Fuck the patriarchy, not Scooter, Ye, or Scott Swift
Taylor's friends, foes, and family are a cast of actors and Taylor Swift is the author and director
(this is just my theory as a person on the internet who writes essays about Gaylor and anti-patriarchal performance art...please be nice and remember that even if I am wrong or you disagree, its good to talk about the patriarchy!!)
In March, Taylor Swift accepted the Artist of the Year award at the 2026 IHeartRadio Music Awards and used her speech to advise artists to take time, in private, to hone their craft. She told the crowd that “anything you feed the internet, it will attempt to kill”, and that she had spent thousands of hours, in private, working at her craft.
In her bait-and-switch fashion, she then ended by thanking Travis Kelce, and saying that he was the reason she was now able to feel so free and confident in her work.
Given the message of The Fate of Ophelia, I interpreted this as Taylor Swift thanking herself for having the space to hone her craft. This also supports my theory that, throughout Taylor’s work, she has used her muses to represent parts of herself. She is, obviously, the director that guarded her private life with the story/circus she has told/performed for 2 decades, while she was honing her power (and her true self was alone in her tower, stranded), not Travis Kelce, even if he is one of the most recent examples of said circus.
In Taylor Swift’s Time Person of the Year Interview in 2023, it said:
“This was the year she perfected her craft—not just with her music, but in her position as the master storyteller of the modern era."
Could this be telling us that everything has been a story? Otherwise, Taylor Swift never would have had the opportunity to grow up and have a normal life, apart from her celebrity. Not just to hone her craft (which she JUST accomplished, not when she was 12), but to just exist, to mature, to be messy.
Even her very first song, of her very first album, Tim McGraw, appears to tell the story of her performance art journey from beginning to after it’s reveal. This would, I believe, include her biggest villains, family, and muses.
I want to say some things first about performance art...none of this happened except how everyone has reacted to it.
Taylor Swift told us many, many, times that the “slide shows” of pictures the internet uses to back the “paternity” theories for her songs, will all be wrong. This includes people like her dad, Scooter Braun, Kanye West, and Karlie Kloss.
She has also told us that any attention - including negative - in her industry, is affection. In The Release Party of a Showgirl, she says this when discussing the song “Actually Romantic,” a song that many speculated was about Charlie xcx.
Even more importantly, she has made it very clear that we only see and know what she wants us to. Which means that if these pictures match up with these stories we are telling ourselves, it is intentional, and that it IS in fact, one of the stories she is telling us. Where we, as readers, need to take the next steps, when interpreting art, is to think deeper about that story.
The question isn’t “Can I separate the art from the artist?” because this implies that you know anything real about “the artist.” If you are interpreting anything through the lense of “performance art,” there isn’t anything to separate, it’s just simply a performance.
We need to ask ourselves: What message is this story sending? What other pieces of literature - from Shakespeare to pop music - might this be referencing to tell a deeper story?
And then, because most artists do not own their own work or the channels through which they distribute them on: Who benefits from this message? Is this a message that more broadly benefits women or one that more broadly benefits the patriarchy?
(The reason that I think Gaylor and the New Romantics are such a fuck you to the patriarchy, is that ALL art is and always has been political. Once you start asking yourselves these questions, even artists who have been censored can tell their stories, because you start looking for the deeper message.)
And last, what might my interpretation of this art say about me? For example: why am I so resistant to the idea that Taylor Swift could be a lesbian? Why did it only take a few pap-walks for me to create an entire relationship with Matty Healy in my head, but I denied her relationship with Karlie Kloss? Why do I want Taylor Swift to want to get married so badly? Just a few examples!
This is, after all, what most people interpret the song “mirrorball” to be referencing, on some level. We project some things about ourselves onto people that we do not know. This is also part of the “play within a play,” device that is famously used by Shakespeare. Remember when Sydney Sweeney (as Cassie) asked during Euphoria “Is this play about us?”
So, with those things in mind, if Taylor Swift is telling us a story about being a closeted artist, here is a brief outline of that story:
- Taylor Swift and her family moved to Nashville when she was 14 so that she could begin a career as a country singer/songwriter.
