The first time Taylor Swift performed the “Vigilante Shit” dance at the Eras Tour, I scraped my jaw off the floor, watched it from 30 different angles on TikTok, then hit play on folklore.
What do you sing on your drive home?
Do you see my face in the neighbor's lawn?
Does she smile?
Or does she mouth, "Fuck you forever"?
Fuck.
It was my first expression of my newfound freedom after I sent the resignation letter that extracted me from the high-control religion of my youth. Whispered, first: f…uck. So meaningless to so many, but everything to me.
I savor every fuck that Taylor gives because I know that she’s been there. She, too, built her entire identity around meeting others’ definition of “good.” And whether it was thrust upon her or she climbed in herself, she, too, struggled to find her way out of that box — and she’s had to do it in front of a world for which she’ll never be good enough or sexual enough.
So when people roll their eyes at Taylor’s cursing or accuse swifties of sexualizing Taylor over a dance that she wanted to make hot, I just have to keep scrolling. Taylor is a grown woman who has spent more than half her life being held to an impossible standard by the media, the public, and her fans, but a few times a week she gets to drag a damn chair across the stage and make it known that she is the only person who gets to define Taylor Swift. I think that’s worth celebrating.
That’s why I didn’t mind when the chair won Swift Alert’s bracket battle for the best Eras Tour costume or prop. (Confession: I actually voted for it in the final round.)
I wasn’t surprised that the chair beat 53 clothing items and 10 other props and accessories — doing things for the bit is the swiftie way — but the backlash caught me off guard. Whether they were frustrated that a basic black hairpin chair made it further than Lover’s iconic sparkles or downright outraged at what they saw as people sexualizing Taylor, people were feeling things.
In retrospect, I get it. (Not the infantilizing view of Taylor’s ability to be sexual, but that’s a column for another day.) Our already huge fandom has exploded in size over the past few years, leaving longtime swifties disoriented and new swifties drowning in a vast universe of inscrutable lore and potential cultural missteps. It’s more difficult to build consensus now and easier to feel like you’re not even in the same book as the rest of the fandom, let alone on the same page. And because of the rate of growth, even the most niche opinion can attract supporters in numbers large enough to garner headlines and sway polls. People can vote for a chair for any number of reasons and stumble into the majority.
It’s head-spinning and I don’t blame long-time swifties for getting frustrated when our growing pains make the community feel less tight-knit than it once was. I also don’t blame newer or less involved swifties for feeling like we sometimes take our frustration out on them.
One of my favorite things about swifties is that we tend to put our full hearts into everything. I don’t think it would be fair to ask people to care less about fandom activities just because they’re low stakes, but maybe we could redirect our focus.
If you view the ultimate purpose of a fandom activity as building community, which has a cyclical relationship with supporting Taylor’s career, then the journey becomes more important than the destination. Replying to Taylor Nation might not get you a notice, but we have fun bonding over our shameless public rituals. You might not win a giveaway, but it’s great knowing that there are so many generous swifties getting merch into people’s hands. The bracket challenge might have been “Vigilante Shit”-bombed, but its real value in the conversations we had between rounds.
A decade from now, you won’t remember which costumes made it furthest in the Bracket Battle. But you might remember the time thousands of swifties threw the Bracket Battle into chaos over a chair, and if you do, you’ll be lucky enough to have held onto the feeling of giddy delusion that enveloped us in the heyday of the Eras Tour.
♡ ♡ ♡