After the release of
RED and the very public ending of her relationship with One Direction star Harry Styles, Taylor’s long media honeymoon came to a sudden halt. Her ubiquity had begun to stir what felt like the beginning of a backlash. Suddenly people—and not just haters on the internet but public figures—were making fun of her. It started with Ellen DeGeneres’s relentless ribbing every time Taylor appeared on her show and then progressed to the 2012
Country Music Awards in November 2012, at which hosts Carrie Underwood and Brad Paisley mocked her summer romance with Conor Kennedy. “Are they ever gonna get back together?” Paisley asked. “Never, ever, ever,” Underwood replied, referencing Taylor’s No. 1 “
We Are Never Getting Back Together.” “Like, never.”
After baring her heart in hit songs, Taylor now found her love life—or some distorted version of it—treated as a joke. At the
Golden Globes in February 2013, hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler got on stage and joked: “You know what, Taylor Swift, you stay away from Michael J. Fox’s son.” The joke wouldn’t have worked without the audience being aware of Swift’s highly scrutinized romantic life, the stuff of tabloid obsession. So the zinger hit home, and the audience exploded with laughter, and, as if it were middle school all over again, some went “Ooooooh.” “Or go for it, or go for it,” Poehler interjected. “No,” said Fey. “She needs some ‘me’ time to learn about herself.” That got another big laugh.
Taylor was in the ladies’ room at the time. So, she didn’t hear the sound of everybody who was anybody in Hollywood laughing at her. When she was discussing that moment in an interview with
Vanity Fair a couple of weeks later, Taylor just smiled and said, “You know, Katie Couric is one of my favorite people because she said to me she had heard a quote that she loved”—from former secretary of state Madeleine Albright—“that said, ‘There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.’” The incident quickly became a much-followed story on the Web and Twitter. Understandably, the negative, and plainly sexist press really seemed to bug Taylor: