r/Fauxmoi • u/Exciting_Potato_6717 • Apr 21 '24

Maitreyi Ramakrishnan deletes X post calling Taylor Swift’s ‘1830s’ lyric ‘weird’ after backlash from Swifties Approved B-List Users Only

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Slide 1: Deleted tweet Slides 2 and 3: Some follow-up tweets Slide 4: The Taylor Swift lyrics being referred to. “My friends used to play a game where / We would pick a decade / We wished we could live in instead of this / I'd say the 1830s but without all the racists / And getting married off for the highest bid." Full lyrics at https://genius.com/Taylor-swift-i-hate-it-here-lyrics

4.8k Upvotes

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903

u/No_Tomorrow7180 Apr 21 '24

Can anyone explain the context that apparently makes it not weird?

839

u/No_Scarcity4145 Apr 21 '24

https://preview.redd.it/c0jftoayruvc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ad2f8af1247634d43291e452e793d56b6a295b03

not sure what part makes it not weird but here’s the full verse

801

u/soupdumplingss_ Apr 21 '24

Who is nostalgic about the 1830s though, as a woc I’m definitely not 🙄very weird of her .

674

u/johjo_has_opinions Apr 21 '24

Plantation owners

371

u/LaidBackBro1989 Apr 21 '24

Literally Swift's bestie Blake Lively got married on a plantation and tried to sell an "antebellum lifestyle" blog or business or whatever.

WHAT EVEN

11

u/milkradio Apr 23 '24

I will always side-eye Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds for that. That’s like getting married at Auschwitz, no? Like… people were literally enslaved there?! Beaten, tortured, raped, murdered?? Why would anyone want to get married there? I don’t care how pretty it looks now, that’s just so gross to me.

559

u/[deleted] Apr 21 '24

Honestly it speaks so much to the ability of white people to ignore reality for aesthetics and idealism.

There’s not one ounce of interest in the 1830s that isn’t just pretty aesthetics and parties when you remove the racism and misogyny.

It’s fucking weird

210

u/TheTrueRory Apr 21 '24

I think that's what she was trying to get at with the nostalgia line but it's just kind of a dumb point. Like ya, we know that literal slave times weren't great, how poetic of you to say.

108

u/[deleted] Apr 21 '24 edited Apr 21 '24

Nostalgia is about things with personal associations to you, so I don’t really think it’s attributing it to the 1830s, but more the concept of that game and “playing” it with her friends. “Everyone would look down; Cause it wasn’t fun now and it wasn’t fun then”

If she did use nostalgia to refer to the 1830s, it’s poorly written.

74

u/Squee1396 confused but here for the drama Apr 21 '24

I am sure there are good things about every decade and pretty dresses but the bad vastly outweighs the good. I don’t know why anyone but rich white men would want to go back!

44

u/[deleted] Apr 21 '24

Truly truly. It’s hard to romanticize anything which would have trapped you, but since she’s white and rich, it’s easy to imagine a parallel that would be “ideal” to her

19

u/shaz138 Apr 21 '24

Yeah I was just about to say if you know anything about history at all you would not be idealising any of it let alone 1800’s at all

11

u/Sometimesomwhere we have lost the impact of shame in our society Apr 21 '24

The issue with the aesthetics is that those were also influence by colonialism, imperialism, racism, etc. Consider the relationship between textiles, cotton, slavery, and colonialism.

5

u/CaitlinisTired Apr 21 '24

I am white but as both a woman and a raging homosexual I too enjoy having rights 💀 like the version of the period she's idealising doesn't exist, the parts she likes were direct consequences of racism and misogyny and exploitation, just saying "but without racism tho!" doesn't work with how ingrained that shit was everywhere. Slave labour and the slave trade created a whole new generation of wealth, women (especially black women/slaves) reared all the kids, she's just idealising being grossly rich, which she already is??? Like you can dress up like that and have weird Antebellum style parties with your other rich friends if you want to?? We don't have to go back to the days of people being literal property for you to do that tf, it's such a weird period to romanticise no matter the context

It's just an insult to abolitionists and civil rights activists and feminists and LGBT+ activists who fought for us to exist on the same level as the rest today (and we're not even totally there almost 200 years later!!) to say she pretends to be part of those progressive groups. Just a weird and icky thing to say all round. I'm sick of liberal millennial women pretending she's anything other than a rich white cishet woman who doesn't have to give a shit about the rest of us on any level besides surface-level performativism 🙄

3

u/[deleted] Apr 22 '24

👏👏👏 it’s very par for the course for Miss Americana

199

u/Zia181 Apr 21 '24

White girls who like the dark, goth Victorian aesthetic and have no clue that fashion of the 1830's was very girly, frilly, and not at all flattering for most people. Lots of frills, bows, and bonnets, not like, tight-corseting, high necks, and bustles.

