How Taylor Swift’s tour de force is a call to a New Era

Taylor Swift's outstanding achievements are a part of a progressive cultural transformation — Taylor's work is leading the political empowerment of women. The joy Swift has brought forth must be the currency that guides us in the future.

Taylor Swift's unprecedented The Eras Tour is a progressive call to action. It's an amazing groundbreaking five-star dazzling show by Swift. All those watching in the crowd displayed what many of us know, but so many deny — that peoples' natural state consists within the values of cohesion, cooperation, community, and that the human emotions and behaviours of leisure, love, togetherness, and happiness are closest to our true nature.

These are not things that those who control capital, and cash, care too much for; it's innumerable, for what is the price of joy? What is the value of happiness? This is what scares the rich the most. Whilst money remains a hidden fiction, feelings are tangible; and in women, young women, we have a new political power awakening who will put what is right first. This is not to confuse this cohort as feeling orientated or ruled by emotions, something I would argue men exhibit far more, but that the logic of these decisions is our lives should be organised around happiness, joyfulness, and fairness; "we can be strong and wear pink", as Swift put it.

We only need to look at one of Taylor Swift's distant relatives, Emily Dickinson, for a sense of why we should revolve our ideals and our political arrangement away from money, and utilise positive emotions and be open and understanding of emotions themselves:

A light exists in spring

Not present on the year

At any other period.

When March is scarcely here

____________

A color stands abroad

On solitary hills

That science cannot overtake,

But human nature feels.

Some people try to dismantle the emotions of women as silly, this is propaganda, and in order to achieve this they disparage Taylor's fantastic storytelling; so they sneer and write articles on the 'uselessness of those academic courses' created to analyse her music, or they speak of the tour only in terms of financial success, of people giddy, and spending the avocado money on frivolities, which can't be argued against, The Eras Tour is a huge success, but is that how anyone who has seen Taylor's performance would judge it by? Those men who sit in boardrooms or those journalists quivering at The Economist would like to reduce it all to financial numbers and profit. And yes, again, it is a momentous success by those metrics. But those right-wing commentators are used to progressive movements being poor, small, people picketing, labour scrapping for demands, and those activists gnawing at the corner of mainstream discourse; of course, that is what the billionaires would prefer, because when you're at the edge of things there is little ability to invoke meaningful change. You can't change what you cannot see. What we have here with The Eras Tour and the Barbie movie is more akin to the moment in the last season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer; when all the young women would-be-slayers receive their power — so 82,000 people in Sydney scream "f**k the patriarchy", and a force is awoken.

Notwithstanding that Taylor Swift has given a living wage to those working for her, has given huge financial bonuses to those who have worked on the tour, has gifted — in the style of Dolly Parton — huge donations to charity, and has paid for the climate off-set of her tour; essentially showing that billionaires, who sit like dragons on their hordes of wealth, have been a part of the greatest theft of wealth the world has ever seen. That wealth drastically needs to be reorganised and redistributed. And the latest billionaire to join them is not on their side. In fact, this redistribution of wealth may be what the world's very fate and existence depend upon.

There are many pitted against this change, and they are drawing violent cultural battle lines. I speak to the neo-far-right-fanatical politic which has established manufactured outrage that men are losing, as shown from those reactionary self-serving individuals such as Donald Trump and Andrew Tate who cling to and promote a violent male-first toxic masculine ideology: eliciting in men, but sometimes women too, the strong emotions of hate, fear, and anger.

Donald Trump often exhibits emotionally unhinged behaviour, yet his emotional aspect, as a negative, rarely comes into the analysis of his violent authoritarian speeches. As we look to a presidential rematch in the USA between fascism or the farcical; we may well be tempted to say to Taylor Swift, with a full heart, as Phillip Seymour Hoffman did to Katniss Everdeen, "this is the revolution, and you are the Mockingjay". But fixing the world is not Taylor Swift's job, nor has she signed up to be a politician. Swift is an incredible writer, performer, singer, and all-round inspiration; she has, at risk to herself, given her voice to causes and continues to push explicitly for positive changes in the world. It would be unfair to ask more of her than that which her conscious has already provided and continues to give; she is at heart an exceptional storyteller and her cultural truths, her perspectives, are voiced so eloquently; she beautifully shares them in song, and we see in her songs the piercing of patriarchal ideology and the dismantling of harmful, controlling, toxic masculinity. The "deprogramming of misogyny" as Swift says in her documentary Miss Americana — misogyny to which so many women are subjected to, daily.

