kontextmaschine:

Like, you realize that’s at the core of my thing about Taylor Swift, that she’s a female version of me as a psycho bitch.

Like, she grew up in Southeast Pennsylvania as the child of a professional father that left her as petty gentry, like she fixedly studied the flow of American culture as expressed in places like social media and genres like country. She builds a following by telling this story back to the public in densely self-referential but playful texts, while maintaining a semi-approachable persona on tumblr. She’s very intelligent and a good writer, boosted by the fact that she’s intelligent enough to productively channel a significant pool of her crazy into her work.

Like, I’m bipolar, and in hypomanic periods like now I have a lot of high-quality output at once, and that tends to be the stuff that really makes my reputation. She is clearly Cluster B, or, you know, “psycho bitch”, she has an obsessive need for attention and validation and she’s developed a personality and social skills to serve it, of being a heinous user of other people while maintaining a pose as an innocent put-upon romantic who intensely cares about your interiority.

Which, like, we all know that girl, but she does it at scale, so good at it she has succeeded in capturing a nontrivial share of the entire American culture’s libidinal economy of attention and validation. She is living the dream!

You realize the joke about You Belong With Me and Fifteen is she didn’t have the all-American high school experience of being in the marching band and losing your virginity to a dreamy upperclassman who’s really using you and going to prom with the boy next door.

She home-studied as a Nashville stage kid while plotting an ascent to celebrityhood! Where she lost her virginity to and had her puppy-love relationships with celebrities, the exact guys who are on the covers of magazines for normie all-American high school girls to fantasize about! And she was absolutely using them!

And like, she is not only one of the most famous people in the world, but the highest-paid celebrity at $200mil/yr. And like, her dad was a finance guy, her recording sessions and tours are clearly scheduled as a way to maintain legal residence in no-tax Tennessee, she clearly knows what she’s doing with the money. As you see with her feuding with Spotify and now trying to stir stuff about her master recordings, she is obsessed with maintaining 100% stem-to-stern control of her brand, her funding and publication channels, her empire. She writes and produces stuff for other people now, have you noticed that? And she’s always trying to add other celebrities to her stable. She is possibly the only fully autonomous wildcard acting within American culture.

And God help us, she’s starting to get into politics. I am not joking when I say it is entirely possible she will end up as Empress of America, at least to Eva Peron levels, God help us.

And it’s not like she was disguising the fact that she’s a shapeshifting manipulator who treats other people as things to be used and discarded to feed an obsessive need to be valued that will not be satisfied until she dominates the world while putting up a perfectly calculated facade! She has risen this far by creating and performing works of art that are directly about that in subtext, metatext, AND just straight text!

She is the only writer and public intellectual – and I do first and foremost consider Taylor Swift a writer and public intellectual – that I consider my clear superior, honestly it kind of scares me that only people at my level even seem to notice this. Sady Doyle sure fucking noticed it.

I’ve seen the psycho bitch version of me, she’s on her way to taking over the world, and it’s awesomely terrifying.

Friendly reminder.