00:02:18.160This is the Culture Study Podcast, and I'm Anne-Helen Peterson.
00:02:24.280I'm Margaret H. Willison, and I am a podcaster, a culture writer,
00:02:29.800and I work as faculty for the company Not Sorry Productions.
00:02:33.660I think both of our past being very online for the last decade plus
00:02:39.840makes it so that we're very familiar with the contours of this outrage,
00:02:45.100But this, I think, felt slightly different. It felt like a culmination in some ways. And we're going to get into all of that. But I think we should also talk about the fact that like being mad at celebrities is not new. Right. And we're not going to talk today about people who have like committed crimes. Right.
00:03:02.320we're not talking about being mad at people who are sexual abusers like we're not talking about
00:03:08.300being mad at Harvey Weinstein right we're talking more about like anger at people's decisions
00:03:16.040that are usually somewhat low stakes or people's affiliations with other people who seem not on
00:03:25.520brand right right and that can even mean like things like they have not been as thoughtful
00:03:32.340in the way that they've talked about other people right like there's there's just a lot here and
00:03:39.620and a lot of it too is like having big feelings about people who you don't personally know
00:03:46.400and how that can sometimes be framed as outrageous over like oh yeah like like feminized like all
00:03:54.740these feminized emotions all these sorts of things and so we're going to try to situate some of these
00:03:59.160feelings i think that's the goal big feelings about celebrities this is normal this is totally
00:04:04.660normal and we just want to go in some of the crannies of it i'm excited the common refrain
00:04:09.560that you often see online is that like people with large platforms so celebrities people with a lot
00:04:15.040of people watching them have a responsibility to use those platforms for quote-unquote good
00:04:21.180And I think we saw this around Black Lives Matter. We saw this around how people are talking about how you should use your platform for Israel and Palestine. We saw this around like anti-Trumpness, like all sorts of things. And what is your thinking right now about what a celebrity owes other people, owes its fans, but also just owes the public?
00:04:46.200I think what a celebrity owes the public is a coherent personal understanding of how they want to interact with politics.
00:04:57.800That is really as much as we can demand of them.
00:05:02.020They should know what they're doing and they should understand why they're doing it.
00:05:08.680And, you know, that can be being Olivia Rodrigo.1.00
00:05:11.960She has very deliberately decided to make abortion access a crucial issue in her current stadium tour, right?1.00
00:05:20.780So she is giving out birth control and other materials related to that at all of her shows.1.00
00:05:27.080That's like an overtly political thing that we don't normally let pop stars do.1.00
00:05:31.760We're normally like stick with singing.
00:05:33.680But right now in this moment, it's really well received because it's reflective of the relationship that she has with her audience.
00:05:41.100And it's reflective of how she wants to be in culture.
00:05:46.920Like she wants to be somebody with a point of view.
00:05:49.440She wants to be somebody pushing conversations forward.
00:05:53.040On the flip side, you have Taylor Swift.0.99
00:05:55.540You know, if Taylor Swift did that at this stage in her career, a lot of times people will be like, why doesn't Taylor Swift do things like this with her platform?
00:06:04.400And I guess I would point to the fact that like, she is a blonde, thin woman, publicly dating an NFL tight end. And like, I can't imagine a scenario where that would have been a controversial pairing. But because of how much scrutiny is already on her, because of how many people are already invested in her narrative, it's like, well, this is a this is obviously a CIA stunt.
00:06:29.220You know, this is like Joe Biden has orchestrated this to win the 2024 election.
00:06:36.860So there's more complexity to that than we imagine.0.91
00:06:40.120And Olivia Rodrigo at the outset of her career can establish some particular rules of engagement.
00:06:46.960Taylor Swift is renegotiating 20 years of engagement she's already established.
00:06:51.780And that's a much, much more challenging task.
00:06:54.680And I would say the same is true of Beyonce.0.55
00:06:57.680I think one thing historically that we, and you mentioned this, is that there has been this expectation that performers should stay in their lane in subcapacity, right?
00:07:08.420Like singers should sing and movie stars should be beautiful and act in movies.
