#2 Myth, Misogyny, Storytelling and Taylor Swift
The media literacy test we failed with the Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian and Ye feud and why it matters.
First off, thank you to everyone who has already subscribed and supported this substack. My plan is to post at least once every month as I get this going, and then increasing frequency as I get the hang of sharing writing again. Thank you for being here for it.
This essay is based on a presentation I gave last February at the University of Melbourne’s Swiftposium . With the recent re-election of Donald Trump, this piece remains more relevant than I would prefer. So, I’d like to take a moment amidst our regularly scheduled panic attacks to journey back at the media landscape of Trump’s previous election through another giant pop cultural event that year..the feud between Taylor Swift, Ye, and Kim Kardashian.…and the mythology and misogyny the continues to play out in politics and our pop cultural landscape.
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It’s February of 2016, Ye (going by Kanye West at the time) debuted his song “Famous” containing the lyrics: "I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that bitch famous." Ye infamously claimed he had Taylor Swift's approval for these lyrics before the song's release: "I called Taylor and had a hour long convo with her about the line and she thought it was funny and gave her blessings.” Taylor denied the use of this specific lyric, but not that they had the conversation. No one really cared about the specificity of truth. No one was more ready to attack than the teams behind Ye and Kim Kardashian , and the American public.
This drama which was recorded by the Kardashian/West team, and strategically released in promotion for both a social media platform (snapchat) and content during the long running reality tv show Keeping Up With the Kardashians ahead of the release of Ye’s incendiary “Famous” music video . (This video featured a naked wax lifelike figure of Swift in bed with West and Kardashian amongst several other other public figures). We were primed for the “cancellation” of Taylor Swift on World Snake Day (July 16th) when Kim Kardashian used the day to negatively attach the snake emoji to Taylor Swift. Taylor’s feeds were spammed with snake emojis, “TaylorSwiftisOverParty became the top trending hashtag wordwide, and Swift withdrew from the public eye to sit out the storm.
It doesn’t take much digging to find out that Ye and Kim Kardashian are infamously unreliable narrators. Yet in this moment, without questioning, without looking at context, motives, facts and blatant manipulation, Ye and Kim were believed. The conversation was recorded without consent, which itself is a shady tactic when attempting to affirm consent on a different issue. All media and public narratives can be edited, manipulated and presented as ‘truth’. It’s what reality tv is made of and what its prodigies like the Kardashians and Donald Trump have built their empires on.
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I won’t go into the full timeline of the Ye, Kardashian and Swift feud which spans from the 2009 MTV VMA’s with the “Kanye Interrupt” during Swift’s acceptance speech and continues through 2024 with Swift’s Kardashian (and later Ye) dis track “thanK you aIMee”/“thank You aimEe” released on the anthology version of her most recent album The Tortured Poets Department. (However if you do want/need to dive deeper/relive this saga, take your pick of any of the following compilations: New York Times (‘24), Billboard (‘24), Rolling Stone (’24). )
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However, we are going to start in 2015.
Taylor Swift’s cultural cache was soaring higher than ever before with her critical darling album 1989 which took her full throttle into the world of mainstream pop. It looked as if we reached peak Swiftomania. Ok, we definitely had not….but back then it looked like this was high as this young female singer-songwriter and cultural creator could go.
This was a very good time for Ye to make amends for the infamous 2009 VMA’s incident and this time with his then wife, Kim Kardashian in tow.
Kim Kardashian has officially full on entered the narrative.
Look at her by Ye’s side during the Grammys!
Look at her awkward dancing with Taylor!
(This was peak awkward Taylor Swift dancing. I would know…I created the tumblr.)
Of course, 2015 is also the year where Donald Trump from the escalator of Trump Tower announces that he would be running for president of the United States of America.
I know. It’s not great. I offer this palette cleanser of some Moo Deng gifs.
( I may have made a bunch of Moo Deng gifs this month because I needed them and not enough existed. )
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And now it’s 2016.
Ye’s single “Famous” is debuted in February and Swift’s heels are brought to the backlash flames 🔥🔥.
June 16, 2016
Kim brings up the Ye/Swift incident in an interview with GQ. This is perfectly timed ahead of next month’s episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians addressing the Swift drama and West’s “Famous” music video.
Jun 24 2016
Subtlety? Not on Ye’s watch. The music video for “Famous” premieres . It features lifelike naked wax figures depicting several celebrities in bed together with Ye, including Swift, Kim Kardashian, and Donald Trump. I won’t link to this video because I find the whole thing an unethical low blow. No one’s body should be stripped nude without their consent. Even celebrities. And like that rich narcissist dude in your MFA program that no one can stop, the sculpture is then exhibited in an art gallery after the video’s release.
July 17, 2016
Kim releases Snapchat receipts of Taylor seemingly giving Kanye permission to release “Famous.” Highlighted in this conversation is Taylor saying “If people ask me about it, I think it would be great for me to be like, ‘Look, he called me and told me the line before it came out. Like, joke’s on you guys, we’re fine.’” Kim Kardashian has been teasing that her Twitter followers that they should start following her snapchat because shes about the drop the BIGGEST OF BOMBSHELLS EVER. The secret recording of Taylor Swift's phone conversation with Kanye, seemingly agreeing to the use of her name on his song Famous. The words "respect" and "friends" are also thrown around a lot in the conversation (mainly by Taylor.)
