00:00:00.000I want to read off to you some of the notes that I took while I was getting death threats.
00:00:10.860I'm scared that by the end of this episode, they're going to have doxed me and all of my
00:00:16.280ex-boyfriends. Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruity. I have been the subject of many
00:00:24.520harassment campaigns from andrew tate's teenage incels to jk rowling's fanatical turfs to elon
00:00:32.980musk's muskrats to libs of tiktok's bloodthirsty homophobes you name it i've had it if there was
00:00:40.340a punch card for harassment campaigns i would be getting my free drink by now thank you i thought1.00
00:00:45.360that was funny what what drink would it be they're like very berry hibiscus because i'm a faggot0.99
00:00:52.260So I was surprised when, after all of that, the coordinated cruelty of a certain fandom could shock me just by its scale.0.99
00:01:00.180I'm not talking about super fans of an aspiring American dictator or delusional conspiracy theorists on the hunt for an imaginary pedophile ring being run out of the basement of a pizza shop.
00:01:12.220No, I'm talking about fans of country darling turned pop superstar Taylor Swift.
00:01:19.860Rule number one of online mobs is that you should not feed into them when they're on your tail.
00:01:25.100So I know that by doing this, I am kicking a hornet's nest.
00:02:34.380We were just discussing before we started recording about like how uncanny it can feel,
00:02:39.720but also really validating and satisfying when someone whose internet presence you are so
00:02:44.140intimately familiar with comes out as also being a follower of yours. It's an honor to be here,
00:02:49.760Matt. Well, I mean, I've asked, I've called you here to therapize me through my trauma of being
00:02:56.760the target of the Swifties for the last two weeks. So I hope you're ready.1.00
00:03:00.480I really, I valued what you were saying earlier about how, you know, the conventional wisdom
00:03:06.100when you've been dogpiled is to cut off the mob's fuel supply, right? But the royal family's
00:03:15.520trademark PR strategy of never complain, never explain is sort of at odds with what I understand
00:03:23.240to be increasing cultural values on the internet of authenticity and transparency. Never complaining,
00:03:30.460never explaining. It doesn't appear very authentic. But how could a person ever portray
00:03:35.880true transparency and authenticity on the internet when everyone is going to interpret
00:03:40.880your statements differently. Everyone is going to bring their own biases and backgrounds to your
00:03:46.500points of view. So it's really hard to know what to do. And ultimately, I like, really respect that
00:03:52.080you're just kind of going with your gut. And I feel I may be naively confident that we'll be able
00:03:58.700to have this conversation in a way that I hope won't further fuel the fire. Okay, we should
00:04:04.180first establish how we got here, shall we? Yeah, let's do that. A little bit of background for why
00:04:10.040exactly we're making this episode. Because after last one, I was like, I'm done talking about
00:04:15.040celebrities and parasociality and all of that. I was like, I've closed this chapter. I've gotten
00:04:19.760my piece out. That was before last week. So if you haven't been following page six or the New York
00:04:27.580post or something. Taylor Swift has a friend named Brittany Mahomes. Brittany Mahomes is the
00:04:33.700wife of Austin Mahomes, the quarterback. Don't you love when I talk about sports?
00:04:40.840I don't have the terminology either. I'm just like, they were doing like a ball rehearsal.
00:04:47.280What is that called? It was intermission at the ball show. Brittany Mahomes is the wife of Austin
00:04:53.680Mahomes, who is the quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs, which is the same team that Taylor
00:04:58.760Swift's boyfriend, Travis Kelsey, plays for. So Brittany and Taylor are essentially, you know,
00:05:05.740football wives. Hi, post-production editing Matt here. Patrick Mahomes is the football player.
00:05:17.040Austin Mahone is the singer. I am sorry.
00:05:23.680So Brittany got into a whole thing a few weeks ago where online she was liking some pro Donald Trump content, which got people on her ass.0.97
00:05:34.620And then she basically doubled down, which was the way she chose to do this was really funny.0.95
00:05:40.560I want to send you what she posted on her Instagram story amidst the backlash for her publicly supporting Donald Trump.
00:05:51.020to be a hater as an adult, you have to have some deep-rooted issues you refuse to heal from
00:05:57.400childhood. There's no reason your brain is fully developed and you hate to see others doing well.
00:06:05.220A little inscrutable. I know what she's saying. It was, I don't know, it could use a copy editor
00:06:11.420a little bit next time. But that was, that was her response, which like at first blush and with
00:06:16.760no context i'm like yeah no honestly like if you're coming from a really unresourced place
00:06:23.040you might be more likely to to spread venom on the internet i with no context fine i just love
00:06:31.100the idea of like everyone who's criticizing me for like supporting a you know an aspiring fascist0.99
00:06:38.220dictator is a hater is a hater this is the end game of like of like fuck the haters i don't need0.99
00:06:44.580to prove anything to anyone. I'm a girl boss. It's like, okay, yeah, all the haters and the1.00
00:06:48.920losers. This is also clearly like the bastardization of therapy speak that we're seeing0.87
00:06:55.480propagate everywhere these days. And yeah, just when you have the context, that being fascism,
00:07:03.260you know, stripping of rights, etc. This starts to seem a little insidious.
00:07:08.900If you don't like Donald Trump, you need to heal your inner childhood wounds.
00:07:12.400yeah i mean what an unbelievably 2024 statement right unbelievably but so donald trump ultimately
00:07:21.580publicly thanks britney mahomes on truth social he posts i want to thank beautiful britney mahomes
00:07:29.420for so strongly defending me and the fact that maga is the greatest and most powerful political
00:07:34.480movement in the history of our now failing country it's also side note i can never just
00:07:40.220stay on task but it's so interesting how every time he like talks about a woman he likes he
00:07:44.480always calls her beautiful tell me about it or even a woman that he doesn't like i mean
00:07:48.620watching him try to make sense of and work his way around kamala harris and her appearance and
00:07:56.220her speech and her identity and her in the in the debate i found it really striking that he
00:08:03.040would manage to like insult her in a gendered capacity, but also compliment her for seemingly
00:08:11.300sharing some MAGA principles in the same breath. She really throws him for a loop. Women throw
00:08:16.840Donald Trump for a loop. All this is happening amidst growing calls for Taylor Swift to say1.00
00:08:22.480something about the election. Taylor Swift has famously over the years branded herself a feminist.
