“I’m NOT calling him dad.”
That’s what one TikTok commenter had to say about some photos of Taylor Swift and the 1975’s Matty Healy from earlier this week. The pictures, which show Healy reaching for the small of Swift’s back as they exited a Manhattan recording studio Monday evening, are just another bit of evidence that seems to corroborate rumors Swift and Healy are romantically involved—there was also another outing in New York last week, not to mention several Healy sightings at Swift’s concerts in recent weeks.
It’s all a lot to take in for Swift’s devoted fandom. Swift was dating her previous partner, actor Joe Alwyn, for six years, so for some Swifties, having Healy around is not unlike, well, their mom dating a new guy after getting divorced. Who is this bozo? How could she do this to us? (Not all of them are taking it badly, to be fair: “Stepdad is growing on me I have to say it,” another wrote in a TikTok comment.)
Alwyn and Healy are about as different as two famous early-30s British white men could be. Alwyn is blond and clean-cut, with dreamboat good looks. Healy, while resembling a young Luke Perry from some angles, is less classically handsome, with often unruly hair and a style that can range from grungy to hipster. (Tattoos! Edgy.) On a less superficial level, Alwyn was notoriously private, but Swift’s fellow rock star Healy seems to love attention.
But you ask some fans, they’ll tell you that Healy doesn’t just like attention—he’s a full-on provocateur, or worse. It’s this aspect of Healy that’s currently sowing a kind of civil war among Swifties, who have been revisiting his history and questioning why Swift would associate with someone like him. Some fans have taken to calling him “Problematty.” What did he do to earn this nickname? A BuzzFeed article summarized the bulk of it: He was accused of doing a Nazi salute on stage; he once said something years ago about how it would be emasculating to date Swift; he’s been accused of using the Black Lives Matter movement to promote his music; he has eaten raw meat on stage (?); he’s kissed fans at his concerts; he recently laughed at racist jokes and joked about watching torture porn on a podcast. The list goes on.
Some defenders have chalked all this up to bad attempts at satire and performance art—the faux Nazi salute and the raw-meat eating, for example. Basically, over the past few years, Healy’s cultivated a persona as a sleazeball and a bit of a cad—some fans of his own band actually like this about him, and think it speaks to his “authenticity.” For every Twitter thread that talks about how bad he is, you can find another one that refutes it or explains it away point by point. Maybe he’s just an edgelord and is trying to get a rise out of people.
Swifities feel some degree of ownership over their object of worship, and Swift’s love life has always been a huge part of her art, so the outpouring isn’t that hard to understand. Still, the opposition to Healy seems strangely palpable. “This man has managed to unite the 13 kingdoms of the swiftiverse in indignation and disgust,” one fan wrote. Another wrote, “I’m glad that a lot of people (and Swifties) are finally condemning Taylor for who she is all along—a conniving white woman with a faux feminist complex.” That seems to be the flavor of a lot of it. I just really enjoyed this: “To everyone here who is a classical music fan and needs a way of understanding the level of this piping hot tea: This is like the time when Cosima von Bulow ran away with Richard Wagner.” Damn.
Partly, it feels like there’s no one who could ever be good enough for Swift: There are loads of fans who didn’t like Alwyn and felt like he was forcing her to hide her light under a bushel, so to speak. But are they overreacting just a tad bit this time? This TikTok about how Swift has broken a pact with her fans, for example, is a little ridiculous: I really don’t think anyone attending the Eras tour needs to be afraid of Healy performing an ironic Nazi salute on stage. It all recalls an incident last year when a Chris Evans fan, disappointed that Evans had revealed that he had a new girlfriend, wrote him an absurd open letter excoriating him. Everyone could stand to be a little less online here. But hey, if any fans want to give up their Eras tour tickets in protest, I know plenty of people who wouldn’t mind taking them off their hands.
