The secret meanings behind Taylor Swift\u2019s engagement<\/p>\n
Breaking news alerts were pinged to phones around the world; Swifties screamed in the street; the Prince and Princess of Wales delivered their royal approval; Donald Trump wished them luck<\/a>. By now it will not have escaped your attention that Taylor Swift, the reigning queen of pop, is engaged to Travis Kelce, a podcaster who also plays football.<\/p>\n What does this engagement mean? It\u2019s possible you naively think it simply means an extremely famous woman and a somewhat famous man enjoy each other\u2019s company and want to settle down together to start a big, beautiful brand partnership. Wrong! When it comes to Swift, Occam\u2019s razor rarely applies. The megastar is known for hiding Easter eggs and hidden meaning in her musical output; she has driven a lot of otherwise normal people on quixotic missions into the deep, dark depths of her lyrics to validate their left-field theories about their idol.<\/p>\n Who can forget, for example, the 5,000-word essay<\/a> published in the New York Times last year arguing that Swift is secretly part of the LGBTQ+ community and communicating that fact via coded lyrics? A surprisingly large number of \u201cGaylors\u201d seem invested in this theory: a Gaylor subreddit<\/a> has more than 50,000 members. Following news of the proposal, it went private to avoid trolling from outsiders.<\/p>\n While the engagement has sent some Gaylors into mourning, various conservatives are celebrating the idea that Swift might be on her way from being an independent career woman to a tradwife. On his podcast, the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk mused that getting married and having kids changes a person, and he hopes that it will \u201cderadicalize\u201d the billionaire \u2013 who is, it must be said, not widely known for having any radical ideas.<\/p>\n \u201cTaylor Swift might go from a cat lady to a JD Vance supporter,\u201d Kirk said<\/a>. \u201cI think that if she ends up having children, she\u2019ll stop this kind of liberal endorsing Joe Biden nonsense.\u201d (Well, I mean, she\u2019s not going to be endorsing Biden any more, that\u2019s for sure.) Kirk added: \u201cReject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You\u2019re not in charge.\u201d Oh, I think she is.<\/p>\n While Vance himself hasn\u2019t weighed in on whether he thinks the Kelce effect will mean Swift suddenly has a Mar-a-Lago <\/a>makeover and starts fangirling over Maga politics, he has aired his thoughts on the news. More specifically, he used the Swift-Kelce engagement to float the conspiracy theory<\/a> that NFL games could be rigged for Kelce\u2019s team, the Chiefs. \u201cI hope that the NFL does not put a thumb on the scale for the Kansas City Chiefs just because Travis Kelce is now getting married to maybe the most famous woman in the world,\u201d Vance told USA Today in an interview on Wednesday.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just the right projecting their hopes, dreams and weird Super Bowl fantasies on to Kelce-Swift. Some Swifties have been gushing over<\/a> what a great guy Kelce is because \u201che has no issue with Swift being successful.\u201d While Kelce may well be supportive to his megastar fiancee, let\u2019s not get carried away and frame him as some sort of feminist. The football star has called women \u201cbreeders<\/a>\u201d in the past and defended his Kansas City Chiefs teammate Harrison Butker after Butker delivered a bigoted commencement speech<\/a> last year, calling Pride month a \u201cdeadly sin\u201d and telling women they should be more excited about getting married and having kids than having a successful career. Kelce made clear that<\/a> he doesn\u2019t agree with the majority of Butker\u2019s views, but said it wasn\u2019t his place to criticize them. Kind of a slap in the face to all of Swift\u2019s queer fans for her husband-to-be to let the Pride comments slide, just because Butker has always been nice to him.<\/p>\n Various other hot takes about the engagement abound. The business press have been talking about how the engagement might boost stocks<\/a> and marketing trade journals have been looking at brand reactions<\/a>. No doubt even defence industry publications (which have previously put out bangers <\/a>like What Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift Can Teach Veterans About Federal Resumes) will find an angle.