Taylor Swift and the Jezebel Spirit

The conservative online pop culture women’s magazine Evie (think Elle, but for red-state ladies) recently excitedly broadcast the news: Taylor Swift has entered her “tradwife” era!

Now very publicly engaged to Kansas City Chief tight end (and recent Pfizer spokesman, how soon we forget!) Travis Kelce— following a long and seemingly endless cavalcade of famous or semi-famous boyfriends, and nary a year after endorsing Kamala Harris in an online missive in which she embraced the sobriquet “Childless Cat Lady,” Miss Swift’s new album now apparently features her embracing being a wife (“When I said I didn’t believe in marriage, that was a lie”) and a mom (“I just want you/ Have a couple kids, got the whole block looking like you”), while simultaneously mocking those very intentionally “childless” types that she so recently associated herself with (“They want those three dogs that they call kids”).

Evie, and other right-leaning outlets, noted the future Mrs. Kelce’s vibe shift approvingly, while feminist Redditors and their ilk fumed and fulminated about this development. I, however, found myself recalling a song from before Taylor’s time: Meredith Brooks’ “Bitch” (a title that, believe it or not, was actually fairly shocking by late-90s standards).

“Bitch” aims to be a celebration of femininity. The speaker talks about how she, in Whitmanesque parlance, “contains multitudes.”

I’m a bitch, I’m a lover
I’m a child, I’m a mother
I’m a sinner, I’m a saint
I do not feel ashamed
I’m your Hell, I’m your dream
I’m nothing in between
You know you wouldn’t want it any other way

In 1997, when this song was released, the culture of sexual politics wasn’t what it is today. Men of that era didn’t yet know just how massive of a lie that latter line “(“You know you wouldn’t want it any other way”) encapsulated. We hadn’t learned just how appalling and terrifying sheer chaos can be. These lines— including the disconcerting bit about “Hell”— was taken as a sort of good-natured but harmless little jibe, similar to when, two years earlier, Shania Twain sang “Any man of mine better walk the line… If I change my mind a million times/ I wanna hear him say ‘yeah, yeah, yeah!’”

“If someone tells who they are, believe them” runs the quite overused, and often misused, dictum.

With respect to what Meredith and Shania were telling us, however, the fact is that we should have known better than to take such declarations as amusing hyperbole. When Shania demanded that a man change on a dime according to her constantly shifting, fickle decrees, she wasn’t kidding. And when Meredith said, “I’m your Hell,” she meant Hell. (As in endless torment, and a sense of eternal separation from God, and all the other infernal attributes).

In 2025, men now largely know these things. But in 1997, we were absolutely clueless.

And that is why any thinking and properly discerning man ought to be deeply dubious of this sudden “wife-pilling” of the Swift brand. Again, Meredith Brooks’ lyrics ring out with sinister portentousness:

Rest assured that when I start to make you nervous
And I’m going to extremes
Tomorrow I will change and today won’t mean a thing!

If yesterday Taylor trained her fans to scream “Fuck the patriarchy,” and today she’s embracing the tradwife mystique, just where will she stand tomorrow?

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The true terror of dark femininity, which has been furiously unleashed upon the Western world since the blighted twins of feminism and the sexual revolution took hold of the culture— and not by accident— is the very absence of constancy so shallowly— and perhaps naively— celebrated in a song like “Bitch.” A girl in love who enthusiastically pledges her troth to her equally loving young swain is transformed, over the course of a mere decade or so, into a shrill, hateful harridan who demands a divorce, and her still-faithful, still-loving husband can only stand helplessly by, thunderstruck and heartbroken. How did he go from being the object of his love’s adoration to an utterly pathetic wretch in her eyes, incapable of doing anything right?

Legions of men have suffered such a fate, or worse, at the hands of a woman in our time. It isn’t, of course, that men are anywhere close to perfect, or anywhere near blameless. But even trivial male misbehavior is regularly excoriated, while female misconduct is commonly excused, where it isn’t openly celebrated. But such two-tier standards only serve to confirm the central problem: since women can’t seem to manage to practice constancy of behavior, why should the perverse culture which gave rise to the very dark femininity being discussed here not reveal a similar inconstancy?

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In Hindu lore, Kali is the goddess— we would sooner call her a demon— of chaos and destruction. Is it surprising at all that Kali is a woman? The same sort of being with the power to nurture and gestate life within her womb is uniquely poised to be a destroyer of life. It is, to be sure, a catastrophic inversion of divinely-ordered femininity, metaphorically comparable to the now all-too-common occurrence of mothers in the West opting, for the mere sake of convenience, to kill the very children they ought to love and protect from harm.

In the Bible, the dark feminine is personified in Queen Jezebel, a woman who promoted idolatry and fomented murderous violence against the righteous (see 1 and 2 Kings). Today, many Christians speak of how a “Jezebel spirit” pervades our modern times. Women in our times are often particularly susceptible to this “Jezebel spirit,” because they are no longer reminded of possessing the limitations of nature, or urged to exercise responsibility for their families and communities. Instead, young girls are commonly told some variation of “You are incredible, you are perfect just as you are, you can be whatever you want to be!”

These sentiments may seem harmless, even inspirational, but they are in fact rooted in lies. When women who have been indoctrinated since their youth to think of themselves as wondrous beings of limitless potential, who are perfect just as they are, and who owe no responsibility to anyone but themselves, it is little wonder that so many feel no compunction to practice constancy of behavior, especially not towards the men in their lives, whom feminism has trained them to resent and despise.

Things will not be put right until the Jezebel/Kali demon is exorcised en masse. But this will not happen, barring a cataclysm, or a miracle.

Let us hope and pray for the latter.

https://andynowicki.substack.com/p/taylor-swift-and-the-jezebel-spirit