- Taylor Swift wrote six highly successful albums under her first label, Big Machine records. Early on we begin to see her date in the public eye with high profile celebrities (John Mayer, etc). She also, at 19, begins her feud with Kanye West, after getting interrupted at the 2009 VMAs.
- After Taylor’s 4th album, Red, she moves to New York City and fully crosses over into pop for her 5th album, 1989 (“Where you can want who you want, boys and boys and girls and girls.”) This is also when she begins loudly flagging a secret relationship with Karlie Kloss.
- Next, Taylor Swift gets “cancelled” after the “Famous” scandal with Kanye and Kim Kardashian, disappears, and then releases reputation. She also begins her long-term, 6-year, extremely private relationship with actor, Joe Alwyn.
- Then, after Taylor satisfies her 6-record contract with Big Machine records, she releases Lover, her first record with her new label, where she is given “full creative freedom.” She also releases Miss Americana and the entire Lover album and era is defined by a rainbow/queer pride aesthetic, causing MANY to speculate that she is planning on coming out at 2019 Pride.
- The day of the World Pride March that many speculated would be the day Taylor came out, she announced that Scooter Braun had purchased the master recordings of her first six albums. She described him as a manipulative, incessant, bully. After this, the rainbow aesthetics of the Lover era vanished. She performed “Lover Live in Paris,” completely dressed in black.
- And then? It brings us to now, this era, when she defeats these villains, and buys back her work. A real journey!!!! And she has the prince!
At the beginning of this year, I posted an essay here about The Life of a Showgirl. In this essay, I explained how all 12 songs lined up with a stage of the 12-part hero’s journey, and that I believe she is telling the story of how her entire career, her entire battle, has been to fight the patriarchy, along with the rest of the “New Romantics.”
This story details how the patriarchy uses artists and entertainers to distract, control, and divide our communities while simultaneously exploiting and controlling these same artists and entertainers.
Before I rewind and discuss the role of Ye, Scooter, and Scott Swift in Taylor’s story from the beginning, I want to start with defining the era that I think we are in, that I believe is coming to a close (very) soon. I am going to call it “The Showgirl Era,” because I believe it’s the era of her “burn it down” performance that revolves around her re-recordings, TNT/Travis Kelce, and The Eras Tour.
This is also why I think that Taylor’s Time Person of the Year article is going to be an important piece of literature for years to come - I believe that it (in Taylor Swift style, with metaphor and poetry and literary references) explains her entire mission and why. This is why she mentions her two biggest bullies (Ye and Scooter) directly - they do not represent the actual villains she has worked so hard to defeat, they represent the patriarchy and the ways in which it harms women (and artists..and queer artists…and literally everyone).
Pat McGrath, Taylor’s makeup artist, has also confirmed that Midnights is when the “Showgirl” debuted, during the music video for “Bejeweled,” which, as many have pointed out, shows Taylor Swift winning the prize (by being a Showgirl!) and “ghosting the prince.”
Appropriately, this album that kicked off this era also featured Taylor Swift holding a lighter, and The Life of a Showgirl (which will end it) along with her engagement to Travis Kelce, have been paired with the flaming heart emoji and the dynamite emoji.
Midnights also begins with a song about hiding and ends with either “Mastermind” or “Dear Reader,” depending on the version. Mastermind tells the story of Taylor pulling off a Master plot (duh) and “Dear Reader,” instructs readers to “burn all of the past files.”
At the beginning of the Eras tour, when she kicked off all of the scandal (breaking up with Joe, Matty Healy, etc) Taylor glitched out her website, with the word red herring. This is defined as a “piece of information, argument, or literary device that is deliberately misleading or distracting from the actual issue at hand.”
In my essay about Mine and All Too Well I actually wrote about how she has used red to describe the impact of the patriarchy or maybe even the patriarchy itself - which is why I also find it extremely exciting that I am writing this essay about how the LITERAL largest villains in Taylor’s story are ACTUAL “red herrings” for THE PATRIARCHY. (as well as Scott Swift, her “patriarch.”)
When announcing her engagement to Travis Kelce, Taylor also referred to herself as an “English Teacher,” (which is also appropriate considering the first time that she teased lyrics from Midnights was during her speech at NYU when she accepted her honorary PhD). This is because she has used all of her art (interviews, album forwards, documentaries, etc) to give readers clues for how to interpret her work, and literature overall.