There are commentators who state that having such a large social media platform of 280 million means Swift must directly intervene on every political issue. Allow me to dispel that notion. Swift has worked hard to cultivate a platform of fans and followers and she is simultaneously relentlessly criticised, judged and subjected to terrible abuse on such platforms (just look at the conspiracies and vile directed at Swift on X, formerly Twitter). To hold an individual to this level is a double standard of epic proportion when, for example, a chocolate producer like Kraft, sells over 1 billion chocolate bars a year, but can't even remove child labour from their own supply chains. So, we are meant to pressure Swift into changing the world? Seems very unfair. That said, Swift is changing the world; not necessarily always in the explicit direct call to action, though she has done this selectively, but by the nature and messaging contained within her songs which elevate the politic away from everyday discourse, and into a new realm, beyond which the uncovering of subjective cultural and gendered exploitation can be seen.

It's in the millions seeing and hearing Taylor Swift, listening to her music, it's from those pool of people where there will be many who will take-up the call and hold the political mantle of change, leaders who will realise and fulfil the ultimate exercise of female political strength. Ensuring that voting by the ballot box brings real and lasting change. Emancipation from the worst-ills of capitalism, the ending of the peoples' subservience to capital interests, and the equality of the many, over the few. Yes, there will be leaders in this movement, and the fact is this will be a political charged majority of women, those taught for so long to say "sorry", for no reason, taught to be submissive, but whom, like a widening cataclysmic crack in a dam, will change, and release a powerful river of their newfound political capital.

Intrinsically linked to this new political force is the dismantling of toxic masculinity. But men have reorganised extreme responses to this forthcoming deluge, so we have from Incels to Andrew Tate/Donald Trump fanatics; but any logical evaluation of men's control of the world can only be deemed as a colossal failure: the men in the boardrooms don't care for feelings, yet are clearly obsessed with their own insecurities, seeking ever more accumulation, and pushing around their squashed emotions and bruised egos in the most pernicious ways for the world. As the climate crisis destroys the fabric of the environment in which we live, we have not answers from billionaires, but we see the illogical ends of their absurd accumulation; such an example being that Mark Zuckerberg plans to fight Elon Musk in a violent cage match — "You need to calm down", indeed! Or, for those not privy to some $200B in wealth, the 'real-man' is now about eating a whole cow (eat as much meat as possible, it's 'manly'; Freud would have a field day), punching someone, firing a gun, and being the absolute biggest first letter of the Greek alphabet; these are the signifiers of success for this reactionary man – please, can someone take the decisions away from men: we are desperately overwrought, out of ideas, prone to self-harm, exhausted, emotional, illogical and, frankly, in need of therapy.

Yet, emotion is the powerful weapon here; despite being long discarded and floating away from capital accumulation like the country of plastic in the ocean the size of Texas. An example being how often there is no emotion in the news reporting of, for example, when a listed company does badly, it speaks in terms of 'righting a ship' and then fires 10,000 people to 'make things right'. People who were doing their jobs, right: 10,000 lives turned-upside-down because the business didn't make a quarterly projection. Only for 12 months later, as was the case of Facebook, the same company enjoys record profits — shareholders are the ones who enjoy the productivity of the value of that year's labour, by those who weren't fired, but lived under that threat of it; and the congrats goes to, for some reason, often, the same person who did poorly before? And those getting richer are those who are already rich; 81 people own half of the world's wealth. That's not an accident; that's by design. And an attempt to label Taylor Swift among them is to forgo the resources they have and that we can use to create lasting positive change. Money is ill-equipped to deal with today's problems, but a bit of it waters the seed of change we so desperately require.

Taylor's art reached millions and millions of people: people who were amazed by all her achievements; her performance; the thoughtful pageantry; the mastery lyrical poetry; and her stage at The Eras Tour not splitting people apart like a spear, but like two hands cradling people to come together, and every crowd found in themselves a wonderful cacophony of joy. A complete antithesis to the world at large which is beset with tribalism, winners/losers, power, and control. As we have seen the bodily rights of women stripped away in the USA; we're seeing a cultural reactionary level of warmongering that the world has not seen since World War 2. That, by no coincidence, concerns, almost exclusively, male leaders across the world — men who are goosestepping the entire world to greater and greater tragedy, so the near unheard chime, that sabre rattle, of nuclear war has been commenced. Under this threatening context, full female empowerment, full female awakening as a political force will be the only means that can save humanity. The patriarchal toxic masculinity that has prevented women from this emancipation is unwinding as wonderfully as Swift's percussion playing.