00:07:13.720And I think that that expectation has mostly been levied on white performers.0.80
00:07:18.620It's like whiteness should not be political, which, you know, that's a statement in and of itself.0.70
00:07:25.340whereas performers of color there's always been an expectation that like you're in in part because0.67
00:07:31.360like your very presence your popularity is political that there is yeah it's understood
00:07:38.320to be political yes that there is an expectation that you should also like if you don't speak out
00:07:43.640if you are a person of color then like somehow you aren't using your platform and in the way
00:07:49.720that is expected but i think like what we now expect of taylor swift is also what is a cultural
00:07:56.720expectation of white women more generally which is like you can't be complacent like it's not enough
00:08:02.560and the thing that people will point to the most specifically with taylor swift and this came up
00:08:07.780a lot with matt healy because he'd made controversial comments around queerness and about
00:08:15.060queer people and they were like well she has declared herself to be a queer ally and she has
00:08:20.120used queer coded imagery and all of her work therefore she is profiting off her queer fans0.85
00:08:26.440and like therefore like she can't profit off of them and then like make her concerts not a safe0.67
00:08:32.160space by possibly dating someone who said some stuff we don't like right well and i think that
00:08:38.300like some of this connects to to larger star theory which is essentially that like a star
00:08:44.000needs to have a coherent image, right? And when something happens, when they date someone, when
00:08:49.580they say something, when they're caught doing something that does not fit within that coherent
00:08:55.420image, that is when it becomes scandalous. So we can look at her connection to Maddie Healy
00:09:03.640as scandalous because of exactly what you were laying out. Whereas like Olivia Rodrigo,
00:09:09.380maybe there would be some scandal if she hadn't done the work both in the lyrics to her songs0.95
00:09:16.320and in other parts of her image to separate herself from this image as a child star yeah0.99
00:09:20.600like britney for instance like did not necessarily do that work right like there was like there are1.00
00:09:26.220other stars who have not successfully made that transition whereas i think olivia rodrigo and her
00:09:32.680team have very successfully allowed her to transition into an adult with a point of view
00:09:40.820and a feminist and reproductive rights minded point of view. And that's not to say that she
00:09:46.240doesn't get any pushback. Yeah. She has gotten significant pushback from conservatives. But
00:09:51.160that doesn't disrupt her star image that augments it. So let's get to listener questions because
00:09:56.940this will give us an opportunity to talk about Maddie Healy even more. This is from Z.
00:10:01.220whenever maddie healy is back in the news for whatever he has done this time there's a ton
00:10:07.520of conversation on social media about his famous friends like taylor swift and phoebe bridgers
00:10:12.880and how disappointed people are that they're friends where does this expectation that famous
00:10:18.440people should not be friends with controversial people come from is this a shift in general
00:10:24.140approaches to friendships or do we have different expectations of famous people okay so this is an
00:10:30.220opportunity for us to outline what makes maddie healy not a great person i like i don't even know
00:10:39.400how to say this right like right this is the thing it's what made maddie healy uh a complex
00:10:46.000factor in understanding taylor swift's star image right and then i also am like wary of saying0.73
00:10:52.340oh like he's complex when he said shitty things right does saying shitty things make you a shitty
00:10:58.660person sometimes i don't know like this is where i mean this is why we're doing this episode so
00:11:03.660let's let's talk about the things that he has said that are shitty it was a it was an array of things0.76
00:11:11.300yeah uh there was appearing on a podcast and telling a story about masturbating to like0.98
00:16:21.900being a socialist was like absolutely fine0.99
00:16:24.480kind of patriotic totally chill and then suddenly our relationship with the soviets shifted and it0.98
00:16:31.140was like oh yeah all of you guys who like went to one luncheon yeah you're in trouble now you better
00:16:37.460name everybody else who was at that luncheon are you too friendly with unions yeah and i think too
00:16:43.080like even when you think about i don't know stars in the 1980s like if you look at press photographs
00:16:49.760photographs like people who are like oh here's me with ronald reagan right like here's jane fonda
00:16:55.780with ronald reagan or something like i actually don't know if that picture exists that might be