<\/p>\n If you can\u2019t beat them, join them: since it\u2019s the Swift Hot Take Super Bowl, I\u2019ll quickly get mine in. I think the singer is very talented, and I\u2019m glad she makes a lot of people very happy, but I do wish she would do a Ms Rachel<\/a> and use her unmatched influence to shame politicians into action on Gaza. Or at least follow the lead of the YouTuber Lindsay Ellis<\/a> and raise<\/a> money for suffering kids. Parents are having to watch their children wither away<\/a> amid a man-made famine<\/a> facilitated (and denied) by the US. Doctors are coming back from Gaza with harrowing<\/a> stories about Israeli soldiers targeting kids<\/a> with shots to the head and deliberately shooting teenage boys in the testicles<\/a>. You can argue all day about whether celebrities have an obligation to speak out about injustice or not but, ultimately, having so much influence and choosing not to use it in the face of a genocide your government is helping to perpetuate, and your engagement knocks from the front page, is not \u201cneutrality\u201d. It is a deliberate choice.<\/p>\n Amnesty calls for end of investigation into Polish doctor who performed abortion<\/p>\n Last year Dr Gizela Jagielska was targeted by anti-abortion extremists<\/a> after she provided a legal late-term abortion to a woman in a hospital in southern Poland after her unborn baby was diagnosed with a fatal foetal anomaly. Poland has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe. Jagielska is being investigated by authorities and faces possible imprisonment of up to eight years. \u201cInstead of investigating Dr Jagielska\u2019s conduct, the Polish authorities must look into the attacks she has faced since the investigation was announced,\u201d Amnesty International said in a statement<\/a> this week.<\/p>\n Now I ain\u2019t saying she\u2019s a gold digger \u2026 but she is trademarking the term<\/p>\n What first attracted the 24-year-old former cheerleader Jordon Hudson to the 73-year-old multimillionaire Bill Belichick, I wonder? We may never know. But do we know that Hudson\u2019s company<\/a> has filed a trademark application for the term \u201cgold digger\u201d, to be used on jewellery or keychains. Instead of getting huffy about the jokes about her being attracted to Belichick\u2019s big bank account, she\u2019s monetizing them.<\/p>\n Italian police investigating porn site with doctored pictures of prominent women<\/p>\n If you are a woman in the public eye, it\u2019s almost inevitable that insecure men will use technology to humiliate you online<\/a>. And the tech bros who keep telling us AI will revolutionize the world seem helpless (or just not interested) when it comes to stopping it.<\/p>\n Snoop Dogg is \u201cscared to go to the movies\u201d because of animated lesbians<\/p>\n The musician has called himself a \u201cgangsta\u201d but he\u2019s apparently terrified of two fictional women parenting a child together. Snoop told a podcast he was horrified<\/a> when he took his grandson to see Pixar\u2019s Lightyear and the child asked about the two gay mums in the movie. Instead of just answering his grandson\u2019s question like a normal person, Snoop clutched his pearls.<\/p>\n Denmark apologises for forced contraception of Greenlandic women<\/p>\n It\u2019s estimated that 4,500 women and girls were fitted with contraceptive coils without their permission or knowledge<\/a> in the 1960s in an attempt to reduce the population of Greenland.<\/p>\n UK gender pay gap underestimated for two decades, report says<\/p>\n The faulty methodology, which gave undue weight to large companies, resulted in an underestimate of a \u201csmall but noteworthy\u201d margin of one percentage point, new research<\/a> says.<\/p>\n Fertility rate hits record low in England, Scotland and Wales<\/p>\n And we will continue to see headlines like this<\/a> until the cost of living goes down (or wages rise in response) and having children becomes more affordable.<\/p>\n Grammy-award winning singer Tems is helping African women navigate music industry<\/p>\n The Nigerian singer-songwriter and producer, born Temilade Openiyi, has launched the Leading Vibe Initiative<\/a> to try to help more young women in Africa overcome the hurdles of breaking into the music industry.<\/p>\n How an oil spill in Mauritius led to a female revolution in farming<\/p>\n After a wrecked ship polluted the water and sank the local economy, a group of women formed the South-East Ladies Agro collective and started \u201cbringing home the bok choi<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n The week in pawtriarchy<\/p>\n In the Guardian, Frances Ryan considers the impaw-tant question<\/a>: Is it wrong to throw a birthday party for my dog? The short answer is: absolutely not, your pooch would be barking mad if you didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n