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Taylor Swift: engaged, mummy-tracked and doomed to tradwifedom? You really haven’t been listening | Gaby Hinsliff

Taylor Swift: engaged, mummy-tracked and doomed to tradwifedom? You really haven’t been listening | Gaby Hinsliff

Critics say marriage will kill her creativity. Not likely for an artist who’s made billions from songs about redefining women’s limits Taylor Swift is off the market . She’s engaged to marry the NFL player Travis Kelce in what will be the US’s first proper royal wedding, and yes of course I know you’re far too high-minded to care about any of that, but what’s striking is how many people seem convinced that this is the end of any kind of interesting life for her. As if a woman had no drama, no edge, no stories to tell, and – let’s be frank, here – no commercial value to speak of once she is no longer at least theoretically sexually available. The fairytale ends when the princess marries the prince: who cares, really, what happens to her after that? Music critics are already gloomily debating whether marriage will kill her creativity, or whether she’ll be left for dust by one of the younger rivals already nipping at her heels if she does take time out from music to have the children she’s always said she wanted. Poor Taylor, mummy-tracked before she’s even pregnant, like an old friend of mine whose engagement in her 20s prompted her male boss to tell everyone in the pub afterwards that that was her out for the count. He meant that she’d presumably have babies now and lose her professional edge – right on the first count, very wrong on the second – but also perhaps that she had somehow put herself in a different category: no longer young and promising, but practically matronly overnight. Even the Today programme devoted breakfast airtime to pondering where Swift will get her material, once she’s a smug married with no toxic exes to write about – though of course she was never just about break-up songs, and women have been known to have interesting interior lives even over the age of 35. Continue reading...