00:08:28.420She's branded herself a sort of figure, unafraid to take political stances she deems correct
00:08:34.620and progressive, regardless of the blowback that she might receive.
00:08:39.240And amidst people's ongoing calls for her to basically endorse Kamala Harris for the
00:08:43.500election, which at this point she had not done, she is photographed at a Chiefs game
00:08:48.880in the crowd hugging Brittany Mahomes.
00:08:51.480This photograph of Taylor Swift hugging Brittany Mahomes got a ton of blowback from Swifties
00:08:56.720who had been hoping to see at this point some political statement by Taylor Swift,
00:09:02.220whether that be an endorsement of Kamala Harris, comment or perhaps sharing fundraisers for
00:09:07.940Palestine, any sort of comment about the rising tide of bigotry against queer people and trans
00:09:15.160people in the United States. At this point, she'd done none of that. And this felt like
00:09:20.440the most politically substantive thing that she had done in a very long time. And so people were
00:09:25.680pissed. I was one of those people. I want to clarify at this point my own personal feelings
00:09:32.140about Taylor Swift. I, first of all, have been a big fan of Taylor Swift's music since Fearless.
00:09:38.220That was, I believe, her second album. As most people my age, you know, I'm 25, like we grew up
00:09:43.460with her. I was in elementary school when she started to get really popular around the Fearless
00:09:47.700era. And now I am a working adult, allegedly working. And she only continues to become more
00:09:56.700famous, which is a pretty unbelievable and unprecedented career trajectory. But while
00:10:01.920I've mostly continued to love Taylor Swift's music, I have ethical questions, as I think many
00:10:06.940people do, around her accumulation of capital, both financial, political, social. And I think
00:10:14.500it's gotten to a point where she is so famous and so influential that, and we're all free to debate
00:10:20.440about this, I do think, especially if she's going to brand herself a sort of progressive political
00:10:26.700figure, which she's done a number of times in her documentary, Miss Americana, in her gay themed
00:10:32.600music video for You Need to Calm Down, I think if she's going to posit herself that way and in doing
00:10:37.080so endear herself to largely marginalized, especially queer audiences, she does need to
00:10:44.060step up to the plate a little bit when so much is at stake. And again, at the time of this photograph
00:10:49.100of her hugging Brittany Mahomes, she had not done that. Yeah, I'm personally a lot more interested
00:10:55.440in the fan behaviors and dynamics and how those have evolved and what they say about this particular
00:11:02.400time in history, what they say about the general zeitgeist and psychological state of particularly
00:11:09.460American fans these days than I am in Taylor Swift herself. I regard Taylor Swift as a person
00:11:17.540who I could speculate all day long about who she might be in her private life. Clearly,
00:11:25.100she values expansionism in a sense, you know, like she's not someone who decided, you know what,
00:11:31.060I have enough. I'm going to quit while I'm ahead and kind of, you know, like retire on a cloud.
00:11:36.360No, she likes to persevere. And I don't necessarily really care to speculate too much about her personal life. I don't really pay attention to her music, forgive me. But I am fascinated by the parasocial dynamics that she has participated in probably more than the average pop star with her fans.
00:11:59.060Yeah, I'm interested in the sociocultural context of her fan behaviors, but my personal relationship to Taylor Swift kind of doesn't exist. I listened to the Red album when I was in college living in Brooklyn and I enjoyed it. I think the song Treacherous is underrated.
00:12:16.800You can probably also sense that like years, years and years of commenting on on Taylor Swift's fan community have rendered me perhaps like overly cautious about expressing my personal opinions of her because I'm really motivated to take the temperature down on some of this discourse so we can really get into it.
00:12:37.860And if I like share too much of like my chitty chatty brunch opinions on a public forum, I feel like it might distract from some of the meat of what I want to bring to a public forum, if that makes sense.
00:18:03.980And I realized that with this podcast, that's a little bit of what I'm doing, you know, analyzing why these people told me to die of AIDS and how they'll celebrate it. It is a little bit easier to metabolize that through the lens of like analysis.
00:18:18.160I totally agree. That's the only thing that's gotten me through moments when I felt really misunderstood or like I was going through something incredibly painful and unnecessary having to do with the Internet. Developing a sense of curiosity about why, about why they're acting this way, why my brain is responding in this manner. It really it really does help.
00:18:38.880Amanda, before we interrogate what happened here, I want to talk a little bit about stan
00:18:46.260Twitter and stan culture, which some listeners might be intimately familiar with, but others
00:18:51.700might have no idea what I am talking about. And so I feel like to get everyone on the same page,
00:18:57.500let's discuss a little bit of history. First of all, what is a stan? Could you describe
00:19:02.260to your best ability what a stan is? Yeah, a lot of the literature and there is
00:19:07.660formal academic literature on this topic, tends to define stans as a coalition of particularly
00:19:17.180obsessive, zealous acolytes of usually pop stars. So they usually exist with regard to musicians,
00:19:26.720particularly in the pop space. Some attribute the origins of this term stan to Eminem,
00:19:33.380who had a 2000s song titled Stan, which told the story of a sort of obsessed superfan who
00:19:41.560lost his mind when his idol wouldn't answer his fan letters. And then conspicuously,
00:19:48.000the word Stan is also a perfect portmanteau of stalker and fan. So that kind of demonstrates the
00:19:53.920intensity of this type of fandom, which has grown even more zealous and even more diffuse
00:20:02.140over the past few decades, which we can discuss as well. With regard to Stan Twitter, I want to
00:20:08.660reference a really fascinating paper that I found connecting Stan Twitter and reactionary fandoms
00:20:16.000with cancel culture. Because I saw that one of the topics that you wanted to discuss today
00:20:22.380was hyper-reactionary, zealous fandoms appropriating some of the mob mentality and
00:20:30.420methods of far-right groups and using them for different aims, different means, with a different
00:20:37.020aesthetic, a different flavor. And I found it really interesting that someone named Haley Roos
00:20:42.640at Muhlenberg College wrote a paper, her honors thesis actually, about how techniques of cancel
00:20:51.120culture have been bastardized by stan communities. So Haley Roos talks about how cancel culture
00:20:59.220began on Black Twitter. And the original intention and mode of interaction of cancel culture,
00:21:07.160some listeners might already know this, was to sort of, you know, take your consumer behavior
00:21:12.180into your own hands when you found that a public figure or a celebrity is behaving in a problematic
00:21:18.880fashion, is acting in a way that is racist, misogynistic, homophobic. You can sort of call
00:21:26.240in, call out, abstain from consuming their products, resist putting money in their coffers.