This is not to undermine or reduce the credit which is wholly due to those individual women who have fought their entire lives for women's rights; now and in the past, such as Emmeline Pankhurst, or to those who continue to push forward feminism via new innovative methods such as Hannah Ferguson, here in Australia, of the fabulous Cheek Media, or to those who have worked diligently to re-examine male identity such as the author and commentator Liz Plank, with her fantastic work For the Love of Men ... however, to invoke a rule of war, it's almost impossible to win a battle at soldier odds of 3-1, against. This is why male silence is, and always has been, complicity; thanks to these countless individuals, and to the millions who are now experiencing Taylor Swift or Barbie, we stand now at the turning of the tide (for the Swifties it would be the switching of those two numbers around and chucking out the dash) and we need only a little more to move the mountains which oppress women, and humanity, as a whole, and likewise, it will cause great change for men – whose violence towards women is at an epidemic level. Men have much to gain from this change: as we see the highest cause of death for men below 50 is suicide. We can see here that women are being attacked; men are extremely distressed and taking their own lives – we have a common place to stand, united, and to make things better.

We must acknowledge, at this point, whilst we wish to be together, that there is no absolute uniformity of experience here and that the experience of women of colour is unique and, in many ways, the racial discrimination they have suffered and continue to suffer will require additional and unique solutions, and in certain instances include reperations. We do see, however, that male violence, broadly speaking, crosses all national borders, races, religions, so it is by this conformity that I state it must be tackled as one issue.

We must quickly dispel any notion that the expansion of women's rights and political power does detract from the rights of men. It only serves to enhance them. People gaining rights does not remove your rights (I say as I try in vain to get through to a male peer who "just really doesn't like Taylor", despite not listening to any of her music...). As mentioned earlier, there are those who exploit this period of transformational change to evoke a regressive, violent, and sexist agenda. These individuals, such as Trump or Tate, play the victim, whilst being outwardly and clearly perpetrators of violence against women in both specifically their own actions, but also offering a wider cloak to men who would use this cover to explain away their own misogyny, bigotry, violence and privilege. Jordan Peterson writes pseudo-intellectual nonsense to give whatever this revisionist 'faux-male' form is, a paperback version. This is the difficult and dangerous political opposition which we will need to overcome, a loud minority; an aggressive oppositional force whose focus is split between hating 'the other' and being angry about how Taylor Swift is attending a sports game. Meanwhile, Swift's fans share bracelets, hugs and compliments at her concerts. They are actively seeking betterment and change; but, for this to win, we must overcome these reactionary campaigns which attempt to turn the narrative, 'men into victims', oft-funded by rich people scared of a cohesive equal society. These people try to make men scared that they are becoming: the losers. Going as far as to gaslight women into thinking they are the ones hurting men.

As an example, I recently met a friend for a drink, she and her new girlfriend, and we got to discussing my friend's living arrangement — she has a flatmate, a man, who she had met via a flat sharing website, my friend explained to us (and her girlfriend) that she was living with 'a nice guy' (I know, aren't they all...), but he was a Trump and Tate listener/supporter; my friend gave us a jolt when she repeated the much mistaken claim that "men are being blamed for everything, these days".

Her girlfriend and I repeated several statistics to disprove this, "1 in 3 women worldwide are abused, 1 in 3 women have experienced physical or sexual violence — mostly by an intimate partner." Not wanting to linger too much on these statistics on a sunny day in Sydney, we spoke about the recent thick heat in New South Wales, and mentioned the Coogee Rock Pools, so the conversation fell upon the nearby McIver's Ladies Baths — the only one in all of Australia to be exclusively for women and children. To which my friend, suggested, parroting slightly what her flatmate had told her, "Where is the exclusive pool for men?". We had to say that ALL spaces are safe spaces for men. As a man, I am aware of this privilege, but not nearly as aware of it as women are. As this proxy argument between me and this flatmate took hold, we spoke about the violence coming from men and this being the reason there is a need for these safe spaces, and we continued, that this hostility extends to not only women but to trans-women, who are women, and are targeted viciously under a fake guise, the man desperately seeking to reclaim the role (that never was) of the protector/saviour of women, 'to secure the safety of women', but really, given that men are the main violent perpetrators against women, transwomen are seen, wrongly, as a 'free' target for male violence. Yet, it was the fact these ideas by her male flatmate were being so seemingly unchallenged by my friend that had me worried — proving that we still have work to do; and men have a large part to play in shutting down these narratives.