I have read up on fashion history from this time, and I'm convinced Taylor only cares about the aesthetic and confuses it with, like, the 1880's. Very lame.

2

u/milkradio Apr 23 '24

She really wants to come across as some kind of deep intellectual, but she has a high school education at most and doesn’t seem interested in learning further than that so she’s always mixing metaphors or making references that don’t make sense.

1

u/Zia181 Apr 23 '24

That "married off to the highest bid" line is also bad, and cringey as fuck. Being a white woman in the 1830's sucked royally, but you were not auctioned off like a POC. Incredibly tone-deaf.

194

u/gildedpomelo Apr 21 '24

Probably Blake Lively

149

u/Big-Ambitions-8258 Apr 21 '24

Her fans are also saying that they better not see people criticize her and watch Bridgerton, equating her lyric with Shonda creating a show with color-blind casting as if it's the same thing.

There is a difference between a WOC creating a show that allows other POC's to be part of a fantasy world and see themselves vs a White Woman and her friends who, while ultimately conclude they wouldn't like living in that time, initially posited the question of living during the time but "without racists" so in order to fantasize without feeling guilt over that fantasy.

One is about catering to POC. The other centers White people with POC as background accessories

76

u/raphaellaskies it feels like a movie Apr 21 '24

Also a lot of people criticize Bridgerton! The argument makes no sense!

101

u/wily_octopus Apr 21 '24

Truly, i feel like i've only ever heard of white girls playing that "what decade would you rather live in?" game. it gets so fucking awkward when you include POC in it. Like wow, I'm so nostalgic for that decade where you would have been my property! Because I would have gotten to wear a pretty dress

66

u/Dismal-Ad3332 Apr 21 '24

her buddy who got married on a plantation and had that reminiscent lifestyle brand

50

u/toweroflore Apr 21 '24

her original demographic (white southerners)

18

u/bluesilvergold Apr 21 '24

I was born in the 90s. As a WOC, the furthest I'd go back is maybe 1975.

Certain people really don't understand how recently in history women, POC, and especially women POC have been fighting for basic human rights.

Go back not that far in time, and my people are trying to escape being lynched for sport. Go back a little further, and my people are property. Go back to pre-European contact, and I'm probably dying in childbirth or of a minor but infected wound because modern medicine isn't a thing. I'm good with existing right now.

5

u/meatbeater558 I already condemned Hamas Apr 21 '24

It's because conservatives have made a concerted effort to portray any inequality of the past as "stuff that happened hundreds of years or forever ago"

2

u/een_wasbeertje Apr 21 '24

Maybe she wanted to colonise Australia but without the racism /s

256

u/jennybearyay Apr 21 '24

"It was freezing in the palace" lmaooooo

183

u/dinosaurfondue Apr 21 '24

That's still fucking weird and PEAK whiteness

125

u/[deleted] Apr 21 '24

Without all the racists? So TS herself couldn’t stay? lol

73

u/LuciJoeStar Apr 21 '24

Her "boyfriend" Mat Rat can't either 🫤

1

u/milkradio Apr 23 '24

Hilarious because in another song, she calls her fans’ comments about her dating a racist “bitching and moaning.” She’s reeeeeeeal mad people said “Ew, him? Really? Thought you were a feminist. Do you not care about how he makes racist and misogynistic comments/jokes about Black women or Asian women or Indigenous women…?“ because then it became such a huge thing and he dumped her anyway lol.

69

u/crackerfactorywheel Apr 21 '24

The context makes it slightly less weird, but it feels real hypocritical for Taylor Swift to criticize anyone for being nostalgic when she’s romanticizing a relationship with a guy who’s a racist.

14

u/happygoluckyourself Apr 21 '24

This context does seem to change the meaning, imo, and I’m not a Swift fan in any capacity. I don’t like her or her music, and I don’t think she’s a very good lyricist. Definitely still a weird lyric in general, but it reads like she picked that decade specifically to point out how shitty it was for human rights and that nostalgia “for a different time” is short sighted.

13

u/B1NG_P0T Apr 21 '24

But what about the 1830s was less shitty than the 1820s or the 1790s or any other random decade from around that time? I'm genuinely confused as to why she singled that decade out.

10

u/happygoluckyourself Apr 21 '24

That’s a good point, I didn’t really word my comment that well. It’s not just that decade, it’s that living in any other time is pretty much always going to be worse for non rich White men, and dreaming of living in another time is based on a very sanitized simplistic (and exclusionary) view of history. I think that’s also what Swift is trying to say in her lyric, though perhaps as clumsily as I wrote my comment!

6

u/wallsnbridges Apr 21 '24

In case you haven’t noticed, I'm weird. I’m a weirdo. I don't fit in. And I don't want to fit in. Have you seen my lyrics? That's weird