I wrote about this in my Life of a Showgirl essay, but one example of this was when Taylor told us during the POTY interview that she gave up drinking. This is one of many times that she has given clues to signal that she uses alcohol throughout her work to reference Lies/PR.
"she also stopped drinking. “Doing that show with a hangover,” she says ominously. “I don’t want to know that world.”
However, famously (loudly) Taylor Swift was seen at many Chief’s games during the tour, every time, drink in hand.
In her POTY interview, when referencing her two great villains, this is what she says:
“there’s a dramatic irony, she explains, to the success of the tour. “It’s not lost on me that the two great catalysts for this happening were two horrendous things that happened to me,” Swift says, and this is where the story takes a turn. “The first was getting canceled within an inch of my life and sanity,” she says plainly. “The second was having my life’s work taken away from me by someone who hates me.”
If this tour can be used more widely to tell the story of Taylor Swift’s career (it is after all, The Eras Tour), she just said that the catalysts for all of it happening were Scooter Braun and Kanye West.
So, if Scooter and Ye represent the patriarchy, and they are actors, what is this story about?
Artists have to stay closeted (among other restrictions on creative freedom) as long as they do not own their work, and the industry (and the patriarchy) bullies and abuses women, and punishes women if they try to speak out.
These two men, in a story that every single person and their grandmother knows, concisely and explicitly demonstrate this in the story of Taylor Swift.
The POTY interview describes her ability to craft this story appropriately:
"Yet over time, she has harnessed the power of the media, both traditional and new, to create something wholly unique—a narrative world, in which her music is just one piece in an interactive, shape-shifting story. Swift is that story’s architect and hero, protagonist and narrator."
Interestingly, in an interview that focuses on the incredible storytelling ability of Taylor Swift, it starts with a story. A story about alcohol. She tells the story of having agreed to open for Kenny Chesney’s tour and then coming home to find her mom crying because she could no longer do the tour. This was because she was not yet 18 and the tour was to be sponsored by a beer company. She was devastated. However, there was a silver lining:
"But some months later, at Swift’s 18th birthday party, she saw Chesney’s promoter. He handed her a card from Chesney that read, as Swift recalls, “I’m sorry that you couldn’t come on the tour, so I wanted to make it up to you.” With the note was a check. “It was for more money than I’d ever seen in my life,” Swift says. “I was able to pay my band bonuses. I was able to pay for my tour buses. I was able to fuel my dreams.”"
So Taylor Swift wasn’t yet old enough to be on a tour being sponsored and funded by alcohol. However, the promoter made it up to Taylor by providing her with enough money to fund her dreams.
And then, not long after, she was old enough to metaphorically get drunk on her own…and if alcohol does represent her PR….well, we know that is a tool Taylor Swift is not only not a stranger to, but most would say an expert in, as I (and the POTY interviewer) continue to note.
If alcohol is PR, some could say she is somewhat of a professional drinker.
Taylor Swift also discussed what fuels not just the music industry, but the entire “patriarchal society” in her POTY interview as well, which was the same thing “Kenny Chesney” gifted her with: money.
“And what has existed since the dawn of time? A patriarchal society. What fuels a patriarchal society? Money, flow of revenue, the economy. “
Say whatever you want to about Ye’s entire, extremely controversial career, he has been profitable. So has Scooter Braun. And so is Taylor Swift’s boyfriend drama. And girl drama. And all of the drama.
Money is the thing that fueled her dreams from the beginning - but she wasn’t quite old enough to engage in the “alcohol” or the thing that makes the money: scandal. Scooter Braun and Ye are famous for not only scandal, but the art of making stars. And as we all know, it wouldn’t be long after she turned 18 that she began engaging in her own high profile scandal. If she plans everything so far in advance, does it not sound like “Kenny Chesney’s promoter” could be Scooter, Ye, Jay-Z, Beyonce, and potentially other big industry names?
On her song “thank you aimee” she also had the letters for the names “Kim” and “Ye” capitalized in the title. Although the song is scathing (“everyone knows that my mother is a saintly woman, but she used to say she wished that you were dead”) it also credits the subject with her success. “And when I count the stars there’s a moment of truth, that there wouldn’t be this if there hadn’t been you.” While I do think this song is acknowledging the large hand that her scandal and PR played in her success, I also do not think she would - twice now, blatantly credit him with her success, if there was not some truth to it.
