#I did just see katy hook up with a woman so that was fun. bi rights

[llycaons]

the 'wish you weren't so fucking awkward, bud' line is genuinely funny, but only out of context. in context it's talking about a very normal guy

[readingthelastpage]

Calvin, Tom and Joe in the context of Gaylor

so the consensus in the Kaylor fandom is that all of these were purely PR relationships made up to hide her gayness, and the proof was that Taylor is a lesbian in a long-term monogamous endgame relationship with another lesbian, Karlie. I don’t share this opinion, and yet when I prod at these relationships, my overwhelming conclusion is that they are conducted for the public. Gaylor Swift (Taylor being fluid or bi or gay) and songs inspired by her love of women (like Karlie) factor a little bit into that, but the reason why I have this feeling is the reality of Taylor’s image at the time she was publicly linked to each of these men, and the things I assume about Taylor’s creative process.

here’s the deal about 1989: Taylor’s glossy pop single gal makeover is celebrated, but she is still mocked. the love songs aren’t super sad breakup songs, but they aren’t happy love songs either. she says she would love to write an album about a love that shines golden if she ever finds it - it’s obvious that, for Taylor to shed her image of kinda sexless and mildly immature young woman, being a single feminist with a girl squad won’t work as a public image - and it super stops working when the media publishes images of her and Karlie snuggling at a concert. she needs to date someone who is kinda older (but not innapropriately so), not a teenybopper but considered hot by Taylor’s generation, both respected in his field (that has to be different than the typical Taylor date of either actor or pop singer) and up-and-coming in popularity. Someone kinda worldly, maybe foreign.

If it sounds like I just described Calvin, I did! Honestly, dating him for longer than a year was the best thing Taylor did for her public image, for her overwhelmingly hetero audience who want to see her succeeding in her love life. She can now “”””keep a man””””, and a cool man at that, someone who hasn’t been seen as a star-chaser and who hasn’t been involved in PR-relationships. But Calvin wasn’t the best person, he publicly embarrassed Taylor several times and is generally volatile and her fanbase begins to dislike him. He’s not the way to go.

Except Taylor still wants to write about her golden love. TS6. Lover. (Karlie). The good stuff, the good feelings. Someone hot by her side she has cocktails with on a private beach, so handsome they make her jealous and high above the whole scene.

Here’s something controversial: I don’t think Taylor’s albums are a perfect diary of her private life. Anyone trying to “prove” any theory or timeline via them will have a very difficult time. I do think she writes about the real feelings she has experienced (with maybe some artifice in the specifics), but the songs she will put on her album will connect to the story about herself she wants to tell that era, just like her different image each era will communicate different things.

In other words: it’s not that Taylor writes a bunch of isolated happy love songs about Karlie or a bunch of isolated on-and-off again songs about Dianna and conceptualizes her next era around that batch of songs and picks a public muse based on that, to cover up for the real inspiration. Rather, the real inspiration is her life and feelings, she picks the songs and the concepts based on the story she wants to spend a few years performing and telling in the next era, the image and the boyfriends follow.

I don’t have any concrete evidence for this. It’s just my feeling based around being around musicians, being a fan of musicians and investigating into their creative processes, and being a creative type myself and seeing different things about Taylor’s journey. REP is about a very isolated incident in Taylor’s life, but also giving the middle finger to the haters (and, as it turns out, her crappy label) because she has a hot lover and real friends. We know Taylor went through a lot more shit at the time she wrote about these things, but this is the story she wanted to keep telling, possibly to pick herself up, keep herself strong, and for an image benefit. There’s nothing the public loves more than someone owning their mistakes, rising from the ashes and at the same time living a good life. Putting other songs on REP would have muddied the message.

Here’s how I think it went down: Taylor goes through her storm. It becomes clear to her that she will address the storm on the next album. She also will not give the next album to her crappy label, and will have to leave all the old Taylors in the past so she can break free with Reputation and then have the Lover Paradise Butterfly concept. The LWYMMD video is pretty clear as a retelling of that. However, Taylor still has happy love songs in mind and will not spend the next era single - she wants a public partner, not just to cover for the “paternity test” because she doesn’t want the songs tied to Calvin (or Karlie), but because that’s the right PR move to pull in light of the Tayvin breakup.

Enter someone also handsome, enviably so, worldly, funny, broad-shouldered and supportive and - key difference from Calvin - a good sport and agreeable and fun. She attempts to create a whirlwind romance fast with Tom and really there’s no reason why it would go wrong... except they go overboard and it does go wrong. It works on paper but the way they captured all of that looks freakin’ silly, that silly shirt appears, and people go nuts. Taylor gets rid of him very fast. Now she has two romances she doesn’t want her love songs tied to. I don’t think it’s a coincidence she spread the word of Joe on her secret sessions and specifically said all songs are about him, because some of these details really bring me back to specific Hiddleswift and Tayvin public moments she has created. Not a great start for a new era. She would definitely want to go away for a while, regardless of whether or not she is creating space for another public romance or not. Maybe the realization Karlie and her aren’t the endgame she was writing about or thinking about happens right then and there when she disappears, maybe it’s earlier or later.

Joe is a bit of a mystery just because he is such a ghost. There’s no question that not all of the time Taylor spends in London is for work, and there’s no question that at least some of that time is spent with Joe. Sometimes I wonder if she is with someone in his particular inner circle (though there is no need for that really), and sometimes I wonder if she is really with him. But one thing is absolutely clear: in him, she has found her ideal public relationship. A blank canvas, he could be made into anything her team wanted. She could write any future love songs “about him” and no one would question it. It corrects for all things in her previous public relationships (especially Hiddleswift) and it’s perfectly stable and allows her to have the pop star life that’s more in tune with her sensibilities: both glamorous and lowkey, both cool and kinda boring. It would be a big coincidence if she happened to find the perfect boyfriend for her golden love album and mature pop star era. It’s especially suspicious that he was projected to be the next big serious yet mysterious leading man right around the time they hooked up, and then, purely by chance, his career just didn’t blow up like it was expected to. I’m not saying it’s impossible that they are real. But so far... I’m going with PR because it’s a little too perfect.

People constantly question the benefit of Joe for Taylor. With him, she is so private and boring and gets no publicity, and he doesn’t get much either! I’d argue that’s the exact point. Taylor wants to be a little boring. Not too much, but romantically. She doesn’t want her private life pried into so hardcore. She still plays the game, but a bare minimum of it, and it shows. If you go on popular swiftie ask blogs, you’ll constantly get seasoned bloggers saying there’s no point in following her so closely because she “feeds us” so irregularly and then flits off to London for a week right after. “She only does one thing a week and not every week”. The lowering of expectations is working. She only has to “work” in this way when it most benefits her and her public life isn’t such a spectacle anymore because there is nothing juicy to discover.

So. The thing about this fandom is that, when you want to see if something is true or not, you have to start believing it is true and then finding something palpable to debunk it. But with her past few boyfriends, people abandoned that method and went from the assumption that they were fake and let every tiny thing confirm this. I wanna go back to the original way. Overall, even when I debunk Kaylor as an overwhelming long lasting and still ongoing monogamous romance, Calvin, Tom and Joe still don’t quite check out as real boyfriends to me. Thems my thoughts. Maybe Lover will debunk some of them, but I definitely expect some golden love songs like those we got on Rep, some sad songs about other events she skipped depicting on Rep and - maybe another Karlie breakup song or two. (I say another because I connect GC to Karlie and DWOHT and NYD to breaking up). Maybe a song about reconciling after something bitter that people will attribute to Katy but that will be about her feelings about reconciling with Karlie. Maybe a song about a friendship breakup.