And guess what? ??? Kim says it’s National Snake Day, a pointed dig at Taylor which leads to all Taylor Swift’s social media accounts get relentlessly spammed with snake emojis.
For the record that apparently no one but me is checking, there is no National Snake Day that I can find. There IS World Snake Day which actually was the day before these posts, Saturday July 16th 2016. Saturdays don’t conveniently sync up with the Keeping Up With the Kardashians Sunday night timeslot. Why on earth would we want to get bogged down with accuracy and truth now?
Nevertheless, #TaylorSwiftisOverParty became the top trending hashtag worldwide.
Keeping Up with the Kardashians season 12 episode 11, “Got MILF” premieres, giving airtime to explaining Kim and Ye’s side of the Swift drama. “Filmed the whole conversation” and “knew it was going to be controversial” “So many fake things going on.” The rest of the episode is otherwise unrelated to Swift, but this snippet is used for its promotion. This episode airs almost exactly one month after the GQ Interview is released.
(Note on reality tv timelines…The follow up show to KUWTK, “the Kardashians” will go on to blatantly air episodes out of order, creating their own timeline events while further confusing the viewer and reality.)
Taylor releases her own statement the same day asking for the full unedited footage to be released.
Her defense falls on deaf ears. It was deemed “calculated and manipulative”. The reasoning? It shows up as a ‘search’ result in her notes app, which isn’t the off-the-cuff reaction that the public was salivating for. She has several million followers and is being put to the flames. It feels difficult to fathom that a young powerful woman who has been in the public eye since her teenage years would not choose her words wisely before sharing her defense with millions of people.
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Also in 2016…. an election unlike any we’d seen before.
Medusa and Perseus slaying Medusa become viral political meme for the 2016 election.
The most popular of the memes showed Trump as Perseus holding the head of Hillary as Medusa after a sculpture by Cellini.
and going further with this gladiatorial image with the American flag and a sword raised. Real cute.
“To some people, a woman with power and a voice is always a monster. And for some people, death and disfigurement are an appropriate response to such women…
The memes/ statue provide a perfect illustration of what many women felt and continue to feel about the violence they experience at the hands of some men. Not only do these women face it in their daily lives, but they see it all around them presented as a norm, everywhere from newspaper headlines to the walls of art galleries and museums…. Medusa may have snakes in her hair, but also still has a face and a body….
We are so accustomed to seeing these images that we barely notice the cruelty that underpins the story. “A hero and his trophy”
She is damaged first by a god, then by a goddess. And finally Perseus comes looking for her to kill her and mutilate her, to satisfy the whim of another man.”
Natalie Haynes,.Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths
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September 2016 - Kanye leads a ‘fuck Taylor Swift’ chant amongst thousands in Nashville, TN (Taylor’s adoptive hometown and early career launchpad.)
“Lock her up!” Republican chant of 2016, often lead by Donald Trump himself.
I’m sorry.
Here’s a gif of Moo Deng’s bum getting booped and another of her flopping down to be hosed off.
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SNAKE TIME.
It’s time to take a glimpse at the relationship between snakes, women, and FEMALE POWER.
Our cultural associations with snakes and women could easily take up an entirely different essay or more. There’s enough to fill an entire museum with our psychological associations and artistic representations of the relationship between snakes and women that humans have been making thousands of years. (I for one, would very much like to go to this museum.) Medusa, a mortal gorgon with a head of snakes, is one of the most easily recognizable figures in ancient Greek art.
As Claire Litt succinctly puts it in her essay Blood, Stone, Snake, Woman, ‘the Medusa myth is an archetype, ..the symbolic fertility of long hair, the punishment and ostracization of the victim of sexual assault, and the association of snakes with knowing things – in this case, of the loss of virginal ignorance.’
If we follow our most popular version of the myth, Medusa is a beautiful, mortal gorgon. She goes to see the new temple of Athena, where she is raped by the sea god Poseidon. Athena, offended by the act in her temple, punishes Medusa by transforming her hair into snakes while also giving her a gaze that turns anyone she looks at into stone. Medusa isolates herself in a cave, where Perseus, aided by multiple gods, beheads her in her sleep. Medusa’s destruction is only because Perseus was given a quest to get him out of the way so that a king could marry his mother. Her death is for a trophy, (and ultimately a weapon)…not defense. With Medusa, she is more powerful in death than she ever was in life. Her severed head becomes a weapon, able to be welded without her body, consent, or consciousness.
We can easily view Ye as Poseidon, Kim as Athena, and Taylor as Medusa.
If we continue to view Taylor as Medusa in this narrative, the hyperrealistic wax figures of naked celebrities in Ye’s “Famous” music video are directly correlated with the destruction of Taylor Swift’s public image. In this case, Swift’s-downfall as weapon that not only literally objectifies its victims, it does so while stripping them of all clothing simultaneously..forever freezing them in a state of naked vulnerability.