00:16:59.600a bridge too far but jane fonda is a chameleon right like she has jane fonda's a wild outlier0.67
00:17:04.340yes in that respect um she is a figure who's always insistently politicized her star image
00:17:12.180even when she received massive massive blowback and punishment for it and so i think that like
00:17:18.340what we've come to understand now and I think this has become more acute post-Trumpism is that like
00:17:27.180if you are friends with someone who voted for Trump or conversely if you are friends with
00:17:32.440someone who voted for Biden that you can't be friends with that person yeah that is a betrayal
00:17:37.320of your politics and that's another conversation to have but that's part of why people are angry
00:17:42.860I think yeah but there was definitely the question where it's like have all friendships
00:17:45.780changed that way and it's like kind of like taylor's just gonna have it worse than we are
00:17:51.280but like we are all scrutinized in this way just the same i remember when sydney sweeney was just
00:17:57.980on the upswing with fame and like people realized that her family might be conservative and like
00:18:04.000suddenly it was like well wait then what is sydney sweeney conservative and now the conservatives0.94
00:18:09.660are kind of like well yeah she is and she's also conventionally femininely hot so like she's our0.98
00:18:14.640girly now listen she grew up in spokane washington which is two hours from where i grew up which is
00:18:20.600where the good mall was and it was so important it is hard to grow up in that area right and and
00:18:28.460not like not have any trump voters in your family yes 100 and you are not responsible for your
00:18:35.060family's voting history like right friends are different than family in this capacity but uh
00:18:40.900yeah I mean this is a hard one well I think it is also just so complicated the thing I would
00:18:47.200always come back to with this is that like especially at the outset of Taylor Swift's
00:18:52.120relationship with Maddie Healy like she has known him for 10 years right like they've been in each
00:18:57.300other's orbit and they've been friends for that long and so what I would say to my students is I
00:19:01.500was like can you entertain the possibility that she actually knows him better than you do right
00:19:08.800Right. He doesn't seem great. But there's all this contextual reason why he may be performing shittiness. If you read about him, that's very in line with him. And then there's also just like context collapse, which is as soon as he went into that stratosphere, it's like he was doing a Nazi salute at concerts.
00:19:28.340And it's like he was doing the Nazi salute to indicate that he thought Kanye West and Donald Trump were fascists.
00:19:39.040He was not doing it to express his allegiance with him.
00:19:41.700It's like, well, what is he doing the Nazi salute for at all?0.69
00:19:44.020The mere fact that he feels comfortable doing it is sus.
00:19:48.160And what I think this is, is we have the allegiance to the stars that we love and we know they're imperfect.
00:19:57.120But one of the ways you purify yourself, one of the ways you identify, I love Taylor Swift, but I'm still a good person, is by scrutinizing satellite figures of Taylor Swift that you don't have that degree of investment in.
00:20:10.440And just being like, you know I'm a good Taylor Swift fan because I'm going to make 16 posts about how problematic Maddie Healy is.
00:20:17.040And that is how I am going to show that even though I still admire this complex, complicated and imperfect star, I am not imperfect in the same ways she is.
00:20:29.200I am not failing to show up in the ways I know she is because I can say this guy who I didn't ever care about before is like absolutely terrible.
00:20:38.180That is a very convincing theory to me.
00:21:10.380And I think it is this really tricky thing.
00:21:12.760And this is something that our company works with more generally.
00:21:15.460But it's basically like we have moved so much of our identity and so much to our value definition and so much of like the meaning making of our life has moved into fandom of various kinds.
00:21:28.200And then you have that incredibly complicated moment where it's like, well, yeah, my entire political consciousness is influenced by Harry Potter.
00:21:37.820And now J.Q. Rowling is like aggressively transphobic.
00:21:42.460It's like, well, does that mean my politics have been transphobic this whole time?
00:21:47.520Like, it's not like you can go back and undo your cultural attachments.
00:21:53.000So something that we work on at my company and that I think about a lot independent of it is just like, what is the non-toxic way to love your problematic fave?
00:22:02.220Like, what do you do with the fact that, like, okay, you've given Taylor Swift this position of incredible importance in your life, and she is, like, the number one greenhouse gas-producing pop star with her private jets.
