Perhaps you’ve heard that Taylor Swift’s rumored boyfriend Matty Healy called rapper Ice Spice a “chubby Chinese lady.” Perhaps you’ve heard that he jacks off to racist porn. Perhaps you’ve heard that he’s bigoted against Hawaiians and Inuits, and salutes Hitler. Perhaps you’ve heard that the 34-year-old English singer raped and murdered a girl in Shreveport, Louisiana, during the summer of ‘68, or led the cavalry during the massacre at Wounded Knee. Ever since Healy, The 1975’s frontman, started dating Swift, he’s apparently committed virtually every sin in the West’s civic religion — having been called racist, anti-black, homophobic, transphobic, Islamaphobic, colorist, xenophobic, antisemitic, sexist, and a white supremacist.

And because she’s refused to dump Healy, Swift has also faced immense criticism from the terminally online members of her own rabid fanbase. Angry fans wrote open letters, and attempted to cancel their merch orders. One person reported that Swiftie group chats were plotting an organized campaign to have her placed under conservatorship. In a recent article, Huffington Post Audience Editor Cambria Roth, who counted herself as a Taylor Swift fan before the Healy controversy, wrote of her fellow Swifties, “They’ll defend her at all costs — even if that means defending bad behavior and white womanhood.” And Swift’s recently announced collaboration with Ice Spice has been panned as a P.R. move.

Of course, Healy didn’t actually call Ice Spice a “chubby Chinese lady,” or “the Inuit spice girl.” Comedian Nick Mullen did, on a podcast that Healy happened to be on. That podcast, The Adam Friedland Show (TAFS), which Mullen and the titular Friedland host, is a comedy podcast. It’s a spiritual successor to Cumtown, a previous comedy podcast that the two hosted along with another comedian called Stavros Halkias. TAFS is known for its edgy, sometimes raunchy humor, but what would you expect from a podcast that used to be called Cumtown?

On Healy’s TAFS episode, he recounted a story about a female friend walking in on him watching Ghetto Gaggers, a porn site with the tagline: “black women, white men, ROUGH SEX.” This has been characterized as Healy “admitting to watching degrading pornography in which people of color are being humiliated and insulted.” And though this is the least hyperbolic accusation against Healy, criticizing him for it seems ironic in a progressive cultural landscape where “sex work is work” and “no kink shaming” have become popular slogans.

At face value, this would seem like another example of the ridiculous excesses of cancel culture, but it’s more than that. Though the charges against Healy are couched in woke language, they betray a deep unfamiliarity with conventional male humor, and a naive view of male sexuality. Swift is facing backlash from her fans because she, through her public persona and artistry, has cultivated a fan base that has an exceptionally shallow understanding of men. Generally speaking, the men who appear in her songs are unindividuated specters who either woo her or hurt her. They are a prince charming or a bad ex, existing insofar as they make Swift feel happy, sad or oppressed. Taylor Swift just isn’t interested in men in their own right — unlike, for example, Lana Del Rey: I watched the guys getting high as they fight / For the things that they hold dear / To forget the things they fear (“How to Disappear,” 2019).

So Swifties’ humorless scolding over the off-the-cuff ethnic jokes Healy and the podcast hosts made feel like the sort of responses one would expect from a ballbusting girlfriend who doesn’t like her boyfriend’s friends, or a “girl’s gay” who’s too intimidated by straight guys to form friendships with them. It demonstrates a general unfamiliarity with male conversational humor — they’ve just never riffed with the boys, and it shows. In general, riffing is often the default form of conversation among groups of male friends. It’s both collaborative and competitive: the primary mission is to keep the momentum going, but the ultimate goal is to end the bit and “win” by saying something so funny that it can’t be topped. This tit-for-tat escalation of a comedic premise is riffing’s hallmark, and it often leads to commentary that might be considered offensive by those unfamiliar with the game. But simply saying something offensive without a comedic premise or punchline while riffing would be a social faux pax — it would kill the bit, ruin the game. For women, who socialize more carefully, the off-the-cuff nature of riffing must seem alien, even dangerous, particularly for those who have little experience with it.

I’ve long contended that women are funny (RIP Hitchens), but in a different way than men. I can count on my hand the number of times I’ve seen a group of women organically engage in conversation that could be accurately described as riffing. That’s not to say that women don’t have funny conversations amongst themselves. They do. As the token gay friend in many otherwise female-only conversations throughout my life, I find that women are much funnier storytellers than men. And many women can riff online and in conversations with men, but its just not a form of communication that women, even funny ones, tend to engage in organically with one another.

Similarly, the schoolmarmish horror showed over the Ghetto Gaggers aspect of the controversy reeks of a naivety about male sexuality. One Redditor described it as “just full of hatred for women, specifically about white men getting off on racially and sexually degrading black women.” Buzfeed’s Stephanie Soteriou quoted an obscure Medium post from 2017 in her article about the controversy, which flatly accepts the studio-produced porn’s premise:

The texts on Ghetto Gaggers and other websites describe how they trick eighteen-year-olds and have other young women who mostly have never never have [sic] been in a porn film and clearly have been manipulated in some way and totally unprepared for what they are about to face.

Yeah, and the Bang Bus could pick you up for a ride at any moment.

The credulity of accepting studio porn premises aside, the angry Swifites miss the actual point of Healy’s Ghetto Gaggers story. It was self-deprecating — an embarrassing yarn about getting caught Apple-casting the most hardcore pornography imaginable onto your TV within 30 seconds of a girl leaving your house. For a male audience, that’s funny. But for Taylor Swift’s man-hating (or man-ignorant) audience, it was an “admission.” “Absolutely horrifying. Note that even Matty says the woman was being ‘brutalized.’ That’s his own word choice. And yet he still admits to getting off to this shit,” said one Redditor. The explicitly racial component of Ghetto Gaggers is niche, but the rough sex is not. One can’t help but think that Taylor Swift’s PG-rated pop might be a draw for women who are a bit more naive about the depravations of human sexuality (and internet porn).

I find Taylor Swift’s heretofore refusal to denounce Healy in the face of fans unable to “Shake It Off” admirable. Perhaps she’s finally accepted that “the haters gonna hate hate hate.” Nevertheless, one wonders to what extent the backlash is stroking her victim complex, the one she shares with her fans who felt seen by all her songs about “haters” and shitty ex-boyfriends. Whether Taylor caves to her fans or stands by her man, one thing is certain: they’ll be streaming Taylor’s Version at the pity party.

-River Page