didn’t even come close to “Trump gets COVID” tier (you had to be there.)

I assumed everyone, except perhaps the niche community of “Gaylors” (people who are convinced that Taylor Swift is a lesbian and that her continually dating men and writing songs about men is but a crypto-sapphic ruse) didn’t think much of the engagement aside from the typical “celebrity gossip” type stuff. For example: ooh, pretty/ugly ring. Ooh, hope they got a prenup! Ooh, they’ll have tall kids! Bla bla bla. And don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of that. But some people have taken a relatively unsurprising thing and turned it into something far more serious and political than it needs to be.

For one, there was a Substack post called A Dark Day for Smart Women about how Taylor Swift ultimately choosing marriage is surprising and upsetting because the intellectual feminists of the world expected better of her. (Tyra Banks voice: I was rooting for you! WE WERE ALL ROOTING FOR YOU!) I’m not here to trash the author of the piece (she is a good writer and I know nothing about her as a human being, I just disagree with the article.) I encourage you to read the whole thing, but toward the beginning of the article, she says this:

I acknowledge Taylor Swift gets to make her own choices and I am very happy for her as a person. But I’m sad for us as a culture. Celebrities don’t just live their own lives; they perform symbolic labor for the rest of us. They model what futures might look like, what choices are available, and which stories still carry cultural legitimacy.

Granted, this is just one person on Substack. Maybe I’m doing the thing people always criticize me for doing—looking online to find wacky opinions that “everyone” knows are wrong and then refuting them because I’m only slightly less insane. But I don’t know how fringe or wacky this is. I think a lot of people actually feel this way, even if they don’t say it so bluntly. And when you view people as projections of your own political views or biases, it can be really shocking and upsetting when they do normal things that you didn’t imagine them doing.