00:22:20.820How do you indicate, like, I love her, but this is bad?
00:22:25.260You know, I found myself in one of the culture study threads the other day, like, again, defending private jets.
00:22:31.640And I'm like, what? What is wrong with me? But I was like, yeah, she Taylor Swift needs private jets to go do, you know, like that. That's messed up. But that's where we find ourselves.
00:22:43.740it's messed up but it's not it's not untrue it's like she lives an incredibly unsafe life
00:22:48.800and like i can actually i can i can slice it real fine you know initially when the guy who
00:22:54.500tracked all the celebrity jets was like tweeting out her location they were like this is an invasion
00:23:00.400of her privacy you are making her vulnerable to stalkers this is unacceptable and he was like oh
00:23:04.160okay great i'll delay the notifications by 24 hours yeah i was like great work you solved it
00:23:10.400And they were like, no, we're still suing you.
00:23:12.260And I was like, no, you're not suing because of safety.
00:23:16.140You're suing because of image management.
00:23:41.640I think I realized that celebrity outrage had gone too far when my friend said she didn't like a certain actor anymore, but she couldn't remember what he had done.
00:23:52.920I have also felt this way, and it's exhausting.
00:23:56.540But I also find it annoying when someone has no idea what's going on and plays Kanye in a yoga class the same week he said some vile stuff.
00:24:05.160do you think there's a happy medium between being engaged and being clueless and or not caring
00:24:11.320is it always essentially about picking your battles uh I feel like last week I was talking
00:24:18.180about a star and someone said isn't he canceled yeah and we we debated for like 10 minutes I was
00:24:23.700like I don't think he's canceled I don't think so and that we had to like google is someone
00:24:28.380canceled like that's such a an umbrella understanding of us trying to affix bad good
00:24:35.200as if they're like roles in a melodrama to various actors and it is rarely that complex but that's us
00:24:42.860trying to seek moral clarity I think particularly in a post me too era moment yeah also this was
00:24:50.880happening to some extent before do you have a celebrity that you feel this way about you're
00:24:54.640like oh like is this person canceled like i can't remember i mean i think aziz ansari is like the
00:25:01.580most complicated example of this because his quote-unquote expose felt like the moment that
00:25:09.020the internet agreed me too had gone too far but also his behavior is documented in the piece which0.71
00:25:14.080was mostly being like very pushy about wanting to receive oral sex and like not skilled and uh not0.93
00:25:21.960considerate and kind of cold wasn't great and it wasn't aligned with his star image which was0.93
00:25:28.260very consciously feminist and like feminist particularly around questions of casual dating
00:25:34.300because he'd written his like online dating guidebook with some social scientists right so
00:25:39.160it is honestly something he should have been called out for probably not the way he was called
00:25:43.320out for it but then it's like well because it came up from an inappropriate place should we disregard
00:25:49.140it do i as a feminist do i just have to like hold a grudge against disease and sorry forever
00:25:54.900he's since done comedy that like addressed the allegations and like demonstrated that he reckoned
00:26:01.620with it we haven't had any further allegations and it's like wait but isn't that what he's
00:26:06.380supposed to do growth like isn't that the the gallant path right yeah like louis ck's over0.99
00:26:11.940your goofus right like would we rather them like double down on being an asshole and like become a0.99
00:26:18.000hero of the right which some of them have done right would be very profitable like aziz ansari0.99
00:26:23.080maybe his agent is like aziz couldn't you have just done your heel turn seriously you'd gotten
00:26:29.600what you could from netflix yeah it's time for your fox news era they love they love indian
00:26:35.440conservatives but yeah so it's one of those things where it's like because we don't have a path to
00:26:40.640sort of reconciliation uh we end up stuck where it's like do I just have to feel chagrined for
00:26:49.280liking this person for the rest of my life luckily I'm not that attached to Aziz Ansari's work so
00:26:54.460it's more like a fascinating case study I'm trying to think if I have any like I obviously have
00:27:01.120problematic faves like I'm a human being in the world you know our previous conversation about
00:27:06.040JK Rowling is instructive here because I think and I know that like the work that your organization
00:27:11.880does is also thinking through this part of why like fandom has in some ways taken this
00:27:19.660secular position of moral guidance right like it is a way that in the absence of faith traditions
00:27:27.400that are meaningful to us that we come up with senses of how the world works ways of making
00:27:32.520things legible yes and then when something happens that that questions that moral universe
00:27:40.440right or that unsettles it yes the same way like people have crises of faith all the time so it
00:27:46.380makes sense that we also would have crises of fandom we just don't have any tools to deal with
00:27:52.180it yes that's the thing is that like if you are within the church or within a religious organization
00:27:58.000and you have a crisis of faith like there are many different ways some of them i think like
00:28:02.400more welcoming and understanding than others to work through that crisis of faith. And maybe you
00:28:10.160end up leaving the faith, maybe you don't, whatever it is. I don't think that we have
00:28:14.420established those mechanisms of care, self-care too, when we're having these crises of faith
00:28:20.360within a fandom. And I think that it is absolutely right that like fandom serves the same role that
00:28:26.240like faith communities did back when faith communities had more meaning to more Americans.