The circus that Taylor Swift and other celebrities put on is not just used to groom women, keep people closeted, and divide communities, it’s also profitable and it sells. If she didn’t play the game, they would replace her with someone who will, so I believe she decided to play that game until she got big enough to burn shit down.
It’s also very interesting that “Tim McGraw” also featured the “secret” lyrical message “Can’t tell me nothing.” While this is a Tim McGraw song with themes of rebellion, it is also a Kanye song from the very next year (arguably one of his most famous songs) that features the lyric “wait til I get my money right…” The story in this song very closely parallels that of someone who is going to come back in a big way to blow shit up once they rise to the absolute tippy top.
Scooter Braun
I wrote about why I thought Scooter Braun was working with Taylor Swift all along earlier this year, but I am going to include him in here anyway, because I cannot write about Ye without the role that he plays. The man that Taylor Swift has referred to as a bully on more than one occasion.
Less than two weeks after the Time POTY article was published, New York Times published a very controversial opinion piece titled “Look What We Made Taylor Swift Do.”
This piece outlines, in detail, why the author believed that Taylor Swift was queer. The author provided many well-documented examples of Taylor’s queer flagging throughout her work and press (the headline’s image even features a hairpin!).
The author also told the story of Taylor starting at a new label, with full creative freedom, centering her first project under this label around gay pride and activism. And then, how her chances of a public coming out were seemingly squashed by Scooter Braun purchasing her first 6 master recordings (and how most of her fanbase refused to recognize her queer flagging anyway.)
Whether she is queer or not, this is certainly one of the stories that Taylor Swift told us.
Given how tightly Taylor Swift controls her press to tell such cohesive stories, I do not believe it is accidental that this story was published almost alongside her Time Person of the Year Article. This color, painted as “opinion” provides the rest of the context for her Time interview, while giving, as always, plausible deniability.
If this is the story - then Scooter Braun’s actions - were the most necessary component of this story. Someone had to steal Taylor’s work from under her, to control and restrict her freedom, to profit off of her art and her pain. To use her as a tool of enforcing heteronormativity via this control.
In “My Letter” on taylorswift.com, which she published with the announcement of her buying her masters back, she wrote that “My first tattoo might just be a huge
shamrock in the middle of my forehead.” Shamrock was a reference to the firm that she purchased her master’s back from.
It also appeared to be a reference to Prince, performing with “slave” written across his face. Prince famously battled for ownership of his own work and said “If you do not own your masters, your masters own you,” which compares these industry executives to slave owners, under which you do not have freedom.
If Braun represents the “slave master” who controls artists, it also adds A LOT more context to Taylor’s “cancellation” in 2016. If people in her orbit already knew that she was queer, which would be very likely considering how long people typically plan a coming out, this demonstrates how easy it is for people more powerful than you to silence you and make you disappear. And then, when she got back up and tried to keep fighting under a new label, their check (dick) was bigger again, and he bought her work from under her.
In “My Letter” Taylor Swift echos the importance of telling this story, as well:
"I’m extremely heartened by the conversations this saga has reignited within my industry among artists and fans. Every time a new artist tells me they negotiated to own their master recordings in their record contract because of this fight, I’m reminded of how important it was for all of this to happen. Thank you for being curious about something that used to be thought of as too industry-centric for broad discussion.”
She has also said this, of their ability to control through ownership:
“He knew what he was doing; they both did. Controlling a woman who didn’t want to be associated with them. In perpetuity. That means forever.””
I also wrote an essay about Sydney Sweeney being anti patriarchal performance art that makes her current “relationship” with Scooter Braun as well (given that every character she has played is a woman who is brainwashed by the patriarchy)
Ye
I am going to write about Ye’s biggest controversies over the last twenty years, but I am going to start with where his public story overlaps with Taylor’s (and Scooter’s). Their feud even has a wikipedia page.
2009 MTV Video Music Awards
Kanye interrupted a teen-aged Taylor Swift on stage at the VMAs.
