'Back in the studio. “Uh oh . . .,” Taylor Swift tweeted Jan. 10. “Uh oh” is right. The missive probably caused every man the pop star has ever dated, spoken to or even walked by to sell all their possessions and hide in a decommissioned bomb shelter deep within the earth.
The 23-year-old singer, up for three Grammys at tonight’s ceremony, is known as much for hit records as her ever-growing wreckage heap of famous exes, about whom she then writes scathing revenge songs. Record of the Year nominee “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” is a poppy, 3-minute, 13-second hateboarding that finds Swift callously dismissing a former flame who begs to patch things up.
Another single off the triple-platinum “Red” album, “I Knew You Were Trouble,” contains the lyric, “Now I heard you moved on from whispers on the street/A new notch in your belt is all I’ll ever be.”
“Dear John” from 2010’s “Speak Now” appears aimed at infamous womanizer John Mayer, whom she briefly dated. “Dear John, I see it all now, it was wrong,” Swift sings. “Don’t you think 19’s too young to be played by your dark, twisted games?”
Mayer later told Rolling Stone that he was “caught off guard” and “humiliated” by the song. “I didn’t deserve it,” he said. “It was a really lousy thing for her to do.”
“There’s two ways to look at it,” says Dr. Dennis Lin, director of the psychosexual medicine program at Beth Israel Medical Center. “The less cynical way is that [she] may become infatuated very easily, but doesn’t have the tools or maturity to maintain the relationship.
“The more cynical point of view, as a sex therapist, is that maybe she’s doing this for publicity,” says Lin, adding that he’s never met or treated Swift. “I do believe she’s acting in good faith, but if she’s doing this for publicity, that’s someone with anti-social traits, sociopathic traits.”
Pop music’s most famous black widow comes in a surprising package. Swift is blond and pretty, but more cute than vampy, with bangs, ringlet curls, bright red lipstick and a wardrobe bursting with zippy sundresses and striped tops.
Her image, perhaps a leftover from scoring her first hit record at age 16, is chaste and non-threatening. She sometimes punctuates her lyrics, as well as her speech, with “like.”
It’s only recently that the perception of Swift has morphed from virginal to man-eater. After dating — among others — Joe Jonas and Taylor Lautner, Swift’s recent dalliances with political heir Conor Kennedy and English boy band member Harry Styles seem to have moved her romantic exploits into parody territory.
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