Gorgons make a grim noise , and if history has taught us anything, it is that a women making noise - whether speaking or shouting, is intrinsically disruptive. - Natalie Haynes, Pandora’s Jar.
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We were given a media literacy test. We failed. The next media literacy test that America would fail would have far more dire results..the election of professional narrative manipulator and fellow reality tv alumni, Donald Trump.
Opening credits for The Apprentice
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After 2016 - the Snake slaps back.
Taylor Swift deletes every instagram post on her feed, and then starts posting again with a snake video, becoming a theme of her 2017 clapback album Reputation.
When she takes this album on tour, the theme of snakes is embraced even more wholeheartedly, along with her first embraces of witches. The snakes are sometimes behind her implying attack, but we soon realize Swift is in control of the snake ending with giant snakes awkward dancing to Shake it Off with Swift and her dancers. The main snake is named…Karyn. The tour was also the best tour I had seen of Swift to that point. She had never seemed so….alive.
2018 - Christine Blasey Ford & a new Medusa meme.
I’m going to quote again from the incredible Natalie Haynes whose work on women and Greek mythology occupies sacred space in my brain. This essay from the Guardian is great, and so are all of her books. (I think my arms flailed with nerdy. kindred joy while reading “Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths” and this Guardian essay. )
Haynes writes :
In 2018, we saw one example of Medusa being used to fight back against a narrative that literally silences women. At the time, Prof Christine Blasey Ford was giving evidence against supreme court justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who she claimed had sexually assaulted her many years before. He would go on to be appointed to the court. A meme circulated that showed a gender-switched reversal of another Perseus statue by Antonio Canova from the beginning of the 19th century. Canova’s statue shows Perseus in gleaming white marble, every inch the young hero, holding the head of Medusa. The 2018 meme showed Luciano Garbati’s reimagining of Canova’s statue, with Medusa naked, holding the severed head of Perseus. Some versions of the meme came with an accompanying text. “Be thankful we only want equality, and not payback.” The first time I saw this, I gasped. Then I wondered why I’d never gasped at the Canova statue.
January 2020
The snake emoji rears its flat green head again to flood female presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s Twitter after the Democratic debate. #WarrenIsASnake trended along with #NeverWarren. The snake social media shakedown was unleashed after Warren stated that Sanders told her privately that he didn’t think a woman could win in 2020. Sanders denied saying such a thing, even if it ended up being still true four years later. However, after a while the hashtags flipped as a method of support for Warren by Warren supporters.
March 2020
The full unedited West/Swift phone all is leaked. It is proven, as Taylor had been saying since the beginning, at no point does she agree to ‘bitch’ being used in “I made that bitch famous.”
Taylor is redeemed and has since restored her reputation . but it’s otherwise quiet. We are always more fascinated by the destruction than the redemption, the lies shout louder than a corrective truth. However, Taylor reaches a new level of pop cultural relevance and power with her enviable pandemic productivity with releasing two critically acclaimed and psychological zeitgesty albums folklore and evermore.
November 2020
Joe Biden wins the presidential election. Trump is voted out of office.
December 2023
Taylor Swift is named Time’s Person of the Year. In her interview, she address the Ye/Kardashian shakedown.
“You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar…
..that took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.” - Taylor Swift, Time Magazine, Person of the Year Interview 2023.
In April of 2024 Taylor releases the song “Cassandra” on the Tortured Poets Department Anthology edition.
So, they killed Cassandra first 'cause she feared the worst
And tried to tell the town
So, they filled my cell with snakes, I regret to say
Do you believe me now?….
When the first stone's thrown, there's screaming, In the streets, there's a raging riot When it's "Burn the bitch, " they're shrieking
When the truth comes out, it's quiet.
Elizabeth Lesser writes in her brilliant book Cassandra Speaks: When Women are the Storytellers, the Story Changes
It is Cassandra’s story, and it is the story of any woman who has been dismissed, gaslighted, or punished for having an opinion of her own. It is the old trope of the hysterical girl or the scorned woman who is not to be believed as a witness to her own experience…
Women have been ignored, ridiculed, punished, even killed for their opinions forever. But without the balancing of the power of her voice - things in the world end in disaster. Cassandra’s voice is your voice.
Of course, in 2024 Trump has been reelected, once again defeating a female presidential candidate.
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The translation of “Medusa” actually is guardian or protectress.
Let’s do by right by her towards other women and for ourselves.
Let’s think about the themes and narratives that are in the zeitgeist and what they are telling us about the moment we are living in.
Let us go beyond headlines, reactions, assumptions and provocations.
In the age of fake news and reality tv programming, let us make an active effort to find and make space for the truth.
Let us not hide in the cave, but wield our strength and autonomy while we are alive.
If we don’t, we might very well be turned to stone and have our own power used against us.
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Recommended Reading:
If Looks Could Kill: How Medusa became a potent political meme - The Guardian, Natalie Haynes.
Blood, Stone, Snake, Woman: A Brief History of Association - Claire Litt
Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths -Natalie Haynes
Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are The Storytellers The Story Changes -Elizabeth Lesser