00:21:33.000And that was a form of social justice empowerment. But Haley Roos goes on to say, and I'm going to
00:21:38.740quote her here, the social justice logic and activism behind cancel culture has been appropriated
00:21:45.580by Stan Twitter. Stan's noticed the power that cancel culture had to end careers, twisted the
00:21:52.700activism into harassment and restructured cancel culture as an excuse to censor anyone who
00:21:58.400questions, competes with or critiques their idols. And one of the reasons why cancel culture now is
00:22:06.540perceived as bullying or honestly something really amorphous that means something different to
00:22:12.520different people, but oftentimes can be really venomous is because of this bastardization by
00:22:19.160stan twitter of some of these social justice tools wow you've gotten some foreshadowing into
00:22:24.680the rest of my outline sorry i i hope i didn't like spill the beans or anything
00:22:30.800no you didn't because i actually come at it from a different place
00:22:34.160quick break from the show to shout out the girls at nordvpn for sponsoring this episode i write and
00:22:42.620make a podcast for a living so i work for and by myself which i love i don't have a real office
00:22:48.480because, first of all, office space in New York is expensive.
00:22:52.580First of all, everything in New York is expensive.
00:22:54.580But I actually like being an office nomad, if you will.
00:22:58.140You know, working from various coffee shops allows me to,
00:23:16.860No, what a Wi-Fi network not being secure means is it's not encrypted, meaning that things like
00:23:23.180your web history or any passwords or credit card numbers that you put in while you're using that
00:23:28.300public Wi-Fi network is much more easily hackable to cyber criminals. NordVPN helps keep me safe
00:23:34.960from that. Nord encrypts your internet connection so that nobody, not the internet service provider,
00:23:40.160nor the business, nor a potential hacker, can access your information while you're on a public
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00:24:03.000discount at nordvpn.com slash fruity. That'll also be in the episode description. It's nordvpn.com
00:24:11.320slash fruity. Now back to the show. I want to do a teeny tiny bit of Stan history because
00:24:20.760standom is not new, right? Like super fans of different musicians have existed and have acted
00:24:27.460out for a long time. You might recall John Lennon was killed by a Beatles fan who was
00:24:32.940increasingly jealous of the Beatles fame and wanted it for himself. Selena Quintanilla was
00:24:39.200killed by the president of her own fan club. Joe Coscarelli wrote this interesting piece in the New
00:24:44.660York Times where he explained that fandom before the internet was generally relegated to concerts
00:24:51.140and like isolated in-person meetups between fans. It was competitive not in like my fandom should
00:24:57.620be better than your fandom and we can get more streams on our song than you can on your artist
00:25:02.820song but it was more of just about like within the fandom like I've been to 10 concerts and you've
00:25:07.680only been to eight. Kind of innocuous shit like that. And he points out that American Idol was0.81
00:25:13.240really like a symbolic turning point in the culture where fans could vote for their favorite
00:25:18.640artists to succeed or fail. And then that the availability of streaming analytics on places
00:25:25.180like Spotify or Apple Music turned music fandom into this inner community competition. I'm going
00:25:31.920to get Miley Cyrus's song to outstream the Lady Gaga songs that like the Miley stans can like beat0.98
00:25:39.040out the little monsters or whatever. In 2010s, we see the real introduction online of what would
00:25:43.580become stan culture. Justin Bieber had his Beliebers, Nicki Minaj has the Barbs, Ariana Grande
00:25:49.060has Arianators, Beyonce has the Beehive, Taylor Swift has Swifties, and it turns into this sort
00:25:55.660of like evangelical Twitter-based movement. What's interesting too is that you mentioned that stan
00:26:00.980comes from the 2000 song by Eminem called Stan. And the thing about Stan was it was a cautionary
00:26:08.860tale. Stan was a super fan of Eminem, who grew so angry with the fact that Eminem wasn't returning
00:26:15.680his letters, that he locked his pregnant wife in the trunk of his car and drove off a bridge.
00:26:22.340Stan is a pejorative when Eminem uses it. But it's been sort of twisted into like,
00:26:28.800I stan you so hard. It's now like a competition of who can be the biggest stan. Stan Twitter today
00:26:36.600has hundreds of thousands of stan accounts, almost all anonymously run, usually with profile pictures
00:26:44.420of their favorite pop stars. Joe Coscarelli, again, explained it best. He wrote, on what is
00:26:50.340known as stan Twitter, these devotees compare number ones in streaming statistics like sports
00:26:55.380fans do voice crack like sports fans do to battling out battling battling i can't talk0.93
00:27:02.960about fucking sports like sports fans do batting averages championship wins and shooting percentages0.97
00:27:08.540they pledge allegiance to their favorites like the most rabid political partisans or religious0.99
00:27:13.880followers they organize to win awards show polls boost sales and raise money like grassroots
00:27:20.680activists, and they band together to pester or harass or even dox those who may dare to slight
00:27:27.440the stars they have chosen to align themselves with. Last thing I want to say about Stan Twitter
00:27:31.520is their two main news sources on Stan Twitter, their CNN and New York Times are called Pop Crave
00:27:39.840and Pop Bass, with 1.8 million and 1.6 million followers respectively. These are two huge Twitter
00:27:47.860accounts that basically just report on the comings and goings of different celebrities, whether they
00:27:52.540release music or appeared in a paparazzi photo. You may have heard the lingo, Taylor Swift stuns
00:27:58.700in new photo. But these accounts have gotten so big that they're now getting invited to the DNC.
