Taylor gets high on her supply of self-serving feminism
MILLENNIAL DIARY
TAYLOR Swift, riding high on two surprise albums, critically acclaimed. Taylor Swift, the Miss Americana documentary that made everyone feel very guilty indeed. Taylor Swift, vindicated by the Free Britney movement and the pervy and pernicious sexism she was subjected to as a teenager in the spotlight. Taylor Swift, re-recording the songs that made her famous, held to ransom by older male execs.
Yes, at 31, Taylor Swift is finally in control of her own narrative. And we all agreed: fair play to her.
Taylor Swift, calling out a throwaway line in a Netflix show last week, spoken by an angry and misguided 15-year-old character, played by a very real 23-year-old black actress who is now being deluged by racist abuse from Swifties. Taylor Swift, high on her own supply. Taylor has been around long enough to see what happens to the people she marks — the fandom picks their bones clean.
“Hey Ginny & Georgia, 2010 called and it wants its lazy, deeply sexist joke back. How about we stop degrading hard-working women by defining this horse s*** as FuNnY.” Thus tweeted Taylor, who would have been well advised to stop there, but she continued: “Also, @netflix after Miss Americana this outfit doesn’t look cute on you. Happy Women’s History Month I guess.”
Swift is right, the line “you go through men faster than Taylor Swift” is lazy writing, but it’s not defined as funny in the context of the show, where it appears in an argument. But perhaps we don’t need to defend a bad joke, to agree that Swift really told on herself by invoking Women’s History Month while showing exactly which women she is willing to stand up for: herself.
Last month was Black History
Month in the US and her failure to mention it is now glaring and telling of a certain performative self-serving feminism. Antonia Gentry, the black actress who spoke the line, was rewarded with a sea of RESPECT TAYLOR SWIFT and APOLOGISE on her social media, as if a 23-year-old on her first big job had any power over the script.
The influx of people on to Antonia’s Instagram was redirected towards news stories about
317 teenage girls recently abducted from a school in Nigeria. She was eventually forced to share a post essentially explaining the difference between fiction and reality, and how actors play imperfect characters.
After an incredible year of art-making, Taylor risks curdling into the worst insult you can level against any millennial: a white feminist cry-baby.
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For the second time this short year, Alec Baldwin has stormed off Twitter.
The 62-year-old husband of Hilaria never really makes as big a show of his returns to Twitter, so perhaps you didn’t know he was back after The Great Hilaria Reveal of New Year 2021 when it turned out his Spanish wife Hilaria is a Bostonian called Hilary.
Gillian Anderson’s acceptance speech at the Golden Globes prompted a couple of comments about her accent from smart-asses who have never seen The X-Files and thought she would sound the same as her more recent English characters: “I see Gillian Anderson has chosen her American accent today,” snarked one.
Naturally this piqued the interest of Alec, numero uno Hilaria-defender, who perhaps interpreted the mild jovial interest that Anderson’s accent had inspired as a direct insult to his maligned wife, whose own accent launched a thousand lols and cancelled a lot of her work.
Alec Baldwin, who tweets like a person doing an impression of Alec Baldwin, shared an article and wrote: “Switching accents? That sounds... fascinating.”
Though he didn’t technically say anything, the fact it was a subtweet said everything and it unleashed a whole world of pain from Anderson’s ardent army of admirers. Gillian, who was born in Chicago and grew up in Puerto Rico and London, has said before that her accent switches and slips between American and English calling herself “bi-dialectical”. Soon, in a long and quietly frenzied Instagram video filmed while driving, Alec announced he had deleted his Twitter account.
The video is almost 10 minutes long and impossible to view in its entirety. The point of view is that of the car phone holder on the dashboard; he towers over the camera, his hands in the foreground enormous and powerful. It is dark.
“Of course you can’t do any irony on Twitter. You can’t do any irony in the United States anymore, because the United States is such an uptight, stressedout place and such an unpleasant place right now.” The irony falls over him, a shimmering veil.
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But the winner of this week’s ‘Tweets that Never should have been Tweets’ trophy goes to podcaster Amanda Richards for her take on Nicola Coughlan’s Golden Globes outfit: “The fat girl from Bridgerton is wearing a black cardigan at the Golden Globes, bc no matter how hot and stylish you are, if you’re a fat girl there will always be a black cardigan you think about wearing, then decide against, but ultimately wear bc you feel like you have to.”
Many will identify with the trope of The Black Cardigan, but in this case it turned out to be projection. Coughlan replied: “I thought the cardigan looked ace, Molly Goddard used them on her runway with the dresses, that’s where the idea came from, also I have a name.”
It was difficult to come back from. The author of the original tweet admitted she was wrong not to use Coughlan’s name.
I almost felt sorry for Richards, who clearly thought she was going to get a knowing wink from Coughlan. The tweet might have made a better essay, exploring the great lengths Bridgerton goes to in order to make actual earth angel Nicola Coughlan read as unfortunate and unlovable as Penelope, mainly through criminal dressmaking.
Within the context of Bridgerton, Nicola/ Penelope stealing the show in voluminous yellow tulle is loaded with meaning. Yellow comes to represent Penelope’s marginalisation: in the show, she hates it and thinks it’s unflattering. So it could have been read as Nicola’s reclamation of her identity and body.
Fans of her character in the show will have been in raptures over her Golden Globes look, which showed that in reality, Nicola Coughlan can wear yellow and take up as much space as she likes and still look beautiful, cool and happy.
There was never anything wrong with Penelope’s body. But that’s not what Amanda Richards said.