00:28:31.040But what is different is that within a faith community, the ways that community functioned as a community, right, and the way that it functioned as a way for making meaning from your life and understanding the world around you and building a moral consensus, like, those things were all defined.
00:28:50.920and it is very accidental that fandom has become the place that we get this information from and
00:28:58.020so we don't have these formalized paths defined for like how do I take this feeling of community
00:29:03.860that I have and turn it into a community that actually functions in my life yeah I put so much
00:29:09.680energy out to the things that I love and I do so much work both with like my time and my money and
00:29:18.760my energy to demonstrate the importance of this thing to me. But do I know how to get some of that
00:29:25.680energy back from it? And faith traditions had a method for that. And so what our company does is
00:29:30.780we do apply faith tradition practices, but to secular material. And the idea, I lead a lot of
00:29:37.200Jane Austen pilgrimages. And the way I joke about it is it's like, well, I can often have a hard
00:29:41.520time taking my life seriously. But I've never had a hard time taking Jane Austen seriously.
00:29:46.120Like that's always come very naturally to me. And when I am consciously putting my life in conversation with that, it can bring some of that seriousness back around to my life. It can dignify like the process of defining my own values. So I don't think I'm just navel gazing. It's like, no, like I'm studying literature and I'm understanding my feelings. And I understand one of those things is important. And that makes the other one important too.
00:30:13.060yeah thank you for explaining to what your company does because I think like even just
00:30:17.720the word company like doesn't it's not even like organized I feel like organization is a better
00:30:22.580word right yeah I think organization is a great word yes
00:30:25.500hey everyone it's Anne I wanted to catch you up on all the episodes we're working on so you have
00:30:33.420plenty of time to submit your questions we're doing an episode on weird TikTok trends so if
00:30:38.740there's something that you keep seeing on your for you page and you want an explainer let us know
00:30:44.180we're also looking for your questions and prompts for an episode about ben affleck with the great
00:30:48.900jen romolini who just wrote a fantastic book about ambition and we also want to hear from you about
00:30:55.360your favorite and least favorite home renovation shows and what they signal about class our guest
00:31:01.360for that one is jonathan minhivar and i am so excited he's the host of classy if any of these
00:31:07.220ideas spark something in you, submit your question at tinyurl.com slash culture study pod. And if
00:31:14.280none of them inspire you, head to the form anyways and tell us what you want to deep dive on. Again,
00:31:19.820that's tinyurl.com slash culture study pod. Okay, thanks. And back to the show.
00:31:29.420Okay, so let's talk a little bit about working through that conflict in yourself.