00:28:06.360Both Pop Crave and Pop Bass were on the ground at the DNC. Think Kamala stuns in new photo.
00:28:13.160I also want to mention, you can be a huge fan or scholar, you can have an extreme admiration
00:28:19.780for a celebrity without being a stan. You know, people who write books or make documentaries
00:28:25.560about people like Michael Jackson or Madonna, or, you know, drag queens who base their entire career
00:28:32.180around impersonating a specific celebrity like Cher, that's not necessarily standom. The thing
00:28:38.200I think, where fandom tips into standom is when your interest or adoration for an artist
00:28:45.160becomes a parasocial obsession. Totally. That's totally fair. And it actually,0.80
00:28:50.520it prompts me to want to cite some research that attempted to quantify certain categories of
00:28:58.260celebrity worship or fandom to paint a clearer picture. The first chapter in my newest book,
00:29:04.200which is called The Age of Magical Overthinking, is called Are You My Mother, Taylor Swift?
00:29:08.200And I guess that's one of the reasons why I'm here today, because since, you know, long before this election season, as you mentioned, you know, Taylor Swift's level of influence and level of capital only continue to skyrocket.
00:29:21.700I was really inspired to ask the question of like, what culturally and psychologically is responsible for these extreme cycles of celebrity worship and dethronement that we're seeing right now?
00:29:32.620And I came to some answers that felt pretty satisfying. And a bit of foreshadowing here is that in a way they have to do with, you know, our relationship to religion and worship in the United States, the conflation of celebrity with religious authority, political authority, business authority.
00:29:52.000They also have to do with emotional resources that are being fulfilled or not in our personal lives, communities, families.
00:30:00.860But I want to talk about that spectrum of stand-up.
00:30:04.900First of all, I want to say that celebrity worship has materially increased over the past few decades.
00:30:10.820So in 2019, there was this one Japanese study that found that about 30% of adolescents aspire to emulate a media figure like their favorite singer or athlete.
00:30:22.300Another study published a couple years later in the North American Journal of Psychology found that celebrity worship had increased dramatically since two decades prior.
00:30:31.440I'm sure you've seen statistics talking about how like vast majorities of young people, middle school age, aspire to be YouTubers more than astronauts or teachers.
00:30:44.720So to your point, fandom falls along a spectrum.
00:31:05.060In that chapter of the book, I quoted a reporter named Danielle Collin Tomey, who wrote a piece
00:31:10.960for Bustle, where she talked about how Tumblr opened up her eyes to nuanced opinions from
00:31:17.000an array of people in a space that wasn't intimidating to her.
00:31:20.500Her fandoms were vehicles to talk about feminism, race, and LGBTQ representation in a format that
00:31:28.000felt approachable. It was a way of sort of talking about politics or other issues that
00:31:32.720were important to her without, you know, having to talk about herself. And that was really
00:31:37.540helpful. But there's also the dogmatic end of stand-up. So I found this 2005 study that was
00:31:44.700published in the Psychology, Crime, and Law Journal, which identified four categories along
00:31:49.240the celebrity worship continuum. I'll name them and some of their symptoms, shall we say? And we
00:31:54.920can determine maybe like which ones we each fall into about certain people. So first there was one
00:31:59.900called the entertainment social level. And this was defined by sentiments like my friends and I
00:32:05.040like to discuss what my favorite celebrity has done. I love to gossip about the likes of Jojo
00:32:10.500Siwa, etc. I would say I can squarely fall into the entertainment social level. And then there
00:32:16.480was another category called intense personal, the intense personal feelings category. And this was
00:32:21.880classified by statements like, I have frequent thoughts about my favorite celebrity even when
00:32:26.620I don't want to. So we're inching along the spectrum, but this is maybe still not quite a
00:32:31.960stan. Me with Britney Spears. Yeah, you're just like falling asleep thinking about her even when
00:32:37.000you don't want to. I'm like hitting myself in the head. I'm like, make the thoughts go away,0.98
00:32:40.660but it can't stop well and we can talk about how to get yourself out of a thought spiral
00:32:46.480surrounding Britney Spears or anything else later cognitive behavioral therapy for Britney Spears
00:32:51.940obsession you know I think there's a real market for that and um totally can we can explore you
00:32:58.720know endorsing such a thing yes this episode is sponsored by my new app which offers uh discounted
00:33:05.000cognitive behavioral therapy for stans that's seriously that's becoming more a more and more
00:33:09.680important thing uh so okay so the third category was called borderline pathological and this level
00:33:15.460was characterized by delusional thoughts including my favorite celebrity and i have our own code so
00:33:22.120we can communicate with each other secretly this might remind you of certain fandoms ranging from
00:33:29.020you know q anon type q drops to uh to easter eggs if i may say so i'm not naming anyone they can't
00:33:36.720yell at me if I don't say it by name. This category was also defined by certain implausible
00:33:41.620expectations, such as if I walked through the door of my favorite celebrity's home without an
00:33:46.700invitation, they would be happy to see me. So now we're talking about that parasocial separation of
00:33:53.360reality and fiction that you were alluding to. Another sentiment expressed by this category was
00:33:58.560self-sacrifice. So sentiments there included, I would gladly die in order to save the life of
00:34:04.160my favorite celebrity there was a fourth category as well labeled deleterious imitation and these
00:34:11.420fans expressed a willingness to engage in illegal behaviors on behalf of their fave so they would
00:34:17.160say things like or they would agree with sentiments such as if i were lucky enough to meet my favorite
00:34:21.460celebrity and they asked me to do something illegal as a favor like january 6th i would probably do it
00:34:27.920I'm like gripping the sides of my chair. This is like, it is so horrifying.
00:34:33.020Yeah, no, it is, especially because these behaviors are increasing in a measurable capacity.