“Famous” and Kim Kardashian’s recorded phone call clips
Years later, in 2016, Ye released “Famous,” which had the line “me and Taylor might still have sex/ why? I made that bitch famous.” The video also featured nude wax dolls of Taylor Swift and other celebrities.
Taylor Swift made multiple public statements that she did not consent and referred to Kim Kardashian publicly claiming otherwise “a smear job.”
Taylor Swifts gets cancelled and disappears.
To simplify that timeline a bit: Taylor accuses Ye of sexual assault and then she gets cancelled. (and another woman helps make it happen).
Reputation is the story of this cancellation, of this disappearance.
Next, I am going to look at Ye’s career timeline more broadly, which I used this article to do (because I am only paying attention to the stories I am being told) that details his controversial career over the last two decades as a solo artist.
His main controversies, begin, in 2005, when, the year after he loses the award for Best New Artist to Gretchen Wilson, he makes headlines for three controversial statements….statements that will continue to define every single thing that he does up until now.
-Ye states that AIDS is a “man-made disease” that was “placed in Africa just like crack was placed in the Black community to break up the Black Panthers.”
-declares, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” during a live NBC fundraiser for the victims of Hurricane Katrina
-He calls out homophobia in the hip-hop community
Very importantly, he stated that he got way more backlash for calling out homophobia than he did for calling out the then-president.
Slavery
One of the big controversies in Ye’s career has been his commentary on slavery. He has said that slavery was a choice, and also that Harriet Tubman never freed the slaves, they now work for other white people. He has even referenced slavery with confederate flag merch.
If Scooter Braun is the incessant, manipulative bully who controls and exploits artists, how fitting is it, that he was Ye’s co-manager, briefly, during Taylor’s cancellation era? It certainly sounds like the story of a man using artists as pawns while he profits off of their work and keeps marginalized communities pitted against each other.
Ye also went on a (100 tweet) twitter rant in 2020 in which he peed on a Grammy and claimed that the music industry and the NBA were “modern day slave ships.”
(I think it is interesting that Scooter Braun’s website, currently, says that “Braun continues to tell his story today while supporting other emerging entrepreneurs as they “BURN THE SHIPS.”)
The thing about the patriarchy, is that it HAS to keep us divided in order to run properly. (“He poisoned the well, every man for himself.” Getaway Car).
There is a reason that no one in the two industries Ye mentioned - the music industry and pro sports - have any figures as prominent as Ye, Taylor Swift, or Travis Kelce, loudly out and proud about being gay, and it’s not because everyone is a coward.
Even if you are a BILLIONAIRE, you are not bigger than streaming services, networks, and large media conglomerates, which we have increasingly seen consolidate under fewer and fewer very very rich men.
If nothing but boy-crazy celebrities like Taylor Swift, angry, dangerous Black rappers like Ye, and macho heterosexual athletes like Travis Kelce exist, people will continue to ignore queer flagging in art, queer flagging in PR, to ignore queer existence….at all.
And this makes it a hell of a lot easier to desensitize the conversation around legislating the fuck out of the rights of queer people (because they don’t exist) and people of color (because they’re dangerous).
In the most recent season of Bridgerton, the queen even tells Lady Whistledown that the reason Benedict cannot marry a non-noble woman is because the people of the tonne (who read the tabloids!!) will read about it and forget their place, more than for any other reason.
On Slavery, Ye has also commented “the Black community is over 90% democrat and that that “seems like control to me.””
When placed in the context of Ye’s entire story, this does seem to reference that there is a strictly enforced social structure that we all need conform to, and do. He received criticism for calling out homophobia, not for calling out George Bush, because Black people, largely, are democrats already. This does not disrupt the status quo, and that status quo also requires the Black community and the gay community to be at odds with each other, as well as the Black community and the Jewish community.
Compare this to when The Chicks called out George Bush, and were cancelled, because this disrupted the status quo in their community.
You cannot keep people enslaved (and keep people acting as slave keepers FOR YOU) unless there is a VERY STRICTLY UNDERSTOOD social order of things.
Mental Health
There have also been a lot of conversations around his very public mental health diagnoses. First with bipolar disorder and more recently with autism.
Let’s again, first assume that we know nothing about these celebrities and take what has happened and what they’ve told us as the “true story.”
These diagnoses can be serious, life threatening disabilities for a lot of people.
