Swiftie Rehab
For almost half her life, Martha harbored an obsessive attachment to Taylor Swift. (“Martha” is a pseudonym; like most of the sources in the piece, she asked to speak on the condition of anonymity for fear of being doxed.) She created numerous Twitter and Instagram accounts dedicated to Swift, sharing pictures of everything from her squad to her cat Meredith, tagging the star and her publicist in each caption. But the 32-year-old hit a breaking point last May when Swift began dating the 1975 front man Matty Healy. “Stuff about his past behaviors and ‘edgelordness,’ came out,” Martha says, referencing an infamous podcast appearance in which Healy mocked Ice Spice’s ethnicity. “Everything since then just felt like a veil was being lifted, and I found myself on the other side of Swiftism. Suddenly, it felt like leaving a cult.”
Martha deleted her accounts, blocked Swift on Spotify, and drove her merch down to the nearest Goodwill. But disconnecting from the world of her former favorite pop singer left her feeling adrift — until earlier this year, when the Reddit homepage suggested she join r/SwiftlyNeutral, a page for questioning Swifties like herself. “I felt less alone,” says Martha. “It was liberating knowing people cared more about these issues than their idolatry.”
When we say ‘Eat the rich,’ Taylor is not an exception.
Describing itself as a “neutral sub for casual listeners to full-blown stans to discuss controversial topics about or involving Taylor Swift,” r/SwiftlyNeutral, which launched last December, has since expanded its purview to become both a forum for Swift-related grievances and a kind of emotional-support group for former hard-core Swifties trying to deprogram. Four months after its launch, r/SwiftlyNeutral grew from several hundred active users to 50,000, putting it in the top 3 percent of forums on Reddit. After the release of Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, it climbed another 7,000.
“None of the Taylor-centered Reddits allow critical debate about her,” says James (also a pseudonym), the 25-year-old creator behind the page. When a fan complained about Swift’s private-jet usage in one such sub, a moderator deleted their comments, prompting another fan to suggest creating a neutral forum. “I just went for it,” James says, chalking up the sub’s recent popularity to Swiftian cultural saturation, including her record-breaking Eras Tour and an endless supply chain of albums, both rerecorded and new. “I think a lot of people were really starting to get sick of her.”
After reading some of the constructive criticism of Swift on the sub-Reddit, James was inclined to feel the same. “I just feel a little disillusioned with her now,” he adds. “When we say ‘Eat the rich,’ Taylor is not an exception. Taylor has done many wonderful things in regards to charity, and I don’t want to take away from that; however, her jet use, her blatant cash grabs, and her horrible merch quality have become a little more glaring.”
The sub-Reddit encompasses a vast range of Swift-questioning sentiments, including the products she sells on her website (“$70 for a snowglobe? Are you for real?!”) and the ways her concerts have impacted lawmakers in the Philippines. In one of the sub-Reddit’s early posts, a member described the forum as a “collective awakening.” But some have handled the exodus from Taylor’s world worse than others.
“Horrified and Emotional,” one member posted four months ago, after Taylor was spotted dining with Brittany Mahomes. “I’m sobbing as I’m unfollowing her on everything. Thinking about boxing up all my merch as well. Someone tell me if I’m being overdramatic …”
“How she dealt with the death of a fan during her concert in Brazil did it for me. She really is the industry of music. Ruthless and inhumane,” said another r/SwiftlyNeutral member a few days later.
“Taylor Swift was my Santa Claus and I found out she wasn’t real, so I had to grow up,” added another, with bitter earnestness.
Samantha (another pseudonym) checks in on the forum daily and understands the pain of ditching Swift for a less parasocial poetry department. “I turned almost all of my friends into Swifties,” she says. “I made it my entire personality.” But the 27-year-old began to wean herself off the pop star following her ascent to supernova fame with the release of Midnights. “A large influx of toxic fans made the entire community worse,” Samantha says. It took a while for her fellow Swiftie friends to accept her indifference. “It was a long time before people stopped buying me Taylor Swift merch for my birthday,” she says. After losing her Swift obsession, she now finds it difficult to listen to music at all: “I lost some joy. No other artist quite hits the same.”
Like longtime Swift haters, r/SwiftlyNeutrals have recently turned their attention to the pop star as a politically ineffective spokesperson. “It does feel like the identity I created of her, especially when I was a kid, fell through,” says 19-year-old Iman Rizwan, who believes that many former fans in Muslim communities like hers “have felt the same,” pointing to the singer’s lack of response on Israel’s war in Gaza. “Taylor has commended herself as a performer for the people and said that she would always stand up for what’s right. What’s happening in Palestine is atrocious, and her refusal to use her powerful voice is questionable.”
Crissa Renee, 30, another forum user, believes the tidal change against Swift represents a growing disillusionment with the cult of celebrity at large. “I absolutely see the masses recognizing that celebrities cannot be trusted,” she says. “They are in it for themselves, and they simply cannot relate to the struggle of other people. She herself did not go from rags to riches.”
Which is why some Neutral Swifties felt a point of validation last week, when a leak of The Tortured Poets Department hit the internet revealing lyrics that seem to reference the tipping point for so many questioning fans: Healy. That Swift would seemingly write an album devoted to the man who helped rupture the bond for many former fans makes Martha think she made the right move. “I’ve seen some of the lyrics, and they seem pointed, like she’s blaming her fans for forcing her out of the relationship,” she told me two days before the album came out. But she said she still had no plans to listen to it: “I don’t have time for anyone who has time for an edgelord rat.”
On the day of its official release, The Tortured Poet’s Department was largely panned across the sub-Reddit, with members complaining that it needed “heavy editing” and that it “was made for her benefit and no one else’s.” Another said it reminded them of the Marvel multiverse, “full of lore and completely impenetrable if you hadn’t already seen the first 17 movies.” The album seemed to inspire physical reactions, too, with one member saying “the synths gave me a migraine” and another noting, “put me to sleep like an ASMR makeup video.”
Yet as former Swifties gleefully critiqued the album, some began reacting as fervently as they had for her past releases. “Stans and antis are two sides of the same coin,” reasoned one poster amid a thread with hundreds of snubs. “Convincing a bunch of antis to stop paying attention to her will be about as difficult as convincing her stans to stop listening.”
Martha knows the struggle. Two days after the album’s release, she emailed me: “OK, I caved lol.” For 48 hours, she had managed to abstain from Poets entirely until “all the gossip and the lore just sucked me straight back in.” This weekend, she heard the album in its entirety while scrolling through the sub-Reddit. So was the playback worth it? “No,” she says. “Listening to someone who’s perpetually 15 has aged me. I’m pissed. But I just couldn’t help myself.”
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