00:34:40.280You know, I attribute it in part to the era that you were describing earlier,
00:34:48.220where we were seeing some of those celebrity assassinations. So that is obviously extreme,
00:34:55.580violent dangerous but uncommon thankfully IRL behavior fortunately you know we're not seeing
00:35:04.920violence quite like that as much anymore although with the past two Trump assassination attempts
00:35:11.640it's like can we even really say that although that's a different context um and it's hard to
00:35:16.380say what those people's motivations were but what we are seeing I think in general is a longing for
00:35:22.860community, ritual, spirituality, and meaning that before that 70s era, like when we started seeing
00:35:31.200the most intense celebrity stands of the modern era, such as Beatlemania, ever since that era,
00:35:37.780celebrity worship has started to become more intense. And I really think that that is due to
00:35:42.440the sort of exodus, if you will, away from mainstream religion in the United States and
00:35:47.860away from, you know, trust in the mainstream government. There's a wonderful piece, an op-ed
00:35:53.380that the writer Jessica Gross wrote for the New York Times, and it's titled something like,
00:35:58.040you know, when did we start taking celebrities seriously? And in that New York Times piece,
00:36:02.820she reported that in 1958, about three quarters of Americans, quote, trusted the federal government
00:36:09.660to do the right thing almost always or most of the time. That was according to Pew Research.
00:36:15.340But then a few noteworthy cultural events happened, including the Vietnam War, the economic recession of 1960, Watergate, the formation of many different cults and spiritual groups.
00:36:28.800You know, people were leaving their childhood Protestantism behind.
00:36:33.280I just like that we're tracing my many Swifty death threats to like the Vietnam War and Watergate.
00:36:39.800No, but like there is it is not a coincidence that so many of Taylor Swift's stan scandals are modeled linguistically in the style of Watergate, Tumblrgate, Lavendergate, Jetgate, because to a certain faction of America, a certain like niche, but increasingly not so niche corner of our culture, it felt like Watergate.
00:37:04.320right? That's I mean, that controversy gate is a form of Internet slang now, but it comes from
00:37:09.720somewhere and it's not a coincidence. So by 1980, only about a quarter of U.S. citizens trusted the
00:37:17.040government to do the right thing anymore. But that didn't mean that we didn't need and want
00:37:23.720a different kind of public paragon to suggest that they could save us. And that can be directly
00:37:30.640connected to the election of our very first celebrity president in the form of ronald reagan
00:37:35.640and you know kind of our relationships to celebrity worship changed forever from there
00:37:41.680yeah yeah wow that is a hallmark of my personality though is finding a way to blame reagan for
00:37:48.380everything and thanks to amanda oh yeah we've done it yep oh my god 100 we can blame reagan
00:37:54.280for everything, including this. But it's telling, I think, that at first ironically and then
00:38:01.600earnestly, and we can talk about the ironic for earnest pipeline, we are now seeing prayer
00:38:08.120candles emblazoned with the images of Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, Saint Dolly. And there is a
00:38:17.240conversation to be had. I don't know if anyone has the definitively correct answers about the
00:38:23.440role of celebrities in influencing politics as celebrity worship combines with late stage
00:38:28.920capitalism, if that's a term that we're using. But what can be said definitively is that there
00:38:34.840are some major negative side effects to extreme celebrity worship. I'm going to rattle off a list
00:38:41.440of what basically are going to sound like the side effects on a pharmaceutical commercial.0.78
00:38:46.780And I want folks to know that like I am I am quoting from this empirical research and I don't want folks to feel judged or, you know, like I'm communicating that there's something wrong with them for being a stan if you identify as such.
00:39:02.020Because, again, that word can can mean different things to different people depending on the context.
00:39:06.520I have said so many times, like, I stan, you know, Jeremy Allen way or like I stan chapel
00:40:11.300for fame, compulsive shopping and gambling, stalking behavior, excessive fantasizing to
00:40:16.680the point of social dysfunction, which was termed in this piece, and I love this phrase,
00:40:21.360maladaptive daydreaming, relatable, addiction, and criminality.
00:40:25.980Yeah. I want to pause quickly to mention that, like, stan Twitter can be very funny. You know, the power of standom is incredible. Do you know about the Trump rally in Oklahoma?
00:40:43.140Yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay, so this is a good memory. In June 2020, Donald Trump was running for president.
00:40:52.120i donald trump has been running for president for a very long time donald trump was running
00:40:57.560for president and he was holding a rally that june in tulsa oklahoma the trump team was boasting to
00:41:04.980media outlets that they had gotten millions of ticket requests for this rally and reporters
00:41:10.960noted a shockingly small turnout and if you're watching this on youtube i'm gonna throw some
00:41:15.500pictures up on the screen because they are very very funny the trump team said that the reason
00:41:21.800it was pretty empty was because protesters outside were preventing the true trump supporters from
00:41:27.220getting into the rally but reporters were like not really they're like were very few protesters
00:41:32.300and what actually happened was k-pop fans in mass registered for tickets beforehand and
00:41:41.740coordinated a campaign to artificially drive up demand for this rally and then not go and interest
00:41:49.680Which is so smart on its own. And something that made it even smarter was that many of these K-pop fans were quickly deleting the content that they made about it in real time so that the Trump team would not catch on to the fact that they were doing this. And they basically successfully thwarted a Trump rally. And it was very funny.0.62
00:42:07.260You know, there are so many occasions of stans really banding together in a grassroots fashion that I think are really beautiful. And the range of like outcomes that can come from, you know, celebrities treading outside of their lane into politics or activism can be, you know, Donald Trump to Dolly Parton.
00:42:31.320Would we want to sacrifice Dolly Parton to save the world from Donald Trump? That's an interesting philosophical exercise. But would we want to give up Jane Fonda and so many profound activist figure celebrities in order to protect our society from the worst of the worst? I don't know. But yeah, I'm heartened by that K-pop stan story.
