Grant Me Moral Personhood, But Not Yet: my problem with Taylor Swift

What happened to my wedding cake?!

There’s a scene in Taylor Swift’s recent music video for “I Bet You Think About Me” that I find both disturbing and quintessentially Taylor. It happens about one minute and thirteen seconds in, and it involves Taylor, a wedding cake and a little girl.

Some of you already know what scene I’m talking about. Others will need this context:

The song, “I Bet You Think About Me” was written by Taylor about a decade ago for Red (2012). The song is written from the point of view of a sassy ex:

3 AM and I'm still awake, I'll bet you're just fine
Fast asleep in your city that's better than mine
And the girl in your bed has a fine pedigree
And I'll bet your friends tell you she's better than me, huh

Then the protagonist of the song goes on to list the ways her ex is encumbered by his elitism, down to his “organic shoes” and “million dollar couch.” The kicker? None of this fancy stuff will ever make him happy, and she bets he still thinks about her, and her down-to-earth, middle-class charms.

It’s a clever, lovely song — if a bit presumptuous, but what pop song isn’t — and more importantly, Taylor’s recent re-recording of the song comes with a wonderful video directed by Blake Lively.

And the plot of this video is made in ex-revenge heaven: a groom, presumably the central snob of the song, is at his suitably cream-colored wedding, but instead of thinking about his bride, he’s haunted by visions of Taylor in a bright red dress. Taylor’s in fact a guest at his wedding! And she keeps popping up when he least expects it: making a hilarious speech in front of all his friends, laughing at a table just within eyeshot, really driving him mad on the night when he’s most supposed to be moving on. It seems he just can’t stop thinking about her… maybe he’s marrying the wrong woman? Ah, too late, she’s out the door, backlit, red dress billowing, and totally country. You blew it, organic shoes. Have a great life, if you even can at this point.

It’s a wonderful video and worth a watch just for pleasure.

The scene I’m interested, though, is in the middle, and it’s one of the forms of playful havoc Taylor gets up to before her stunning exit.

It begins with her standing next to the wedding cake. Then, she reaches up and topples the little groom figure into the icing. Seeing that a little girl, stage left, has seen her do this, Taylor puts her hands behind her back in an expression of mock innocence, but the girl doesn’t leave. I know what you did! she seems to say in her staunchness.

But does Taylor back down? No; she decides to eat some icing off the cake. The little girl, intrigued, follows suit. Then Taylor, with a sisterly nod of her chin, encourages the girl to avail herself of even more, but she hesitates.

Then, out of nowhere, like a total maniac, Taylor takes an enormous handful of the cake, revealing the red velvet sponge cake underneath. It’s a gesture so explosive, so unpredictable, that the girl literally bolts as if to say, I didn’t do it! Taylor stuffs her mouth with the red cake, flinging some behind her onto the wall, then she makes this disturbing expression:

What on earth is happening here?!

Actually, I think it’s a testament to the power of Taylor Swift’s project (and perhaps also Blake Lively’s direction) that despite the seeming non-sequitur nature of this expression, many of us can intuitively read what it means.

This expression says, in a classic Taylor Swift way: who, me?

And I call it classically Taylor Swift because this sentiment of who, me? is a thread that can be found throughout the rest of her work. Take, for example, the entire revenge song off her Reputation album, “Look What You Made Me Do.” The song sets us up for total villainy, as she sings in the pre-chorus, “I’ve got a list of names and yours is in red, underlined” but then, at the moment when we most expect the brazen, remorseless crime to occur, she sings:

Ooh, look what you made me do
Look what you made me do
Look what you just made me do
Look what you just made me—
Ooh, look what you made me do
Look what you made me do
Look what you just made me do
Look what you just made me do

Wait, what did she just do? It’s unclear, but one thing is for certain: whatever it is, you made her do it.

Even though I’ve listened to as much Swift as the next she/her millennial, I’ve never been able to get over this part of her project. Her documentary is called Miss Americana, and if that isn’t pointed enough, we can look at the ways in which her music itself often exemplifies the angelic victimhood of white women. Who, me? and You made me do this are two sides of the same coin: they both assume that the speaker, in her perfect innocence, could only do something wrong if external factors have pushed her to do so. She can’t be held accountable for her actions because they aren’t really hers. Violence, ruin, madness — they are all caused by someone else.

I find this utterly terrifying. What’s more, whenever this narrative emerges, I also feel suddenly and breathtakingly alienated from Swift’s work, as though the air has been sucked out of the room. Why? I think it’s because I intuitively sense that I wouldn’t be able to do the same in her position. I, like the little girl in the video, would probably not take a handful of the cake and trust that Who, me? would solve it. Like her, I’d probably also want to run.

But Taylor Swift didn’t invent this story about white women. And pop musicians often succeed precisely because they tap into collectively held cultural constructs. After all, it’s hard to know how successful Taylor Swift would be if she didn’t intuitively know how to use her white womanhood in her career, and to her credit, she’s also used her presumed innocence in other more interesting and constructive ways:

• By casting her music videos multi-racially, essentially using her white (and famous!) cachet as a way of elevating non-white men, as in her videos for “Lover” and “Willow”:

• And also, by using her “white woman innocence” halo to cast a kind of “innocence umbrella” over the LGBTQ+ movement, as in her and Todrick Hall’s video for “You Need to Calm Down”:

If you actually feel threatened by us innocent, playful tea drinkers — you’re just dumb!

But as I alluded to earlier, the presumed innocence of white women isn’t always just a trope played for entertainment; it’s sometimes downright violent.

Consider the 2020 case of Amy Cooper in what is now forever known as the “Central Park Birdwatching Incident.” Because Christian Cooper, a Black man, asked her to put her dog on a leash in the Ramble, Amy Cooper called the police and falsely claimed that he was attacking her and her dog. C. Cooper got her call on video, which is the only reason we can even speak today of the facts as a matter of public consensus: he didn’t attack her. She was instinctively, unhesitatingly, using the police as a weapon against a Black man she found inconvenient.

Or what of the case of Susan Smith, who killed her own two sons by driving them into a lake but maintained for weeks afterwards that an unknown Black man had stolen her car and taken her boys?¹

Or, even closer to us in time, what of the case of Amber Heard, whose testimony to brutal domestic abuse at the hands of Johnny Depp was ultimately disbelieved by a jury in possession of the evidence from both sides… but not before her claims to noble victimhood (which landed her a spokesperson role at the ACLU) were automatically assumed to be justified?

We seem, collectively, to have a soft spot for white women. And I’m disturbed because Taylor Swift seems to be trying to sell some of that stuff, that thing that white women have that allows them to do crazy things, to me. And deep down, I know that it doesn’t belong to me — and it maybe shouldn’t belong to anyone.

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1. Cornelius Eady the poet writes an extraordinary book about this called Brutal Imagination (here’s his website).

In a related vein, writing about young Black boys who are murdered by white police officers who feel threatened when there is no objective threat, Claudia Rankine writes: “Because white men cannot police their imaginations, black men are dying.”