Are These Guys Bothering You, Taylor?
I am humbly suggesting that tweets about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce raising the U.S. birth rate are deeply unappealing.
I didn’t want to write anything about super-couple Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce this week. Every outlet has already written plenty about them, and I’ve already promised that this midweek newsletter would be a link roundup (it is, below the cut). But here I am, drawn inexorably to the discourse because social media incentivizes everyone to argue over the same topics, leading right-wingers to shoehorn pro-natalist mania into discussions of Swift/Kelce, and me to take the bait in turn.
Swift, through talent and an algorithm-era consolidation of celebrity, is the world’s biggest pop star and Kelce, through fuckups by a badly injured postseason Buffalo Bills defensive lineup, is going to the Super Bowl. They are the A-list partnership of the moment and the right is absolutely allergic to being normal about them.
Rather than accept the ascent of a well-liked heteronormative couple as a politically neutral development (or even one compatible with conservative messaging), a loud faction of right-wing talking heads has decried Swift/Kelce as a publicity stunt intended to help Joe Biden win re-election. (Swift has endorsed liberal politicians in the past, therefore her relationship with a Super Bowl-bound football player must be a setup for an ultra-endorsement of Biden, the conspiracy theorists argue.)
It’s a bizarre stance, and other factions of the right have acknowledged as much, if only to suggest that conservatives should cheer Swift/Kelce because they might have children and encourage Americans to increase the birthrate. This argument has materialized in posts like these, which are being posited as a moderate Republican take:
The conservative birth rate panic is impossible to disentangle from a dense knot of race and gender anxieties. While strangers harangue Swift to reproduce, Black A-list singers like Beyonce and Rihanna have received markedly different treatment in motherhood. Commentators have smeared Beyonce’s pregnancies as suspicious or inauthentic, and derided Rihanna’s partner, rapper A$AP Rocky, as emasculated for daring to hold their child on a Vogue cover. (Tellingly, when a pregnant Rihanna performed at the Super Bowl halftime show last year, conservatives did not cheer her as a potential accelerator for birth rates, but attempted to undercut her own pro-choice politics.)
Demands for greater reproductive output are also demands on women’s roles in relationships, in the workplace, and in the public writ large. When people who can give birth receive access to contraception and education, birth rates generally decrease. Given financial freedom and the ability to opt into pregnancies, women as an overall population generally choose to have fewer children. To anyone who has ever valued their legal, financial, or bodily autonomy, this ought to be viewed as a positive development.
But for a conservative movement that desires strict gender hierarchies and the confinement of women to unpaid domestic work, a low birth rate suggests not just the collapse of a male-led gender order but also the depletion of two exploitable labor forces: under-resourced women and the children (future workers) they will create.
The convergence of these fears about race and gender has previously led the far right to engage in psychotic discourse about Swift as a potential mother, especially before she was open about her liberal politics.
Here’s white nationalist YouTuber Stefan Molyneux using the occasion of Swift’s thirtieth birthday to make a not-so-coded crack on women who do not become mothers in their twenties.
I doubt Molyneux is a Swiftie, nor does he expect Swift to read his Twitter missives. Instead, tweets like these are intended for other young women who might be postponing or forgoing motherhood. The message: if superstar Taylor Swift’s fertility is at risk, hoo boy are you broads in trouble.
And here’s antisemite “comedian” Owen Benjamin this week, suggesting that Swift’s ability to have many children might be compromised due to her advanced age of 34 (lol), and that, thereby, Kelce is gay.
It’s an almost impossibly stupid argument, one designed not to persuade anyone but to bait people into engagement for profit or discourse derailment, and it’s worked! Here I am arguing issues of basic female autonomy with some of the most disingenuous people alive, all through the lens of a celebrity couple who, due to trending topics and cynical SEO plays, have become the load-bearing symbols in complex social issues entirely out of their control. I don’t even want to write about these people! I am frankly tired of the algorithmic gravity that drags every discussion toward a shrinking number of subjects. I bet Taylor is tired of it too.
Okay! No more about this! Here are this week’s MomLinks:
-The anti-choice movement is attempting to push its in-house propaganda in public schools, Jessica Valenti reports in Abortion, Every Day. New state bills, and at least one law, mandate that public school children be shown a counter-scientific video about fetal development, produced by an anti-abortion group known for producing misleading videos. The clip in question was “reviewed and certified” by an anti-LGBTQ+ organization that has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
-In the New Yorker, Isaac Chotiner has a harrowing interview with a pediatrician in Gaza. Dr. Seema Jilani describes the impossible conditions and choices facing doctors as they work without basic facilities or resources to treat victims of Israel’s ongoing war. Many of those victims are young children. More than 10,000 Gazan children have been killed since Israel began its campaign in October, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health. A new project by Al Jazeera names more than 4,000 of those child victims, along with their ages—many of them too young to see their first birthdays. Other, surviving Gazan children have been orphaned, some of them delivered by Cesarean method to mothers who were dying from Israeli airstrikes, the BBC reports.
-Brittany Watts, an Ohio woman who was criminally charged after having a miscarriage in a toilet, said she visited a hospital with concerns about leaking fluids before the miscarriage, and was told her pregnancy was nonviable. Watts, who had her charges dismissed this month, told reporters she waited in the hospital for eight hours without treatment before going home and returning the next day to be induced for labor. Watts said she waited 11 hours, again without treatment, before going home, where she miscarried. When Watts returned to the hospital a third time, this time for miscarriage treatment, a nurse called 911, reporting Watts for a suspected abortion because she claimed Watts “did not want to look” at the fetus.
-In Grist, Zoya Teirstein unpacks a new study on the effects of climate disaster on adolescent mental health. The study, which focused on Puerto Rican students who lived through the disastrous 2017 Hurricane Maria, found a correlation between students who endured the worst hurricane trauma, and those who went on to experience PTSD and substance abuse disorders.
-There are more than two genders after all. A PAC connected to a Republican senate candidate in Montana sent out a survey in which candidates were requested to input their gender: “male,” “female, working woman” and “female, homemaker.” 19th News dug into the survey and the rich thesis on Republican gender theories suggested therein.
-The House of Representatives is set to vote Wednesday night on a (re)expanded child tax credit. The proposed program would allow families to claim a $2,000 tax deduction per child, even if they do not currently make enough money to qualify for the full benefit. The package would be a boon to low-income families, although it would not be as generous as early-pandemic programs that sent checks to eligible parents. Where a 2021 child tax credit expansion was estimated to have temporarily reduced child poverty by 35 percent, the Columbia University Center on Poverty and Social Policy estimates that the current proposal stands to reduce child poverty by five percent over the next year.
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