00:42:57.300It's hysterical. There's also, I mean, and this is kind of in the hall of fame of Stan Twitter situations, but do you know about, okay, I'm just going to tell you. In 2019, there was a Taylor Swift Stan account called Legit Tay Updates, which wrote,
00:43:15.160update as most of you know i haven't been very active in the past couple of months because i
00:43:19.960was in prison i'm back now though more taylor swift updates coming soon and someone responded
00:43:26.380omg why and taylor wrote i refuse to join the idf lmao
00:43:32.220basically legit tay updates refused to join the israeli military and was put in jail and then
00:43:40.800return to Twitter to be like, I'm back for more Taylor Swift updates. Like the resilience is
00:43:47.500unbelievable. Yes, yes, yes, yes. But you know, there is a darkness here as I experienced and as
00:43:55.980one music critic Jillian Mapes experienced in 2020. So in 2020, Taylor Swift dropped Folklore,
00:44:03.000the album, and Jillian Mapes, then a writer for Pitchfork, the music publication,
00:44:07.600wrote a review for it that Swifties did not find to be sufficiently positive.
00:44:39.840So one of my pals, Jill Guttowicz, who is a very, very funny writer, has had a longstanding Twitter presence and is a self-identified Swifty.
00:44:50.740She penned some truly hilarious and glowing reviews of Taylor's lover album for Vulture.
00:44:58.460She was the victim of a Swifty Twitter dogpile because in one of her articles, she referred to Taylor Swift's then boyfriend, Joe Alwyn, as human oat milk, which like just is not cruel.
00:45:16.260No, it's just like saying he's a white boy.
00:45:18.180it's so it's so mild there is this really fascinating dynamic i've observed among
00:45:24.700swifties where they've always felt protective of her as if she's like sort of ever needed
00:45:31.080the protection of like millions of strangers but like there's this weird do i want to call it
00:45:36.160incesty there's like this there's this like you're my mother i'm your mother whose mother
00:45:41.860am i like what is our relationship there's this real like conflation of like maternal
00:45:47.920but also sibling, but also bestie, but also fan idol dynamics that I think prompts some Swifties
00:45:55.580to get defensive of Taylor Swift, even when critique is so mild, even when it's not critique,
00:46:02.600it's just a bit. And Jill told, she told me on an episode of Sounds Like a Cult where we covered
00:46:08.420the cult of Swifties, which was quite the tightrope walk. She once had the FBI show up at her house
00:46:14.020because of something that she tweeted.
00:58:24.800You have a community of fellow believers that sometimes you may attend in-person events
00:58:29.560with that you might pay a lot of money for.
00:58:31.400tests of loyalty to the deified figure rejection of outsiders harassment of critics and a flow of
00:58:40.080money constantly towards the deity and i added that last bit flow of money towards the deity
00:58:46.700because stans spend a lot of money on these artists yes i was reading this 2005 study it
00:58:55.860was in an academic journal called advances in consumer research and the study was called
00:59:00.580Parasocial Relationships in Online Communities by Paul Ballantine and Brett Martin. And they
00:59:06.060were writing in 2005 how basically parasocial online communities spend more money, which I
00:59:14.220thought was really interesting because that is true of Stan Twitter. These artists are not only
00:59:19.740streaming a song like a normal person would or like maybe buying an album here or there,
00:59:24.780But they're setting up hundreds of playlists where they can add the songs, the newly released songs of their favorite artists and play them over and over and over again.
00:59:33.800They instruct each other on how to stream with the volume all the way down so that you can stream a song all day without actually listening to it, but so you can boost those artists numbers.
00:59:43.300They are buying all 40 variants of Taylor Swift's Tortured Poets Department and all the different vinyls and all the different bonus tracks and all the different live versions.
00:59:53.240Like, they are spending so much money. And so I do think it's important to note, like, who is the ultimate beneficiary here? You know?
01:00:02.300Yeah, well, you know, first, I want to sort of highlight that some folks get, they sort of bump up against the conflation of terms like religion, cult, culture.
01:00:15.800I really like the way that theologian and journalist Tara Isabella Burton talks about the sort of porous boundaries between these concepts.
01:00:25.540She talks about how like there really is no stark separation between religion, cults and culture.
01:00:34.240It has so very much to do with sort of cultural normativity.
01:00:38.400So many mainstream religions in the United States were once considered blasphemous cults.
01:00:43.360There are plenty of groups. I mean, this is one of the themes that I discuss on Sounds Like a Cult, albeit lightheartedly. There are so many groups that on the outside look really sort of like ritualistic and, you know, fringy, whether you're talking about like Disney adults or, you know, certain fitness communities that when you really break it down, it's like, OK, well, no, they're not as dangerous as Scientology.
01:01:04.440And then there are certain like totally accepted on the books, government institutions, Silicon Valley corporations that when you check off the list of red flags, you're like, wait, no, that's actually more like a cult than that other thing we were roasting.
01:01:19.440so that's important to point out you know there are plenty of jokes told by religious studies
01:01:25.260scholars to point out those fuzzy boundaries between cult religion and culture like cult plus
01:01:31.180time equals religion or a cult is a group where the leader thinks he can talk to god a religion
01:01:36.840is a group where that leader is dead now we as a society are becoming less traditionally religious
01:01:44.080but we are not becoming less ritualistic, zealous. Obviously, the internet carves out a space for us
01:01:51.840to be ritualistic and zealous in a new way. When I observe hardcore Swifty behaviors,
01:01:58.340it absolutely feels culty, religious-esque, however, you know, whatever sort of equivocal
01:02:04.780language you may or may not want to use. Because Taylor Swift has fully participated in creating
01:02:11.880a sort of, you know, Bible-esque body of lyrics that people pick apart like verses and interpret
01:02:19.360and lead their lives by. She's created a cinematic universe of aesthetics, you know, and it is no
01:02:27.000coincidence that people use language like mother to refer to her. Now, you know, using terms like
01:02:35.020mother or daddy or even aunt to refer to celebrities does have its roots in ballroom
01:02:42.060culture where you would have your chosen family, your mother in communities where the family you
01:02:49.280were born into might not have been able to provide the parenting or mothering or sort of
01:02:54.680familial support that was necessary. So that sort of chosen family idea has been adopted in ways that
01:03:03.300are not problematic and ways that are problematic by stan communities. And so in one sense, it's a
01:03:09.540bit. In one sense, it's a joke. But in another sense, it's not a joke because I actually did
01:03:15.600find some research to support the argument that I made in that first chapter of The Age of Magical
01:03:20.020Overthinking, suggesting that celebrity stans that were most inclined towards stalking tendencies
01:03:26.840tended to be those who lacked what were so-called positive stressors from their real-life parental
01:03:33.140figures and communities. And so they would focus on these surrogate mommies and this sort of
01:03:39.420uncanny fictionalized drama in place of those real life challenges. Say your mom, you know,0.99
01:03:48.860telling you that like you have, you cannot quit the violin. You have to go to orchestra practice.
