Taylor Swift, the gatekeeper of both pop music and feminism, released her brand-new music video for “The Man” on Thursday. It features the singer-songwriter in drag as a dirtbag character named “Tyler Swift,” and is filled with little Swiftian easter eggs, like a voiceover from The Rock and her album titles spray-painted in a subway station. But what really got me was how queer the experience of watching Taylor Swift in drag was for me. Mostly, I was left with questions—some about the video, others deeply internal and existential. This is everything that came up for me, both superficially and emotionally, while watching “The Man.”
- A badly-tailored and ill-fitting suit. A disagreeable tie. A haircut clearly done by a Republican. Is this… Donald Trump Jr. cosplay? Obviously, there are some clear parallels between this video and The Wolf of Wall Street, which makes sense given the lyric, “I’d be just like Leo, in Saint Tropez.” What I love about this video is Taylor’s clear choice to make her “The Man” character completely middling—the kind of mediocre-looking, poorly outfitted white man that is so often heralded in our society. An abrasively unexceptional Donald Trump Jr., rather than an endearingly vanilla Roman Roy.
- Has Taylor Swift been on the subway? I assume she has, given her penchant for both New York City and London. But as I watched Tyler Swift manspread on the train, smoking a cigar and ashing on another passenger’s lap, I couldn’t help but think, I’ve seen way worse on the New York subway. A Martin Shkreli-looking motherfucker with no spatial awareness is just your run-of-the-mill, humdrum prance through the Big Apple. Talk to me when there’s a pack of Shkrelis staring threateningly at you. Talk to me when a rat scurries across your toes. Talk to me when you’re completely alone in a subway car with just your thoughts and Steve Buscemi (seriously, this happened to me last week).
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- Around the 1-minute mark, my eyes went blurry with gay. Tyler Swift pisses on a wall in the subway station and when he walks away, we see that he has peed in what can only be described as unicorn blood. This isn’t so much as a question as it is a statement that yes, undeniably, Tyler Swift has pissed in unicorn blood—very queer. I’ve watched Harry Potter and I know what it looks like and that it’s canonically gay.
- In the next scene, Tyler is partying on a yacht with a bunch of beautiful women dancing around him. Is this a fantasy ripped from the pages of a baby gay’s middle school diary? Imagining yourself as a lothario protagonist in a story that’s intended to condemn patriarchy? This is Sapphic—just check my tragic sketch books from eighth grade.
And to hammer that nail in the coffin, the following scene shows Tyler leaving a naked woman in bed in a hotel room. Is this a repressed memory? A shame dream? I’m seeing the decorative eclipsed moon on the wall, the stifling, prison-like taupe walls, and Tyler leaving a nude woman in a dark room and closing the door behind him, and I’m thinking, this is the personification of repression. This is my repression room—a cold, dark representation of the things I want that I locked up as a teenager, only to return to unconsciously alongside my sleep paralysis demon. None of this is an accusation toward or theory about Swift’s sexuality so much as it is a reflection on my own experiences as a queer person and my inability to see anything clearly through these lesbian-colored glasses. That said, Tyler glumly exits the repression room, then runs beaming down a hallway, high-fiving a series of hands that are painted the colors of the rainbow. I don’t know, man.
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- Flash-forward 58 years later to Tyler as an old man marrying a twenty-something woman. During some scenes, I was like, in it, submerged in the idea that Taylor is this character, The Man, who screams at a tennis official during a match and is applauded as a father for merely holding his child. But in other scenes, like this Vegas chapel one, I’m taken completely out of it, and reminded that the person behind the unkempt facial hair and Republican haircut is, in fact, Taylor Swift. And I can’t help but let my throbbing lesbian longing out of its cage and shout into the ether, “BE GAY!!!” Look, I’m not some militant lesbian trying to mandate gayness as the law of the land. But also, just BE GAY!!! This, too, is not a question.
- Is Taylor Swift wearing a binder? What was that experience like for her? What was it like, Taylor, putting yourself in The Man’s shoes—to fake-sleep with a woman, to bind your breasts, to perform masculinity? Drag is queer. Putting yourself in a man’s shoes, viewing attraction to women only through a heterosexual lens because a heterosexual lens is all you’ve been allowed to peer through, is a very queer experience, both in terms of sexuality and gender.
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- In the last scene, the playback stops, the video cuts, and our reality shifts. We zoom out of the tennis court set to reveal Swift, like actual Taylor Swift, in the director’s chair, wearing a flannel around her waist, sitting next to another female producer. She tells her actor, Tyler, that he needs to appear “sexier” and “more likeable,” before complimenting a woman with a small role as the ball girl (played by influencer Loren Gray), on her performance. It’s as if the hellish elements of the patriarchy that we live in, of which are depicted in the music video, melt away, and it’s replaced by something else…something beautiful, which leads me to my final question: Is this Swift’s official signaling of The Matriarchy? Because if it is, I’m ready to riot at midnight. I, too, have been “directed by Taylor Swift” for the last decade of my life—and if you think I won’t follow her out of my cold, dark repression room and on to the frontlines of battle, you’re wrong.
