Hey Bill Maher: How about you put a sock in it about Taylor Swift’s dating life? She may be able to “handle it,” but she has repeatedly railed against—and sung about—pundits turning her private life into punchlines. The jokes aren’t funny.

I can hear the haters now, “Poor, powerful, too-big-to-hang-out Tay Tay, cwying into her cereal milk.” But it’s one thing to be an honest critic, or even make jokes about her music, her jetsetting ways, or her personality for that matter (though fans love her for it), but joking about Swift’s relationships plays into the misogyny that all women—but especially successful women—face.

How Taylor’s Business Acumen, Creative Genius, and Clapback Towards Misogyny Made Me a Swifty

Swift is mad creative, a musical genius, a literary virtuoso. In sales and awards, she’s already beaten records of musical giants like Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, and Frank Sinatra—and she’s just 35 years old. Her songwriting is nuanced, sophisticated, and undervalued by those not paying attention.

But it’s her willingness to clap back at the double standards women face—not to mention her astounding and underappreciated business acumen and creative genius—that turned me into a Swifty at 50. And I’m not alone. According to a 2023 survey, 44 percent of her fans are Gen X or boomers.

From Snake Emojis to Symbol of Power: Cobra Queen Rising

Throughout history, groups have defused slurs by making them their own, but rarely, if ever, has a creative artist done the same. During the 2016 Kim Kardashian-Kanye West drama when #TaylorSwiftIsASnake trended on Twitter and people flooded Swift’s socials with serpent emojis, Swift reclaimed it, making the symbol her talisman—but not before a painful retreat from the public eye and reckoning with her lifelong desire to be seen as a good girl.

Swift has been popular throughout my adult life. In the 2000s, my then-teenaged eldest daughter said, “Taylor Swift has so many popular songs!” and I was like “Really? I don’t know any.” I consumed celebrity news as “mental Cheetos” escapism, so I knew she dated Twilight’s Taylor Lautner and held hands with Jake Gyllenhall, but I’d never bought her music. I went through the entire pandemic without hearing folkmore. I shy away from the “popular” thing.

But my relationship to Swift changed when I watched Miss Americana two years ago, a behind-the-scenes documentary about how SnakeGate changed her. In her makeup-free face, she cries to her mom, “It just feels like it’s more than music now.” Yes, indeed, Taylor. It is.

As she healed, she spun her pain into music. Not only did her Reputation album use the snake as a symbol of empowerment, she made it literary, as she is wont to do (references to Wordsworth, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and others are scattered through her catalog.) In the “Look What You Made Me Do” lyric video, she used an ouroboro, a snake swallowing its own tail, an ancient Egyptian symbol of the cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

Despite her word-nerdiness, is she stuffy and humorless? Nope. She dances awkwardly on purpose at awards shows, living her best life, katagelasticists be damned. And that giant inflatable cobra on stage during her Reputation tour? She named it Karyn. Snort.

It’s like Swift’s telling the world: I’m this awkward, funny dork who loves to cook and read Aristotle, an insecure good girl who likes bad boys and shiny toys. But while she rarely flaunts it, she’s also a badass, powerhouse businesswoman, a self-made billionaire, generous to strangers, appreciative of fans, and dedicated to her people.

The Billion-Dollar Brain: Good Ideas and Power Moves

When it comes to her brand, Swift’s got power moves. In 2015, she pulled her catalog from Spotify and Apple Music to demand higher royalties for all artists. Both streaming services changed policies in response, Apple immediately and Spotify in 2017. But Swift’s biggest boss move came in 2019 after her first label sold her masters (original copyrighted song recordings) to her long-time nemesis—which they had the legal, but perhaps not the moral, right to. She decided to re-record every album under her former label so she owns them. Check-mate bitches.

Luckily for her, Apple, Spotify, radio stations, and fans prioritize Taylor’s versions over the originals. This re-recorded music in and of itself brings her a cool $8.5 million monthly. She calls it collecting horcruxes.

Masterful at marketing, Swift has, from her first albums, planted “Easter eggs” throughout videos, lyrics, album liners, and even what she wears, which, if you think about it, is Business Genius. She literally created a system, never done by any musical artist before, that encourages fans to put their attention onto everything she sells, says, and does to sleuth out hidden meanings and create fan theories. She. Invented. This.

I like to say she’s “serialized” her life, and we are here for it, following with baited breath, Googling her whereabouts to catch the cotton-candy lover-like positivity that emanates from her public persona.

Mean girls (and boys) call her calculated, as if that’s a dirty word. Cuz damn if she isn’t the only example of an individual woman creating a (literal) billion-dollar enterprise by turning the moments and emotions of her life into hellishly addicting, howl-at-the-moon-rage-inducing, heartbreaking art. From growing up on a Christmas tree farm to “struggling through the night with someone new” to clapping back at patriarchy-preaching pundits like Maher, she’s produced hits on album after album, filled entirely with songs she wrote or co-wrote.

Yet while Forbes and Businessweek occasionally cover business aspects of Swift, Inc., and the likes of UC Berkeley and Harvard Business School offer courses analyzing her entrepreneurial spirit and economic impact, the business aspect of Swift’s story still isn’t widely touted as a “Business Case” like Musk, Bezos, or Zuckerberg. (I see you Kevin Evers, scooping me with your pre-There’s Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift book release feature at Harvard Business Week this month.)

From Love to Liberation

Taylor Swift’s dating is the least interesting part of her life. Yes, she’s a public figure. And many of her songs covertly mention people she’s dated, along with the emotions that go along with every aspect of love and life from 13 to 35. So that brings me back to Maher. It’s funny to pop off jokes at someone at the edge of societal norms, like Musk’s 14 kids with multiple women named Techno Mechanicus and X Æ A-Xii (dude), but Swift’s had a pretty normal dating life. OH MY GOD SHE’S NOT MARRIED by age 35? Woebegone, let’s call in the custodians of virtue.

I’m not famous, but being a smart, successful woman of any level makes it hard to find a partner. And in my opinion, what we women need in today’s world is not a financial provider or a strong protector. We don’t even need a husband to have a baby, or adopt a child. Nope. What we need and want is love—even though its elusivity is often our Achilles’ heel. And nothing portrays the roller-coaster emotions of looking for the One who will challenge us, stimulate us, forgive us, and fight for us like the extensive musical catalog of our beloved Miss Americana.

Even as Swift sings of being a woman in different stages of love, she also calls out misogyny, sometimes with the same song. In “But Daddy I Love Him” on The Tortured Poets Department, Swift sings, “I just learned these people only raise you to cage you,” the perfect verbal eye roll towards fans and pundits who, in so many words, want to keep a woman in her place. “Sarahs and Hannahs in their Sunday best, clutching their pearls, sighing, ‘What a mess.’ I just learned these people try and save you … cause they hate you.”

Even if this incredibly talented woman simply continues singing, songwriting, and general badassery, the rest of us can learn from her confidence and business savvy. But if you ask me, if Swift really wanted to lean into her feminine genius, she should run for political office, start a foundation, or host a talk show to more directly influence the American narrative. Because what the world needs now more than ever is her brand of wisdom, authenticity, vulnerability, and feminine power.