So Ye is mentally ill and the media has used him as a circus performer the entire time he has grown into his adult self, working through the process many go through of receiving an incorrect diagnosis, and the pain and confusion that accompany a life with mental illnesses. And they have not only profited handsomely, they have amplified harmful, divisive messages while blaming a Black man who is mentally ill.
I am reminded of Meryl Streep (as Miranda Priestly) saying “Rupert Murdoch should cut me a check for all the papers I sell for him” in The Devil Wears Prada, when discussing the inevitable scandal around her upcoming divorce, and the media’s obsession with tearing her down for being a career driven woman. I loved this quote because it illustrated the exploitative nature of this industry that extracts profit purely from pain and then how it also twists and spins that pain to keep people trapped in dangerous narratives. Or, as Ye has said…"people “stayed in that position” because they were “mentally enslaved.”
Antisemitism
Ye’s extremely antisemitic public statements have been the source of a LOT of controversy and press (along with being the thing that keeps him extremely controversial as a figure overall, for a large portion of the general public).
While Ye may have (finally) lost his contract with Adidas, at no point in his career did people not listen to his music and was his name not profitable in the media.
I have so much to write about Kendrick Lamar and Drake’s 2025 Superbowl halftime show, but I believe that it illustrates the same point and brings me to my point about Ye’s antisemitism and the crucial role it plays in his story.
The biggest hype and buzz around that show revolved around the song “Not Like Us,” a diss track by Lamar implying that Drake is a pedophile.
Not censored.
It has been reported that a dancer ran through the performance with a Palestinian flag, and was removed from the stage and not shown on the network broadcast. This is on the wikipedia page for the performance.
Censored.
This was during the same superbowl that, somehow, after months of making headlines for extremely alarming antisemitic statements, Ye was allowed to run an ad for his website that was selling nothing but a $20 swastika t-shirt.
Not censored.
The patriarchy honestly could win bonus points for this one, because Donald Trump is in the Epstein files, and I’m sure that The Man would really like us all to be talking about Black men that rape and abuse children and not Donald Trump. To pit us against each other, write articles about Black men abusing women and children, and again, not talk about Donald Trump and the patriarchy.
In September of 2018, Ye performed as the musical guest on SNL despite months of previous controversy. On stage during the goodbyes, Ye performs an extremely pro-trump rant while wearing a MAGA hat. In this same rant, he argues that “the democrats plan is to take black fathers out of the home.”
This rant was not aired by NBC on the broadcast, it was posted online by an audience member.
Essentially, mainstream media typically has absolutely no problem platforming a divisive bully.
The second you try to use your platform to enact meaningful change in your community, to get people united for positive change?
Censored, just like when he tried to call out his own community for homophobia.
Again, you can call out the government, but not in a way that disrupts the status quo. You can make statements that divide us, but you CANNOT start sending messages that UNITE marginalized communities together and force us to start looking at the real villains.
Black people and Jewish people are constantly reminded of slavery and the holocaust, and not that the same dangerous system committed both of these atrocities (and Palestine), because that would be dangerous.
They will let a Black man come on mainstream media and say some of the most antisemitic shit you’ve ever heard, sell SWASTIKAS DURING THE LARGEST TELEVISION EVENT OF THE YEAR but not advocate for a free Palestine.
Weird…and kinda starts to shine a different light on a lot of behavior and gives a pretty powerful WHY behind “acting.”
Comments and treatment of women
The dangerous and divisive comments that Ye has made about women have also been a constant headline topic over his career. He has defended abusers and was even publicly stalking his ex-wife and threatening her current boyfriend.
Again, normalizing violence towards women, amplifying harmful stereotypes towards Black men, and distracting everyone from the real issues.
Even when he has started to make valid commentary on the way that the music industry and awards industry overlooks Black artists, when he instead gets into a public feud with Taylor Swift over the topic instead, it once again serves the purpose of fracturing communities and shining the light away from the ACTUAL villains.
to close, back to reputation, and I guess my point:
20 years ago, shortly after he makes those 3 controversial statements in 2005, Ye appears on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, depicting himself as Jesus Christ.
In this interview, he says that he is addicted to pornography and has been since he was a child. If, like Taylor Swift, Ye is playing a character who is an artist performing under the patriarchy, this is an appropriate way to imply this concept.