00:31:33.440this question comes from kylie in the vein of celebrity anger my best friend is a die-hard
00:31:39.700swifty who also seems to hate taylor swift it's the wildest juxtaposition to me she listens to0.96
00:31:46.440her music frequently tried maybe 10 times to get era's tickets even waking up at like four in the
00:31:51.740morning once to try and follows all the taylor stuff online and yet when she talks about her
00:31:57.840it's almost with vitriol and constant criticism like she loves her but hates her as a public
00:32:03.380figure some of the critique is super valid and i totally agree with it but i'm curious what that
00:32:09.060is and if there are larger patterns of this is it internalized misogyny a grudge over not being
00:32:14.180able to get tickets valid criticisms it's interesting to see a super fan publicly hate
00:32:19.620this person whose art they truly deeply love it's very conflicting feelings i kind of want to
00:32:25.840interview this person because i wonder if it is like like is it that this person is working through
00:32:34.020exactly what we were talking about like using their fandom of taylor swift to also reflect on
00:32:40.240what do i believe in my life how do i think commerce should work right like how do i think
00:32:44.800all of these different things should work so that might be the case right that they are doing some
00:32:49.620self-interrogation but part of me also thinks that maybe they're embarrassed yeah i mean it was very
00:32:55.780funny because the caller gave a list of a bunch of different things that it could be and i was
00:32:59.780like well i think the answer to this question is like yes like yes it's frustration at how difficult
00:33:06.200it is to access taylor swift's art and like just she's so good at being a capitalist and you can
00:33:13.920just like feel all of that value being mined out of you and you're like oh right i i can't not buy
00:33:20.880this commemorative new vinyl but also I resent you for knowing how to make me buy it and it's
00:33:26.640like is it internalized massage it's like oh isn't everything and then like is it valid critique like
00:33:32.080absolutely of course it's valid critique right like am I also conscious of the ways that like
00:33:37.960I need to counter performance of fandom which might be more like overly feminized with like
00:33:43.140a critique that kind of cool girl negates it right like exhausting that's first of all that0.96
00:33:49.560sounds exhausting to me but yes sure I mean living in the world as a woman is exhausting
00:33:53.880the first thing that I thought of when I read this question was um James Baldwin said it's like
00:34:00.640I love America more than any other country in the world and exactly for this reason I insist on the
00:34:06.000right to criticize her perpetually it's like you know put in Taylor Swift and pop star and like
00:34:11.900that's I feel like the sentiment it's like if you have dedicated all this time and energy to loving
00:34:18.280her there is this sense of like okay so she owes me to like not embarrass me in public she owes me
00:34:25.720not embarrass me to like make her tickets harder to scalp and I think unfortunately like that's not
00:34:33.420that's that's probably not a bargain that Taylor Swift has really made with you yeah yeah no I love
00:34:38.560like this idea like she owes me and and this gets to the larger question that we're talking about
00:34:43.200for this episode which is like what does a celebrity owe you and I think sometimes there's
00:34:49.240a position that a celebrity owes you nothing and I don't think that's necessarily the case right
00:34:54.240like you have paid them attention you have an adoration and and dedication and money and often
00:35:01.360in many cases that does not mean that the relationship is purely transactional and not
00:35:05.640like everything that you give them in terms of attention they must give you in terms of like
00:35:10.080right responding to that attention but i don't think that it it's an unfair expectation to say
00:35:17.020like i i do reserve the right to criticize the people that i love but what i think we have to
00:35:22.140undo is like the great evil of the early aughts blogging era which is what i like to call search
00:35:30.040engine optimized outrage right yeah like we had a lot of underemployed academics who really wanted
00:35:36.860to talk about like intersectional feminism but they couldn't just write about intersectional1.00
00:35:42.160feminism it had to be like miley cyrus at the vmas colon like how she got intersectional feminism
00:35:48.840wrong or the buzzfeed style of this was because like the people who are writing these were not
00:35:56.880people who were writing op-eds like they were not writing personal essays it was people who
00:36:01.280their responsibility was to look at twitter and say blank blank blank celebrity did blank and
00:36:06.740people are mad or the internet is mad yeah this was one of the most frustrating things about
00:36:13.280going deep on maddie healy is the number of like responsible outlets that were not reporting
00:36:19.920context that were just reporting outrage and i was like you literally i'm so sorry the cut
00:36:27.140like your job as journalists for new york magazine is to include the context and you're not
00:36:33.860You're just answering the search engine question of why should I hate Mattie Healy?
00:36:39.380And they're like, this is why people hate Mattie Healy right now.
