26

The most active thread yesterday was titled, "Does this Taylor Swift fling with the NFL football brute seem super fake?" and posted in the "Entertainment and Pop Culture" forum. Like the countless British Royal Family threads, Taylor Swift threads could easily take over the entertainment forum. Unlike the BRF threads, however, Taylor Swift threads rarely result in waves of inappropriate posts that require constant intervention. Indeed, about the only complaint I ever get about Taylor Swift threads is that there are too many of them. The posters themselves seem to be extremely well-behaved. Plus, they can take a joke. This particular thread is about Swift's apparent relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. Posters are convinced that the relationship is contrived and not authentic. The reasoning, as best I can tell, is that Kelce does not fit the image that fans have for a Swift boyfriend. Some posters argue that this is a means for Swift to bolster her popularity with "flyover country". I know very little about Taylor Swift, but even so I am fairly certain that popularity is the least of Swift's concerns. As posters point out, she is able to fill a stadium within in minutes of ticket sales opening. Some posters see Kelce as little more than a dumb jock who is far from suitable for Swift. Others rush to Kelce's defense and point out a number of factors that could make him appealing to Swift. I simply had to marvel at some of the motivations posters ascribed to Swift. My favorite was a poster who argued that by dating Kelce, Swift is hoping to appeal to the "Tens of millions of men" who have fantasy football teams and convince them that it is okay to listen to Taylor Swift records. But, the goal is not to simply to sell music, but to swing general elections. Unbeknownst to me, listening to Taylor Swift apparently makes you vote a certain way. I am a bit surprised about how even Swift's most loyal fans seem to view her as manipulative and conniving, with her every move being planned out for public relations purposes. The most charitable among them are convinced that she is simply gathering material for future songs.