Taylor Swift becomes the latest catalyst for male paranoia

Taylor Swift’s latest accolade has, for lack of a better word, triggered some men. And it exposes a broader problem.

Taylor Swift. Pictures: Time Magazine/AFP

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The male ego: bold as brass, fragile as glass.

It was tested again, this week, by Time Magazine’s perfectly innocuous decision to name Taylor Swift its “person of the year”. To which the reasonable response was: OK, goodo, who cares? And the unreasonable response, as embodied by the internet’s forever swelling army of performatively insecure men, was to throw a tantrum that would shame the stroppiest toddler.

“It’s shameful and sad that a hyper-promiscuous, childless woman, ageing and alone with a cat, has become the heroine of a feminist age,” fumed Eric Conn, host of – and I do promise I am not making this up – the Hard Men podcast, whose stated mission is to “reclaim biblical masculinity in a world of softness”. Sweet Jesus.

(Hang on is she hyper-promiscuous, or is she alone with a cat? Those are contradictory insults mate, you need to pick one.)

“What’s happening with Taylor Swift is not organic,” said former White House adviser Stephen Miller, as though complaining about a deceptively advertised pumpkin at the local grocery store.

End Wokeness, a Twitter account which sounds like it must be a parody but in fact has millions of quite credulous followers, denounced Swift’s “cult-like” fanbase and accused the media of “feeding it” with nefarious motives.

“Music. Entertainment. Sports. Now they crowned her person of the year,” it said.

“The next step? Politics. If you don’t think the regime has plans to weaponise her just in time for 2024, you clearly have not been paying attention.”

The regime! Is going to “weaponise” her! You can really picture it, can’t you – doddery old Joe Biden hunched over the Resolute Desk, scribbling a letter to Tay: “I’ve got a blank space (in my nuclear arsenal) baby, and I’ll write your name.”

NOT ORGANIC. Picture: Suzanne Cordeiro/AFP

The word that springs to mind here is “paranoia”. Far too much of male culture, in this age of Andrew Tate and other misogynist, overcompensating weirdos, reeks of it.

It’s a complex cocktail: a mix of victimhood, conspiratorial thinking, joylessness, insecurity, fear of emasculation, probably a dash of whiskey, and another nebulous ingredient we might call chronic dumbassery.

Hence this unhinged umbrage at a pop star getting onto a magazine cover, something which objectively matters less than your decision about what to eat for lunch.

Gentlemen. Take a breath. Listen to yourselves. It’s embarrassing. To quote your new songstress nemesis: “You need to calm down.”

I was positively flummoxed recently to read remarks from Tony George, the headmaster of Sydney’s uber-prestigious King’s School, which exists, at least theoretically, to mould boys into functioning, well-adjusted members of society (preferably with very high ATAR scores).

Mr George told The Weekend Australian boys were victims of “neo-sexism”, were “feeling blamed”, and that it had become “politically incorrect” to let them be boisterous.

“Boys can’t be physical and adventurous and outdoorsy and do manly stuff because it’s politically incorrect,” he said.

“At the moment anything that’s physical gets labelled toxic. Don’t blame boys for being boys.”

To which the only response must be: what on God’s green and increasingly confounding earth is the man talking about? “Boys can’t be physical”? They can’t be “outdoorsy”? They can’t do “manly stuff”? Seriously, what is he talking about?

One wonders which “manly” pursuits, specifically, boys are now so outrageously deprived of. Did the NSW education system ban rugby when I wasn’t looking? Are the poor lads chained to their desks at lunch time, gazing longingly at those pristine sport facilities their parents’ exorbitant fees (and likely some taxpayers’ money) funded?

The King’s School, where the ‘political correctness’ bogeyman, long thought passé, is still alive and well, apparently. Picture: Dan Himbrechts/AAP

I think you’ll find the experience of being a teenage boy, with all its anxieties and awkwardness and ambition and messiness and prodigious swearing and general social incompetence, is much the same now as it has always been.

The one great difference, aside from social media, is that society now frowns more severely upon antisocial behaviour. By which I mean physical violence, bullying, the mistreatment of girls, and the broader pitfall of turning into a bit of a prick, to which young men are sadly quite prone. Trust me, I was one.

“Don’t blame boys for being boys” has, too often, been wielded as the ultimate excuse. Boys fight. Boys make crass jokes. Boys are horny little rascals. OK, yes, fine, but isn’t the point of school to teach them maturity? To train out the antisocial stuff when it’s still largely harmless and rooted in youthful ignorance, before it evolves into something more permanent?

One of the problems with single-sex education is that it inherently treats the opposite sex as an other; as something weird and foreign, an object of distraction and fascination. It puts boys in an “in group” and girls in an “out group”, or vice versa.

Boys need to grow up seeing girls as fellow, equal human beings, no different from their male peers in almost every way that matters, and no less worthy of respect. They need to learn that healthy relationships are built on partnership and mutual support, not ownership or a struggle for dominance. That girls are not possessions.

How can that happen when the people running their education don’t even seem to understand half the lesson themselves?

“They’ve all got mums and sisters and female teachers, so they all know what it is to submit to a woman in authority,” Mr George said in that aforementioned interview.

“So don’t tell me they don’t know how to go out in the workplace and kowtow to a female boss, because they’ve been doing it all their school life.”

Kowtow? Submit? What charged words, chosen so very, very poorly.

That is the language of power, of control. The point should be that neither men nor women are servile to the other. A powerful woman is no more of a threat to your or my masculinity than a powerful man is to her femininity.

The Swifties don’t want you to be crushed under her stiletto, gents. They just like her music. Picture: Angela Weiss/AFP

We live at a time when impressionable young men have greater access than ever to the poisonous, misogynist fringe, as embodied by figures like Tate, with his millions of followers. It’s practically force-fed to them by the opaque algorithms of the internet.

That is what boys’ schools need to be guarding against. That is what should concern their principals and teachers. Leave the culture war paranoia to the talking heads with nothing more important to worry about than singers and magazine articles.

It’s part of a broader lesson, especially salient for young men, and often learned later in life than it should be: your self-worth should never, ever hinge on having power over somebody else. And exerting control over a woman makes you no more of a man.

Most of us do realise that eventually, but we leave emotional wreckage on the path behind us, and not just our own.

An education at King’s costs no small sum of money. The price of an education in mature, adult, self-secure masculinity is less tangible, but no less taxing, because it so often leaves needless victims in its wake: the young women who had to endure our juvenile floundering, and all its toxic byproducts, before the lesson was learned.

Twitter: @SamClench

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Originally published as Taylor Swift becomes the latest catalyst for male paranoia