Tess Explains It All

Here’s a preview of the TSwift interview in Vanity Fair magazine. I’m so so so so happy to hear her speaking out about her reputation and image she’s had lately regarding the guys she’s “dated.” I’m proud of her response.

“You know, Katie Couric is one of my favorite people,” Taylor Swift tells Vanity Fair contributing editor Nancy Jo Sales on the subject of mean girls in general and in response to an incident at this year’s Golden Globes, where Amy Poehler and Tina Fey mocked her highly scrutinized love life. “Because she said to me she had heard a quote that she loved, that said, ‘There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.’”]

Specifically of her dating life, Swift says that “if you want some big revelation, since 2010 I have dated exactly two people,” meaning Conor Kennedy and One Direction’s Harry Styles. Though she has gone out with some of the entertainment world’s most notorious bachelors, including Jake Gyllenhaal, Taylor Lautner, Joe Jonas, and John Mayer, Swift says, “[t]he fact that there are slide shows of a dozen guys that I either hugged on a red carpet or met for lunch or wrote a song with… it’s just kind of ridiculous.” As she sits drinking lavender lemonade in her “Tim Burton–Alice in Wonderland–pirate ship–Peter Pan” apartment, Swift continues, “It’s why I have to avoid the tabloid part of our culture, because they turn you into a fictional character.” When Sales asks Swift if she’s boy-crazy, Swift smiles. “For a female to write about her feelings, and then be portrayed as some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend in need of making you marry her and have kids with her, I think that’s taking something that potentially should be celebrated—a woman writing about her feelings in a confessional way—that’s taking it and turning it and twisting it into something that is frankly a little sexist.”

Although one of Swift’s rules is that she doesn’t go into the personal details of any of her relationships, she authorized someone to discuss them with Sales. “He wore her down,” the source says of Styles, who allegedly “chased” Swift for a year. “He was all, like, ‘You’re amazing—I want to be with you. I want to do this.’” The relationship fell apart after he texted Swift to alert her of a picture on the Internet of him kissing a friend good-bye.

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