01:03:53.260It's going to be good for you. Or like your mom challenging you to, you know, repair that
01:03:58.500relationship with a friend when you wanted to cut them out, stuff like that. So I found
01:04:02.620interestingly that there was this sort of connection between religiosity, celebrity
01:04:08.340fandom and a profound lack of of adequate mothering. Wow. So maybe when they call Taylor
01:04:15.440Swift mother, it's like there's truth or at least empathy that I can give them for putting her on
01:04:21.560the mother pedestal. I mean, if the mother pedestal is empty, then. Yeah, no, totally. And
01:04:26.380I can easily see that if you are not someone whose relationship with your mother, let's say,
01:04:33.160is nurturing enough, you might look for that type of support and validation and nurturing
01:04:39.840in places that fundamentally can never fulfill you because they're parasocial.
01:04:45.960We just keep segwaying so nicely, Amanda. This leads to the next part of my outline,
01:04:51.380loneliness. Here's where not only do I have to give empathy and understanding and, you know,
01:05:00.060perhaps a warm hug to Stans if they'll accept it for me, but also an admission. Amanda,
01:05:05.860I had a Stan account. No. For whomst? I know. That's the question, right? Because if I made
01:05:14.720one now, it would most certainly be Britney Spears. But as a child, I had a little monster
01:05:20.880stan account oh wow which is lady gaga if you're you know living under a rock i can see that
01:05:28.280easily well so this was the thing i was probably 12 years old which means this was 13 years ago
01:05:34.700it was in the early days of twitter lady gaga had just come out with born this way and i remember
01:05:42.280that because i clung to that album couldn't imagine why as a closeted queer kid i remember
01:05:48.600one summer making a stan account and i actually remember the username and i looked it up when i
01:05:53.600was writing down notes for this episode and it's not there anymore so i guess i deleted it at some
01:05:57.080point or maybe twitter got rid of it because it was inactive for so long but i was a closeted
01:06:01.940pre-teen gay boy i did not have a lot of friends in real life and i knew someone from summer camp
01:06:11.800actually who had a stan account for lady gaga and i was like oh i'm gonna do that too and
01:06:18.140And I remember immediately and, you know, I had the profile picture was a picture of Lady Gaga and everything was like all of the different Born This Way photo shoots and we were streaming her songs and we were like the Edge of Glory stream the Edge of Glory right now, you know, or actually it was probably by the Edge of Glory because I don't I don't know if Spotify was really a thing yet.
01:06:38.440But I remember being on my, you know, iPod touch or whatever it was then, like constantly.
01:06:44.400And I was like checking and I was like, I was like doing like follow for follow with all of the other Lady Gaga stan accounts.
01:06:51.560And it did, for a brief moment in time, fill like a real void for me where I needed connection with other people.
01:07:01.240And I wasn't getting that because I didn't because people were not nice to me.
01:07:07.460So I want to mention here, too, that, like, I think it's it's hard to ever know exactly who's behind all of these stan accounts.
01:07:15.580But I think it's safe to say that a lot of them are young queer people.
01:07:20.080Who else famously obsesses over pop stars in this way?
01:07:23.020I think the loneliness I felt as a preteen, like, I'm not envious of people that age now because I think loneliness has only gotten worse, especially since 2020.
01:07:33.160I was reading a piece by Nicole Cardis in Salon.
01:07:35.900She wrote, according to the May 2021 American Perspective Survey, Americans have fewer close friendships than they did in the past.
01:07:42.740They talk to their friends less than before, and they rely less on their friends for support.
01:07:47.580Could it be that stan culture is the result of us replacing in-person friendships with the mirage of celebrity ones?
01:07:54.240In other words, are we filling the gaps with celebrities because we're actually lonely?
01:07:59.020And that resonates with me on a personal level.
01:08:15.880No, but like, honestly, let me quote a different actual icon, that being Elle Woods.1.00
01:08:20.260Happy people don't shoot their husbands.
01:08:21.700And like really resourced folks who are like immersed in IRL community are probably not
01:08:30.520quite as prone to engaging in the worst end of celebrity worship or the most deleterious end
01:08:39.760because they don't need to. Now, that is not to say that if you feel isolated in your community
01:08:45.680and so many people do in a way that is totally outside of your control, that you should avoid
01:08:50.060fandom because you're afraid you might fall down the rabbit hole. I don't mean that at all.
01:08:55.380but you know I talk about this a little bit when I discuss cults in everyday life
01:09:00.260there are certain signs you can look to to know if the particular corner of the internet that
01:09:07.280you're in might be getting a little too cultish for comfort like if you really aren't allowed
01:09:12.940to express any kind of critique or pushback if you will be censured for having one foot out the
01:09:19.180Like if you're a little monster and a Swifty, you know, there should be room for having an identity that is more complex and multifarious than the identity of like just the perfect Swifty or just the perfect, you know, Barb or or whatever it may be.
