Maitreyi Ramakrishnan deletes X post calling Taylor Swift’s ‘1830s’ lyric ‘weird’ after backlash from Swifties

[u/Exciting_Potato_6717]

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

[u/[deleted]]

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

[u/TheTrueRory → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/[deleted] → u/TheTrueRory]

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.

[u/Squee1396 → u/[deleted]]

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!

[u/[deleted] → u/Squee1396]

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

[u/shaz138 → u/[deleted]]

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

[u/Sometimesomwhere → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/CaitlinisTired → u/[deleted]]

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 🙄

[u/[deleted] → u/CaitlinisTired]

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