As a woman in my early thirties, it is my God-given right – arguably my duty – to have an opinion when Taylor Swift releases an album. And it’s a role that I’ve always performed without compunction. But on this occasion – the release of album 12, The Life of a Showgirl, my ability to get into the weeds (does ‘The Fate of Ophelia’ represent close text analysis of Shakespeare?) was hampered by my shock at one particularly audacious lyric.
Previous albums have had the the odd raunchy moment. So when, on this new album, she sang ‘His love was the key that opened my thighs’ in a song titled ‘Wood’, I was unmoved. In a similar vein, when she sang ‘I can make deals with the devil because my dick’s bigger’, I was merely appreciative of the transgressive message about the music industry’s obsession with nurturing talent until that talent has any hint of a backbone. It wasn’t until track seven, titled ‘Actually Romantic’, that I detected any hint of a taboo being broached – because comments about big dicks and cocaine are small fry compared with a line in ‘Actually Romantic’.
The song, which is rumoured to be a swipe at ‘brat summer’ materfamilias Charli XCX, is a monologue about finding another woman’s obsession with her adorable and endearing. It features the lyrics ‘You think I’m tacky, baby/ Stop talking dirty to me/ It sounded nasty, but it/ Feels like you’re flirting with me/ I mind my business, God’s my witness that I don’t provoke it/ It’s kind of making me wet.’
Making. Me. Wet. If you’re not a life-long worshipper at the church of Swift then it’s hard to understand just how unthinkable it once was for the most wholesome of the pop princesses – a genuine Disney dream of a young woman – to acknowledge that she’s had sex, let alone experienced arousal. For years Swift was the pop star that parents wanted their teenage daughter to admire, a well-mannered apolitical sweetheart who baked cookies and used three-syllable words in her songwriting.
It wasn’t until Reputation, Swift’s sixth album, released when she was 27 years old, that she so much as swore for the first time. Mad as it might sound, I still remember lying in bed at 5 a.m., having woken especially to listen to the whole thing, and literally gasping at hearing the ultimate good girl do something so transgressive as swearing. If you’d told me then that a mere eight years later she’d sing a song lyric about vaginal lubrication, I would have been quite literally unable to believe you.
For years Swift was the pop star that parents wanted their teenage daughter to admire, a well-mannered apolitical sweetheart who baked cookies and used three-syllable words in her songwriting
For the avoidance of doubt, Swift is by no means the first person to sing about getting wet, even if you discount Gene Kelly. The song of summer 2020 was Cardi B’s ‘WAP’, which stands for Wet Ass Pussy (unless you’re listening to the child-friendly Kidz Bop remix, in which case it’s Waffles and Pancakes). Sabrina Carpenter’s most recent album Man’s Best Friend features lyrics including ‘I get wet at the thought of you/ Being a responsible guy/ Treating me like you’re supposed to do/ Tears run down my thighs’. Not a libretto likely to see her invited to play Riyadh 2026. But I’d argue that Taylor coming out with a line about physical arousal is far more of a taboo smasher than any of her predecessors because those women were Officially Sexy.
Cardi B is a gloriously unfiltered former stripper who talks openly her sexual fantasies. Sabrina Carpenter might look like a Polly Pocket but her entire brand is based around raunch. Words about wetness are a little transgressive but for the most part expected when it comes from a Sabrina or a Cardi. Taylor is something different. She’s a beautiful vanilla frappé of a woman.
By the time Britney Spears had reached Swift’s current age (35) she’d been mostly naked on dozens of magazine covers, married, divorced, had a couple of children and several rehab stints. Swift, on the contrary, is unmarried (though recently engaged) and child-free. All of her scandals have been spats with other celebrities, never a Pamela Anderson sex tape, nor a long-lens pap shot of her cheating a la Kristen Stewart. Not even a leaked nude like the ones stolen from her contemporaries Jennifer Lawrence, Selena Gomez and Cara Delevingne.
Whether by luck or by judgment, Taylor’s life has left her in a kind of perpetual state of plausible innocence. So when she does the unthinkable and acknowledges that even nice blonde ladies sometimes experience visceral signifiers of arousal, it’s genuinely shocking. And, to my mind at least, a kind of public service. The idea that sex is something that only a certain type of (bad) woman likes, and that the good ones merely put up with it, remains pervasive and entirely unfair, and underpins the centuries old Madonna-whore complex which manages to disadvantage both Madonnas and whores.
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