Remember when he says that our government inflicted “AIDs” to harm the Black community? What if AIDs is hip-hop culture? More broadly, pop culture in general? Have we not been reminded, over and over again, that at the core of most of “pop culture” is a fetishization with youth? With highly sexualized content? With sexual violence? With racism??
He says that HE is addicted to pornography because the character that he is playing is a Black man who was exposed to this culture from the time they were born.
Taylor Swift wrote that she puts “narcotics into all of my songs” (Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me.) I believe this is because the type of behavior that she normalizes is actually quite dangerous and harmful (centering men). Has our very own government not inflicted drugs upon our communities to harm and placate us, from the Native Americans to today? And, like narcotics, these messages are the result of a money-hungry capitalistic industry that kills people for profit.
Could this type of media circus be both the “AIDs” and the “narcotics” they are referencing? Does this type of circus benefit the patriarchy, or us?
And if we look at this circus, and the different roles that we have assigned to different characters, does it not seem like our establishment does, in fact, hate Black people?
The reputation (and Ye) era is also when we see Taylor Swift depict herself as Jesus Christ...
In the music video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” the lead single of Reputation. The album that tells the story of (while under the management of Scooter Braun) Ye getting Taylor Swift cancelled.
I believe that both of them use this metaphor when pointing to their own mythology and origin story because once they are able to reveal their work, everything that they ever did will be viewed in an entirely different light. All of their work will be resurrected, like Jesus Christ, along with their public images, or “reputation.”
A few years after the Rolling Stone cover, Ye says ““One day the light will shine through and one day people will understand everything I ever did, ever said, was to throw myself on the blade for the sake of someone else.”
Ye’s most recent project is also called “Bully,” and the album cover and billboards appear to depict this dangerous cycle as well. A fighter, or a “Bully,” is knocked down, and then gets back up again and continues to repeat this same cycle, over and over. Get knocked down, knock someone else down, over and over.
When Ye discussed his pornography addiction, he said that it started with finding his father’s Playboys as a child. If Ye is a man stuck in this cycle that was told to act this way from the time that he was a child, it is also fitting that he discusses it starting with his own father.
When discussing “Father Figure,” Taylor Swift has said that it is a song about how these dynamics can shift over time.
The line “Leave it with me” in Father Figure, I think, is the shifting of this cycle, because we are leaving the toxic behavior behind, with the Father Figure, not perpetuating the cycle anymore.
The line “Leave it with me/ I protect the family,” I think, is also a rebalancing of these roles. There is a place for the protectiveness of a father, but it is not running the show. You can take the good and leave the bad, and rewrite the cycle.
In the Time POTY article, Taylor refers to reputation as a “goth punk moment of female rage at being gaslit by an entire social structure.”
Every single time a woman gets cancelled for calling out an abuser, it loudly reminds all women EVERYWHERE not to forget their place. That is the story that Taylor Swift told. No matter how big you are, you can either accept abuse, or get cancelled for calling it out.
These public reminders are a necessary component of this cycle because this is how we get gas-lit into denying our own abuse, into cancelling other women, as women.
I also wrote about how reputation is on one layer, a story about Taylor’s hero’s journey to unite and discover all of the parts of her true self, and how she used her “reputation” as a self inflicted armor to hide behind while she did it.
In “My Letter” she says this of reputation:
"All that defiance, that longing to be understood while feeling purposely misunderstood, that desperate hope, that shame-born snarl and mischief. To be perfectly honest, it’s the one album in those first 6 that I thought couldn’t be improved upon by redoing it."
To choose self-love in the face of a social structure designed to make us hate ourselves IS an act of defiance and is very goth punk, in my opinion. even if we are protecting ourselves, or being "purposely misunderstood", to enable this self-love!
She also acknowledges that this defiance and the reason for this mischief is shame born - this is what the patriarchy forces all of us to feel (especially as a woman, or as a queer person, or as any non-white person in this country). However, the journey that she makes in reputation, to overcome this shame, and love her true self, is something that cannot be improved upon. Because it’s her truth.
PT 2 Coming Soon on Scott & Andrea
Posted May 29, 2026, 9:10 PM UTC