Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why by Sady Doyle Read Free Book Online Page B

“crazy.”
    If there were any one woman who could elude the media’s hunger for celebrity carnage through sheer force of good behavior, it would be Taylor Swift, the woman PopEater once crowned“The Teen Anti–‘Train Wreck.’ ”
    Swift’s persona played perfectly to the ideals of feminine purity and innocence that her unlucky peers had been caughtviolating. The press marveled that her lyrics were “wholly unlike the banal sexual come-ons that crowd the music of most of her contemporaries.” She did everything right and took all the right stances: against casual sex (“Where’s the romance? Where’s the magic in that? I’m just not that girl”), against revealing costumes (“ ‘I wouldn’t wear tiny amounts of clothing in my real life so I don’t think it’s necessary to wear that stuff in photo-shoots”), against sexting (her phone contained only text messages;“You wouldn’t find any naked pictures”), against premarital virginity loss (one single, “Fifteen,” bemoaned the fate of a friend who “gave everything she had to a boy who changed his mind”). She did not drink, did not use drugs, and told interviewers her idea of fun was spending time with her parents. Just to drive the point home, a few of Swift’s songs pitted her against overtly sexual harlots—“Better Than Revenge” concerned “an actress / [who’s] better known for the things that she does on the mattress”—whom Swift demolished with the sheer rhetorical force of her righteousness.
    Swift’s image struck some as sanctimonious, or at least, a little too dependent on trashing other women. But it worked: The CEO of her record label, Scott Borchetta, crowed to The New York Times that“[Swift] isn’t a person who’s going to wake up half-naked, drunk in a car somewhere in Hollywood”; Swift herself took to Seventeen magazine to “defend her good girl image”:“Honestly, if somebody wants to criticize me for not being a trainwreck, that’s fine with me!”
    Nothing gold can stay, Ponyboy. No matter how well behaved Swift was, she couldn’t avoid the non-stop, invasive media coverage that comes with her level of celebrity, and the public indignities that are its more-or-less invariable result. One of the key selling points for Swift, in that “Teen Anti–‘Train wreck’ ” piece, ran as follows: “She’s never really been tabloid fodder—we don’t know who she dates.”
    That … well, that changed. By 2014, thanks to a few high-profile relationships and a few breakup songs, most of Swift’s album press was devoted to figuring out which song was about which boyfriend. And most of Swift’s media and/or songwriting strategy was focused on convincing the world that she was not“some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend.” TMZ ’s head honcho, Harvey Levin, had released a video calling her a “nutcase” and “BATBLEEP CRAZY.” Levin made his point with his typical subtlety; the video’s title on YouTube was“Taylor Swift—HAS SHE LOST HER MIND?!?” Still, the allegation resonated even among writers with a healthier relationship to the caps-lock key. Thought Catalog ran a piece entitled “Taylor Swift Is a Psycho”; The Frisky provided a list of“Seven Crazy Taylor Swift Girlfriend Moves”; DListed responded to the news that her latest single was about a breakup by dubbing her the“Bad Seed of music” and a “crazy bitch.”
    The allegation was always the same: Taylor Swift dated men, and got dumped by men, specifically so that she could write cruel songs about them and harm their careers:“[Swift’s] career depends on her getting laid and having her heart broken,” wrote Ryan O’Connell in the Thought Catalog piece. “That’s what 99 percent of her songs are about. If we don’t know who she’s sleeping with, what else is there to really know about her?”
    The coverage, slowly but inevitably, turned inside-out, until she was receiving the exact inverse of the praise she’d gotten