On Thursday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” the host discusses Taylor Swift’s comments on motherhood and “settling down” as a working woman. Video and partial transcript below.
Which brings me to Taylor Swift. You know I don’t like pop music. I’m not a big fan of pop music but I do listen to it. And of the people I like, I really liked the early Taylor Swift. I thought she had a really nice take on kind of high school romance. Teardrops on my guitar. Nice songs, a couple of songs. Then she went into that pop stuff which was a calculated move not as interested in her many, many, many affairs and getting dumped by people. But still, she does produce these songs like “Getting Back Together” and “Shake It Off”; they’re earworms. You know, they get stuck in your head. She’s obviously got some kind of talent and all this stuff.
So, she was asked by a German interviewer if she’d like to be a mother someday. She’s about to turn 30 and she refused to answer, and she said it’s sexist. She said, “I really do not think men are asked that question when they turn 30. So, I’m not going to answer that now.”
Now everything is wrong with that statement, right. Men aren’t asked that question because they don’t become mothers. Children don’t need fathers in the same way, in the same intense way in their early years that they need mothers present in the house with them. They do not need a father like that. The way they need mothers you can tell by the way bodies are built and what they are meant to do. I know this is hard to understand, but women aren’t shaped like that just so you can stare at them. They actually do have a function which has to do with the care and nurturing of children. Right?
And then she went on to say … she posted on Instagram that her next album was going to be political. And I thought to myself, oh boy I can’t wait because everybody cares so much what Taylor Swift has to say about politics. I don’t care at all what Taylor Swift has to say about politics. But this is basically her feeling that she’s not important unless she is engaged in the traditionally male, in the old days the traditionally male world of politics. And if she takes herself away from the traditionally female world of motherhood. I’m sorry but that is just ass backwards.
I mean millennials have now stopped, virtually stopped reproducing and it’s amazing all the people all — even on the Right everybody saying well it’s the economy. You know Millennials were coming up in the Obama economy and they couldn’t afford children, so they waited too long and now they’re not even producing enough people to you know, feed into social security and to develop a working class and it’s all about the economy. Well, baloney. I mean baloney it’s about the economy.
When you tell women that you’re nothing if you stay home and take care of your children that you’re, you know, only something if you lean in, if you’re working all the time, if you adopt male values, why should they? I mean women I think are more subject to social pressure than men are somewhat, and I think when you tell them that it takes them a long time before they found out, whoops, I made a mistake. Even the idea that you should have a career first and then a child is a male idea because men are built for that; women, their time runs out. Why not develop another idea of a career where you have your baby’s first and stay home and take care of them as they need and then go on to have a career later. I mean that makes a lot more sense. So in other words what I’m saying is instead of arguing for that we should that we women should now be able to live by male principles why not argue that female principle should be elevated in our society which I think they should.