00:36:41.900And no further thought about the legitimacy of it.
00:36:46.580So because we've search engine optimized it, it turns celebrity into this highly politicized space where like your fandom is a political action.
00:36:55.920And therefore, you conduct it with the same degree of rigor and intensity that James Baldwin conducted his relationship with the country of America.
00:37:09.920Well, and this is this is interesting, right? Because like, the way that some of these larger stars position themselves, or that the amount of importance that we have mapped onto them as celebrities, both in our own lives, but also societally, right? Like the ideologies that they have come to represent are America, right? Like, Beyonce is America. She actually explicitly is like, okay, we're interrogating all these things about in this album about America, right?
00:37:37.540but then also Taylor Swift is Americana like there are these ways that critiquing them is
00:37:44.160in essence a way of critiquing society but I absolutely agree with you that what happens is
00:37:50.440this like incredible disarticulation of that as a conversation right and this is why like a couple
00:37:57.940of months ago I wrote about Taylor Swift and like being like the pressure to be a nice girl right
00:38:06.180And, like, I had to put a paragraph at the top that said, like, I need to be very clear here that I like Taylor Swift.
00:38:12.940And I think that it's important that we are able to also have a conversation about her.
00:38:18.120And that doesn't mean that I'm a bad feminist.
00:38:20.720That doesn't mean that, like, I don't like her music or doesn't mean that I hate her, which is oftentimes the knee jerk response is like, you just hate Taylor Swift or you're just jealous, which is one that I have gotten since I started writing about celebrity.
00:38:35.300Like, the first piece I ever wrote that went viral on my old free WordPress blog was about Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson.
00:38:44.480And the response was, like, you are just jealous because you want to be dating Robert Pattinson.
00:38:53.980This is one of my favorite things that I've sort of been able to define again through my work with Not Sorry is, like, we talk about, like, you treat things as sacred.
00:39:21.300And what I say is that we are operating more in the academic tradition where it's like you show your devotion through the rigor of your engagement.
00:39:31.080I think Taylor Swift is incredibly important.
00:39:33.740And that means I think she can withstand my critical gaze.
00:39:48.560And so this is a little bit what I feel like people need to do in terms of like, how do you resolve this problem?
00:39:57.060is it's like okay you love taylor swift and you also observe that she has a lot of
00:40:02.220personal and political failings or contradictions right or contradictions yeah contradictions
00:40:09.960better word what do you do with that i think you reflect and you're like okay what is it in my
00:40:17.720value system that feels outraged by her actions right and you're like oh it's like you know she's
00:40:25.800a billionaire. And I think that's morally corrupt. And it's like, okay, well, maybe do a mutual aid
00:40:31.280fundraiser. Right? I think we need to start looking at our relationship with celebrities,
00:40:37.720not as a place where we do politics, but as the space where we discern politics. And then once
00:40:44.560you've used it as a tool of discernment, you go and you do your politics somewhere else. Overall,
00:40:50.800all, I think that is going to be a vastly more satisfying relationship with Taylor Swift than
00:40:56.480what your poor friend has right now, which sounds really tiring. So this is an elegant transition
00:41:03.700into talking about the only person that we got more submissions about than Mattie Healy,
00:41:08.940which is John Mulaney. Yeah. Let's talk about where we go from here with this one. This is
00:41:13.540from Jessie. I know why I felt so betrayed when John Mulaney cheated on his wife, but what do I
00:41:18.520do with that anger? Like I'm still over here liking his ex-wife's posts in solidarity and
00:41:23.780Mulaney's kid with his new partner is basically in preschool. I loved this question. Okay so can we
00:41:31.500let's do a little breakdown of what happened just for people who are utterly unfamiliar. We don't
00:41:37.080have to go deep but we can just we can get the basics. John Mulaney got famous as a comic and
00:41:45.180One of the kind of cornerstones of his comedy was that he was very clean cut and he had not always been.
