Column 12

By Lilly Fernandez

As a long-time Swiftie, I find the romance between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce exhausting and frustrating. At its core, it's nothing more than male worship covered in orange glitter.

“You Belong With Me! Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce – a love story in 11 pictures” , “Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s Romance: A Complete Timeline”, “Travis Kelce Says He and Taylor Swift Both Have a ‘Love For Life’”. You can’t even browse the internet anymore without getting this half-baked couple shoved down your throat with a side of overly cheesy commentary. It’s hard not to notice that beneath the glittery romance that Swift and Kelce share, there is a deep-seated interplay of toxic masculinity, male celebrity worship, and performative femininity.

Travis Kelce exudes a sort of swagger that can only be described as frat boy adjacent. All of the people within Swift’s life seem to be perpetually stuck in high school-early college. Whenever Kelce speaks, you can count on any and all of his words being those said by a fifteen-year-old boy leaving a thirty-six-year-old man's mouth. In February of 2023, just months before Kelce and Swift confirmed the status of their relationship, Kelce joked on his podcast, New Heights, that he needed to “find a breeder” after his brother Jason Kelce made a humorous comment about his younger brother’s lack of children. Kelce continued his joke by saying, “all the breeders out there, slide my way,” to which Jason Kelce replied with “please don’t.” Kelce has continued to make embarrassingly immature comments and behaves like a child, especially on the football field.

The media constantly romanticizes Kelce for his “chivalrous” behavior, such as opening the door for Swift and attending her concerts. But is that not just the bare minimum? More importantly, the media will also go above and beyond to ignore the glaringly large elephant in the room: Kelce’s incredibly toxic habit of treating Swift as if she’s a prize he’s won.

Throughout celebrity and media history, male athletes have been treated as the paragon of physical success and status; oftentimes, the persona of a male athlete can be characterized as your all-American, straight, white man. These all-American, straight, white men are then uplifted into the high heavens whenever they begin any sort of romantic entanglement with a woman of high status, for example, an actress, or, in Kelce’s case, a pop star.

Unfortunately, there has never been a time when a conversation about Taylor Swift has existed without the mention of a man, and her newest album, The Life Of a Showgirl, makes this issue 100 times worse. Fans have begun to question the reasoning behind the inherent lack of nuance throughout Swift's newest record, some even going so far as to speculate that her writing is only as good as the man she is with. This in itself is an extremely misogynistic and hypocritical take. No, Swift's new album isn’t lazy songwriting because of Kelce’s influence, and her previous records, Folklore and Evermore, weren’t as amazing as they were because of her previous boyfriend, Joe Alwyn’s, influence. Folklore and Evermore were written in a time of total boredom (the 2020 Covid shutdown), and as a result, those two albums are bursting with creativity and lyrical beauty. The Life of a Showgirl, on the other hand, was written during a time when everything was perfect for Swift. She’s at the peak of her career and only seems to be going up, she’s freshly engaged, and she’s broken more records than she can count on both hands. What more could she possibly want? All of this to say, Taylor Swift’s most recent album isn’t awful because she lacks talent; it’s awful because she’s uninspired. She’s gone from a person who writes for the sheer love of sharing her work with the world to a person who produces art for a buck. Taylor Swift is no longer just a person. She is a brand.

The general aesthetic of The Life of a Showgirl exudes a hyperfeminine motif surrounded by the glitz and glam of the Roaring 20’s. The aesthetic of this new album is completely unlike anything we’ve ever seen from Swift before. Not to say that she has never been feminine in her eras, because one could argue that Lover is the most feminine of them all, but she’s gone down a stylistic path that she’s never gone down before, and much of it has to do with the fact that she’s now a brand more than she is a person.

It’s no secret that Taylor Swift is her own biggest fan. She’s obsessed with preserving her legacy in the music industry. The choice to transform her different albums into their own fixed “eras” was an incredibly savvy business move because it keeps the image of who Swift is in one's mind, forever changing. She is as fluid as her music, in a sense. Her entire life is extremely publicized; every breakup, every major life moment becomes just another plot point in her story that will eventually become a piece of a future era, which is why the idea of Kelce and Swift’s romance being one big PR stunt was so popular in the early days of their relationship. The fan culture surrounding Taylor Swift has reached a league of its own. They idolize and worship her as both a storyteller and performer. She is the ringmaster as well as the jester. The muse and the poet. She is always center stage.

But what about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce makes the public so obsessed with them? Honestly, nothing. There’s nothing ‘unique’ about a pop star dating and eventually marrying a pro athlete; we see it happen all the time. They’re simply a symptom of a culture of people obsessed with heteronormative romance, alpha masculinity, and overdone, sanitized feminism. And it’s not surprising considering the fact that all of Swift’s past lovers have been rather feminine, as well. Seeing Swift with a man so juxtaposed from all the men of her past must be exciting to witness. But it definitely won’t last. The relationship between Swift and Kelce functions like an ad campaign, and like every catchy, earworm advertisement, people are going to grow tired of it.

For all that is going against this couple, Swift does seem to be genuinely happy with him, and for that, I can understand why fans hope they last. But fans, especially newer ones, of Swift should view her beyond the surface-level feminism that she portrays when she’s next to Kelce because there truly is so much depth that lies beneath the surface in a woman like her. But no matter what the reality of their situation is, Swift and fans of the couple alike seem to be under the Kelce Spell, and only time will tell what will be the result of it.