01:09:36.880But the, you know, the example that you brought up from your childhood also made me think of like specifically Charlie XCX's fandom. I don't know if you're familiar with the example of, you know, folks sort of dehumanizing Charlie XCX by and by folks, I mean, hardcore Charlie's angels, her biggest stans.0.67
01:09:56.000they would dehumanize her by bringing sort of like unseemly props for her to sign in meet and
01:10:02.380greets from poppers to you know sex toys to in one case a vial containing the ashes of one stan's
01:10:09.720dead mother going back to the mothering and so many of these sort of like extreme and ritualistic0.52
01:10:15.400stans were once little queer kids because charlie xdx is known for having like a very gay fandom0.52
01:10:21.860a very gay white male fandom. And I have like incredible empathy. There's no, there's no
01:10:27.400excuse for using violent language. And it's not like, you know, just because someone tweeted
01:10:33.020something horrible about you, but they also identified as gay in their Twitter bio, they're
01:10:36.520somehow absolved. Like that's not the case whatsoever. But I find that like, if I can be0.53
01:10:41.280more compassionate toward what someone who's clearly very lonely is going through and more
01:10:46.100skeptical of my own behavior that can be like a good place to like reroute the conversation
01:10:52.200i have been reading currently actually naomi klein's book doppelganger something she talks
01:10:59.380about a lot which i mentioned in my episode previously about the wellness to alt-right
01:11:04.880pipeline is that sometimes people have correct feelings but their feelings are pointed in the
01:11:11.700wrong direction and oftentimes exploited by nefarious groups or movements. And so the example
01:11:17.800she cites is that people have distrust in what is an increasingly surveillance technology that's
01:11:25.200ever present in all of our lives through phones and cameras and smart speakers and Siri. But that
01:11:32.060valid concern gets exploited by people who are like, all of your information is going to be put
01:11:37.360and the vaccine QR code. And the vaccines are going to be used to turn you into like sheep
01:11:42.460communists. And so that's why you shouldn't get vaccinated. Yeah. And it is kind of a distinctly0.91
01:11:48.680American thing too, I will say, because we happen to be an exception among wealthy nations in that
01:11:57.660despite having so much money in the American coffer, we don't have adequate social support
01:12:06.020systems in almost any way. And that's becoming increasingly true when I think about the barriers
01:12:14.040to accessing health care to women and to queer folks. It's increasingly valid to mistrust the1.00
01:12:21.480powers that be, which is also a phrase that the crunchy to all right pipeline has weaponized.
01:12:26.480It is increasingly valid to mistrust them. And because we have this like every man for himself,
01:12:34.540bootstrap your way to success no one's going to help you but you general american attitude
01:12:40.880that like paves the way for potentially ill-intentioned figures to come in and be like
01:12:47.020the government's not going to save you i will and i think like what distinguishes a fan community
01:12:53.700from say an andrew tate style community is because like andrew tate would be the cult leader right
01:13:02.320Like he's actively participating and egging his followers on in a material and direct and violent way. Taylor Swift is such a little mystery. Like it's always hard to tell exactly how much she's purposefully egging on her fans. And that's like, I would call it a beige flag. But it is different. It is different from, you know, the groups where there is one singular charismatic leader, so to speak.
01:13:30.480Yeah, it definitely is. It definitely is. I guess in conclusion, I have empathy for the stands. Wish death on me though they may. I have empathy for them and I want something good, something fun, something productive for them. Where do we go from here?
01:13:47.680Oh, gosh. I really wish I had some super pithy piece of wisdom to leave us all with. I don't
01:13:55.080know. I mean, unfortunately, I learned while researching the age of magical overthinking
01:13:59.460that it is really, really hard to change other people's minds due to all of the cognitive biases
01:14:06.400each of us have at play in there. In fact, one of the most disheartening stats that I learned
01:14:11.940while researching the book was that even an increase in science literacy does not help
01:14:17.200people become savvier at distinguishing real facts. It just helps people become better at
01:14:22.580using science to defend their existing beliefs. So it's a little chalked, but I just keep coming
01:14:29.500back to this sentiment that we're actually much better at changing our own minds. And if we can
01:14:35.320kind of lead by example with self-skepticism and sort of, yeah, I guess taking steps like this
01:14:43.220not to not to be, you know, as sort of like tribalistic as we might feel pushed to be by
01:14:49.160people who are like positioning us as enemies. If we can extend empathy, if we can open up
01:14:54.380conversations, that's the only thing that's been able to help me get through this particularly
01:14:59.540culty time. I could leave with this sentiment. So on Sounds Like a Cult, we categorize every
01:15:06.340cult of the week as either a live your life, a watch your back or a get the fuck out. So like0.92
01:15:11.900i remember spoiler alert we said that trader joe's was a live your life um purity rings where i get
01:15:19.840the fuck out there are a lot of different types of watch your backs from like soul cycle to like
01:15:25.720theater kids and i would actually i would call swifties a hardcore watch your back0.99
01:15:34.340yeah i would say it's sort of like a watch your back sun a watch your back moon and a get the0.87
01:15:41.020fuck out rising so we gotta no maybe i would say it's a wash your back sun it's a live your life
01:15:46.580moon and it's a get the fuck out rising so it's a combination of all three and and if we can have0.98
01:15:51.120a sense of levity about that it'll also help us get get through there we go the astrological
01:15:57.040warning signs of being a swifty thank you so much amanda montel thank you so much amanda montel
01:16:04.520thank you so much for being here today where can people get more of you get more into cults
01:16:11.600question mark thank you so much this was a total honor and a pleasure and i'm i'm just so impressed
01:16:17.440by what you do at this show so if folks want to keep up with me my books are available wherever
01:16:22.680books are sold my most recent one is called the age of magical overthinking and i talk more about
01:16:27.440celebrity worship in there and i also have two podcasts called sounds like a cult and magical
01:16:32.480Overthinkers. Sounds Like a Cult comes out wherever you find podcasts on Tuesdays and
01:16:37.300Magical Overthinkers comes out every other Wednesday. And if you have made it this far
01:16:42.260and are about to, I don't know, message me some new creative way to kill myself that people have
01:16:49.360not yet discovered, then go with God. I can take it. I wish the best for you. And if Taylor Swift
01:16:58.400as the messiah I hope she's coming soon
01:17:00.520to save us all from the hell that we're living