00:41:50.380He was open about having struggles with addiction before becoming famous, but he was clean cut in his act and also in his act.0.61
00:41:59.120He was married to his terminology, like a pushy Jewish woman, and it was a life changing experience for him as an emotionally constipated Catholic boy.0.82
00:42:09.540And he did a lot of material about them that was very charming. And they had a very adorable French bulldog that they owned together. And that was very charming. And their relationship happened in public. And all of that was very charming.0.90
00:42:19.940And then very suddenly, it's like he relapsed into addiction. He went into rehab. He came out of rehab and he was getting divorced from the very adorable wife and having a relationship and a baby with Olivia Munn.
00:42:35.640And that is after many, many years of saying publicly, like, he didn't want to be a father with his previous partner.
00:42:43.280And that was just like a real cocktail.
00:42:47.460Like, this was the day that we all learned what parasocial relationships are.
00:43:04.100with with Nick Kroll is like an incredibly it's like I love it he came out he came out for like
00:43:10.94060 seconds at the Oscars and I was like oh damn it I still love John Mulaney I know and he did
00:43:16.080like the kids special that was so good uh yeah during the pandemic so I this question asker0.91
00:43:22.320says I know why I'm so mad right right but I think that she's answering her own question like0.94
00:43:27.740what do i do with that anger she's like oh i'm like i'm still liking all of his ex-wife stuff
00:43:34.220like yeah i mean the thing i actually think you're still angry you're so you're still angry because
00:43:40.500you it's it's easy i think for a lot of people to identify with the ex-wife in this position
00:43:47.660yeah anna marie tendler who at the time of their relationship was primarily a makeup artist
00:43:53.080and since then she's like publishing a memoir she's done some really fascinating photography
00:43:58.200exhibits like she's gone on to really grow in her artistic work on her own time and it's easy just
00:44:07.140like that whole no matter even if you weren't that connected to john moly like even if your
00:44:11.640parasocial relationship wasn't that strong that whole idea of like i was with a guy who said he
00:44:17.300didn't want kids and then like he had basically a midlife crisis and many different suddenly and
00:44:24.120now he's like oh and and also olivia munn you know i i don't know much about olivia munn's
00:44:30.260star image other than part of it is classic vixen she also is sort of peak cool girl right because0.99
00:44:38.720it wasn't just vixen she also came up through like i think spike tv yeah where she was sort of like1.00
00:44:45.700a booth babe who is allowed to make jokes yes and in like the guys club of like funny women0.99
00:44:51.220right very much on their terms just like the famous cool girl monologue indicates from gillian
00:44:58.060flynn's gone girl like the cool girl always exists on men's terms right it's embodying a
00:45:03.200male fantasy that is inherently threatening to women because you're like oh well this is just
00:45:08.220telling them this exists right right yeah that like there's always this option for you to go to
00:45:14.580Right. And that's one of those things where it's like you may not even know these things about her, but like you probably read a tweet one time that was like, Olivia Munn colon, how she illustrates like the cool girl mythos.
00:45:29.680Right, right, right. So in your head, Olivia Munn lives in your head as a cool girl, right? So it's what this move represents. And so you have this anger over what this represents. And it feels like I think this question asker feels maybe impotent that like there's no nothing to do with that anger except press like on the ex-wife's post.
00:45:50.780But I think maybe that, like you said, like that that's part of the processing is saying, like, what do I do with this anger?
00:45:58.480I am supportive of this woman and who she is becoming.
00:46:02.160Yeah. I'm going to look at her art exhibit.
00:46:04.200Yeah. I'm going to see these photographs that she took.
00:46:06.560I'm going to buy her memoir. And it's not just out of solidarity.
00:46:10.600It's like the reason it was such a betrayal is because Anna Marie Tendler's identity informed your understanding of who John Mulaney was.
00:46:20.020like she's not just identifiable as the one being left she herself brought a value to the
00:46:27.020relationship and it's like basically saying okay well John Mulaney introduced me to this woman
00:46:31.720but like I identify and I think that she is very cool and so now I am just going to continue being
00:46:39.140a fan of her like that's a great way to deal with the anger yeah is give this woman your attention1.00
00:46:45.400and let her see what she can do with it.1.00
00:46:47.440And as it happens, she's done great stuff with it.
00:46:50.380This is a fantastic place for us to stop,