It is within men, male cohorts of friendship, that we, as men, must seek to make change, regardless of the repercussions. To ensure that men in our social circles do not attack women: not as objects, not to be owned, not to be grouped, or assaulted, and that when it comes to the terrible conduct of men towards women; men cannot stand idle. Yes, this is made more difficult when male peers have disgraceful idols and false prophets such as Trump leading them against this change, filling them with angry emotions, and this means we have a point of conflict which progressive men must not shrink away from. I have left entire friendship groups in the past few years since I will not accept misogyny or bigotry; I deserve nor seek any praise for this; it must be the bare minimum of our contribution as men.

I have earlier mentioned Barbie — a female directed, female written, female starring behemoth of a film. A film that left many in the cinema clapping; is there a greater sign of community then when people clap together at a cinema? There's no one on stage, we are clapping to show each other our appreciation for the experience that we have been through, and how happy we are that others were there to join us. So enchanted by what we have seen on the silver screen that we clap to each other. When I saw Barbie at the cinema (twice) there were many, many people clapping. Many, many women.

Many on the self-sabotaging Left, and those champagne socialists in the Academy of Motion Pictures, dismissed this great film; often the main critique being that it's an advert for a company. Like with Taylor Swift, the political force of Barbie, is not in the money, though it did make a lot of it, as we have discussed, money isn't real, but feelings are and in the story telling of Barbie nothing encapsulates this better than the amazing America Ferrera, whose performance and monologue showed, to millions and millions of women (and many allies/feminists like myself), the entrapment of illogical contradictions that women face; at a time where, for those in the USA, their political will and their bodily autonomy, their basic human rights, have been stripped away by an unelected court — whose three most recent appointments were made by a proven rapist. We are seeing through the misogynistic veil and being wildly entertained at the same time. Women are wonderful multitaskers, as the saying goes.

Another perfect example of this movement forward is that of the joyous Women's World Cup that took part in Australia in 2023. Women's sport has often been decried by misogynists as boring, needless, or not real sport. Watching the continent of Australia, and the world, come together to celebrate these extraordinary talented teams was overwhelming. I knew individuals who have never had any interest in any sport, but ended up loving the WWC23. And at the time of writing, Arsenal Women's, my team, have broken attendance record after attendance record. The quality on show is amazing, but it has been a long hard road for women's football. Organised football for women was banned in the UK until as late as 1971 — men have had a misogynistic leg-up for a long time. The tournament was a great step in the right direction, but, and by no means to make light of it, we couldn't make it through the medal ceremony without a sexual assault occurring — so we do have a long way to go: a long fight ahead.

However, in all this, in these events, in their popularity, their reach, we have the seeds of change and the messages in these powerful stories, the feelings that are taken forward, feelings that have pierced through the farcical patriarchal society. Many would want you to think these aren't real ideas or real ideals because they reached us via mediums of leisure which were hugely profitable — again, nothing is more fearful to the current contemporary structures of capitalism than the ideals of change no longer lying with the fringes, but being right there, centre stage, screaming to millions how things should be, and that storytelling, leisure, is the real natural state of humanity.

As Emily Dickinson puts it, "but only human nature feels.", and we know what feels right and what feels just; and Taylor Swift will spend 21 months showing a whole generation of women (and I use generation regardless of age, but as in all those present, all those alive now, seeing, witnessing; yes, this includes many younger women who have decades ahead of them to change the world) and that this generation of women, and their allies, will become that firestorm of change, burning away the old white toxic poisonous trees, and all men must speak up and join them, or get the hell out of their way!

- So, It's men, hi (hi), we're the problem, it's men (we're the problem, it's men).

*Note to reader: I was fortunate enough to see Taylor Swift perform in Sydney; my partner got tickets several months before, and not wanting to take the ticket from someone who would love this concert; I went on to read, educate myself, take-in everything I could on Taylor Swift and listen to her whole catalogue of music. It did not take long before I became a true, glorious, Swiftie. I penned this article with a home-made wristband from her concert on my right arm.

P.S. As an Arsenal season ticket holder of 15+ years and a proud fan of Arsenal and Arsenal Women (but not proud of the discrimination which persists in the sport I love) I would love for Taylor Swift to be at an Arsenal game, or a fan of the game I love (football/soccer). You can only understand how NFL fans can be angry at Taylor Swift for attending an NFL game, bringing with her more fans to their uniquely North American sport, when you understand toxic masculinity.