Taylor Swift, Pennsylvania Christmas tree farm native, is allegedly dating Matty Healy, who was, up until news broke of their purported romance, best known to me as a guy who eats raw meat on stage when performing with his band, the 1975. But you probably already know this because, since their relationship was all but confirmed (followed by recent reports of a breakup), nobody’s been able to shut up about it. Specifically about how Healy is apparently problematic, which makes Swift problematic, which means—according to think pieces, tweets, and several thousand comments on the celebrity gossip subreddit r/Fauxmoi—she needs to be held accountable for her crime of implicitly endorsing his crimes by associating herself with him.
As is often the case, the precise meaning of accountability here is vague. Mostly it means posting. “[Swift] gets more and more embarrassing and her career becomes more and more of a joke with every passing day,” one commenter wrote in r/Fauxmoi. “I have no idea how anyone can ever take her seriously ever again even if her and Matty eventually break up and I truly hope people see her as a joke going forward.” There have been hashtag campaigns demanding that Swift “reflect on the impact of [her] own and [her] associates’ behavior,” Twitter threads asking whether or not one can ethically attend a Swift concert, and—in response to that backlash—defensive think pieces claiming that Swift is really a victim of misogyny. (Would you care inordinately about a man’s dating life?) But none of this online furor, it should be said, has had a visible negative impact on Swift’s bottom line. The assertions that Swift is wrecking her own career ultimately amount to wishful thinking: Her concerts continue to be sold out, her record sales continue to thrive, and she continues to set new streaming records for herself. For the most part, people who enjoy Swift’s music will simply continue to do so.
As for Matty Healy, it’s hard to keep track of his supposed problematic behavior because newly resurfaced charges get added as the conversation rolls on. Some of the accusations seem to be basically false (no, he didn’t do a Nazi salute while thanking Kanye), others seem probably false (a comment on a podcast claiming he watched a particularly gruesome type of pornography was, the hosts say, a joke), and others are true (he did indeed tell some very odd jokes about Jewish people onstage, and he has issued a mild apology to the rapper Ice Spice for semi-condoning racist riffing about her on that same podcast). Still other Healy offenses have yet to be brought before the public—such as rhyming “Vaccinista tote bag chic baristas” with “communista keisters” in the 1975’s 2022 song “Part of the Band,” which is, in my book, an act of violence against the English language.
Would I be thrilled to have a friend of mine dating Healy? Probably not. But Taylor Swift is not my friend. She’s not, if I’m being honest, even a distant acquaintance. I do not know her. Would I be thrilled to have my friend’s relationship dissected by everybody in the press? Also no. But that would probably be because I am not friends with anybody even remotely as famous as Swift, who presumably by now has figured out how to manage negative attention. Would I feel, as some Swifties apparently do, manipulated or betrayed by her apparent choice of partner (however briefly)? I’ve hated many a friend’s boyfriend, but I can’t say I’ve had those precise feelings about them. Still, there’s always a first time.
But it also doesn’t really matter, because Taylor Swift is still not my friend. She’s an artist who makes music I happen to like, and a showman whose concert I look forward to attending. That is where any “relationship” between the two of us starts and ends. I don’t really know anything about her, her private life, or her relationships. I never will. She is not really capable of any action that means anything toward me or about me. And if you are reading this piece—not to make assumptions about Slate’s readership—my guess is that this goes for you too.
A cultural preoccupation of the 2010s was trying to figure out the moral relationship the average audience member had to the art and entertainment they chose to read, watch, and listen to. People were rightfully disgusted to realize the degree to which cultural production had been used to whitewash brutality and abuse, particularly in industries like Hollywood and music, where a few people really can and do act as kingmakers. They felt betrayed to realize that people who had crafted sensitive and insightful pieces of art simply seemed not to care about real actions in the real world. But in the 2020s, this impulse has mostly run aground, exhausting itself. Decisions about what music to listen to, or movies to watch, or books to read have little to no wider moral implications for audience members because, as individuals, they don’t really have the power to change the world in which these cultural products exist. Moral disgust, however appropriate, didn’t ultimately imbue their choices with moral weight.
In the general case, I’m not actually interested in mocking this sense of disgust and betrayal, although I do find much of it, in the particular case of Matty Healy, strange. We think that art is tied up with the moral aspects of life because, on some level, it is. The trouble is that for the average audience member, this sense of disgust resolves into the individual, binary choice to engage or not engage. The desires that accompany even justified moral repugnance—for people to be “held accountable” for what they’ve done, for instance—usually have no real way to be acted on or fulfilled, except through public agitation. What remains is rather an anxious instinct—if I go to a Taylor Swift concert or post about her on Twitter, will people think I’m a bad person?—and a punitive wish to see somebody suffer for something, at least once.
It might be surprising that so much of the sustained outrage has come from r/Fauxmoi, whose threads have provided publications like BuzzFeed with material for their various write-ups about the affair. After all, if there’s one indulgence that very little can be said for, morally speaking, it’s celebrity gossip, which does not even have the (to my mind, fairly unconvincing) argument that normal gossip has for itself: namely, that it’s a social mechanism through which people keep one another safe. But like its tabloid sister true crime, celebrity gossip, as represented by new outlets like the Instagram account Deuxmoi, is now a mechanism through which people can have justice. This isn’t your mother’s voyeurism—today’s has swapped the old morality of scandal for a glossy sheen of social justice.
Living through successive waves of destructive attention and then “reckonings” with that attention—from Princess Diana to Britney Spears—seems to have done little but teach people who like gossip how to develop a self-righteous edge. Why not have your cake, in becoming over-invested in the lives of famous strangers, and eat it too, by adding your voice to the lamenting choruses whenever things are agreed to have gone too far? Why not decry “slut shaming” in one breath and eagerly solicit rumored details of celebrity sex in the next? If the moralistic impulse of the 2010s has devolved entirely into the language of smugly calling things “not a good look” or “a choice,” if its apparent demands seem to be simply to be allowed to go on prying into the lives of others in the name of “accountability,” it is surely partly because this is simply the only moral language this kind of gossip speaks.
Some people, of course, are going to find this line of commentary unconvincing. They’ll point out that Swift’s early image was built on the feeling that she could be your friend. True enough. But she’s been famous since she was 17, and her own approach has changed over the years. Though her relationship with her fans clearly remains both unusually intimate and important to her, it’s been a long time since she put codes to decipher in her CD booklets and four years since she held a secret listening session for an album with her fans. In her recent concerts, she’s commented that she wants her fans to stop trying to relate her lyrics to her own biography and instead relate her songs to their own lives. If Swift still wants to be friends, it’s not the gossipy, late-night-talks friendships of our teens and twenties but the more reserved friendships of our older years. As for the rest of us, relating to her this way—or not—is ultimately our choice. The choice, to me, seems obvious: It would be better for all of us, artist and fans alike, to not delude ourselves into believing that a famous person’s dating choices are worth this much moral indignation or fevered defense.
If you don’t want to listen to me, though, you could listen to her. In “Dear Reader,” one of the tracks off her latest album, Midnights, Swift tells those listening to her music that they might want to pull back a little. “You wouldn’t take my word for it,” she dryly quips, “if you knew who was talking.” But, of course, you don’t.
