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- [00:00]
Amanda Montell
If you're paying rent and you're not doing it through bilt, it is time.
- [00:03]
Podcast Co-host
For a serious change.
- [00:05]
Amanda Montell
BILT is the loyalty program for renters that rewards you for your biggest monthly expense rent. With bilt, every rent payment earns you valuable points that can be used toward flights, hotels, your next Lyft ride, Amazon.com purchases, and so much more. Starting in February, BILT members can actually earn points on mortgage payments for the very first time ever. Personally, I cannot think of one single thing I would not want to redeem my bill points toward. Join the loyalty program for renters at joinbilt.com cult that's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T.com cult make sure.
- [00:38]
Podcast Co-host
To use our URL so they know we sent you this gorgeous, gorgeous podcast is brought to you by Squarespace.
- [00:44]
Amanda Montell
Whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it super easy to build the website of your dreams, to connect with your audience, and to sell absolutely anything from products to content to even your valuable time. Sounds like a cult.com is a Squarespace website. Check it out. I'm looking at it right now and it needs to be updated and I'm gonna do that. And it's gonna take me two thanks to many of Squarespace's ultra useful features, including their design intelligence, you've also got Squarespace Payments. Squarespace makes it easy to sell content online. I don't know your business, but you can do it on Squarespace. Head to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to Launch, go to squarespace.com cult to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. The views expressed on this episode, as.
- [01:27]
Podcast Co-host
With all episodes of Sounds Like a.
- [01:28]
Amanda Montell
Cult, are solely host opinions and quoted allegations. The content here should not be taken as indisputable fact.
- [01:34]
Podcast Co-host
This podcast is for entertainment purposes only.
- [01:38]
Amanda Montell
This is Sounds Like a Cult, a show about the modern day cults we all follow. I'm your host Amanda Montel, author of the books Cultish and the Age of Magical Overthinking, out now in paperback. Every week on the show we explore a different zeitgeisty group or guru that puts the cults in culture from Labubu to Joe Rogan. To try and answer the big question.
- [02:03]
Podcast Co-host
This group sounds like a cult. But is it really?
- [02:14]
Amanda Montell
And if so, which of our three cult categories does it fall into? A Live youe Life, a Watch your Back, or a Get the Fuck Out. After all, Cultish Influence can be found kind of everywhere these days, but it's.
- [02:27]
Podcast Co-host
Not all equally destructive.
- [02:29]
Amanda Montell
Sometimes cultishness is just some matching outfits and zealotry, but sometimes it can show up as exploitation, manipulation, even abuse that on its surface just looks like a harmless fitness studio or a fandom Today we're revisiting a topic that is Sounds like a Cult canon that we've addressed in multiple different ways on Sounds Like a Cult before, but that always could use an update, and that is the Cult of Taylor Swift. Our original episode on this modern day deity and her millions of Acolytes aired in 2022. I published a little update in 2023 during the eras tour Mayhem and today I'm going to share a slightly different take on the Cult of Taylor Swift, exploring the cycles of worship and dethronement that we see among Swifties, some of the cult like rituals and scandals that have befallen this community through a psychological and behavioral economics lens. And I'm going to be doing that by sharing an exclusive excerpt from my book the Age of Magical Overthinking, which is finally out now in paperback. It's a book about irrationality in the information age, so every single chapter takes a different cognitive bias, a sort of deeply ingrained psychological shortcut that human beings have always used to make decisions, and explores how that mental magic trick is clashing with the digital age.
- [03:58]
Podcast Co-host
The chapter I'm going to be sharing.
- [04:00]
Amanda Montell
With you today is called Are you my mother? Taylor Swift? A note on the Halo effect, which is the cognitive bias that I think can explain so much of the intense indeed cult like religious seeming, fanatical celebrity worship that we see in the 21st century, focusing specifically on how this manifests in the Swifty community. This exclusive excerpt of the audiobook is airing with the permission of my glorious publisher, One Signal, an imprint of Atria and Simon and Schuster. I love them so much. I'm still working with my same publisher on my next book, which is a novel that I'm currently writing. If you want to keep up with my novel writing process and my writerly side of my life in general, I share a lot of updates on my Instagram mandamontel so so you can keep up with my next phase of my writerly journey there. Our 2026 season of Sounds Like a Cult officially launches in a couple of weeks, but I wanted to air this episode slash chapter today because today is the launch day of the Age of Magical Overthinkings paperback edition and I'm doing a one night only live event to celebrate. It's in LA on January 12th.
- [05:10]
It's free.
- [05:11]
It's at Skylight Books in Los Feliz. It's going to be a super, super fun, intimate, culty, dreamy, delulu little night. And so I hope you come. There's no RSVP needed if you're in Southern California. Again, that's on January 12th at Skylight Books. And you'll be able to find more information about it on my website@amandamontel.com events. But anyway, without further ado, I hope you enjoy this special, slightly more literary treatment of the cult of Taylor Swift.
- [05:47]
Culties. Happy 2026. Now I gotta get real with you. If you're paying rent and you're not doing it through bilt, it is time.
- [05:54]
Podcast Co-host
For a serious change.
- [05:55]
Amanda Montell
Built is the loyalty program for renters that rewards you for your biggest monthly expense. Rent. I don't like paying rent. You don't like paying rent. But with Built, a little bit of that pain is softened.
- [06:06]
Why?
- [06:07]
Because with bilt, every rent payment earns you valuable points that can be used toward flights, hotels, your next Lyft ride, Amazon.com purchases, and so much more. And here's something to tickle your fancy. Starting in February, BILT members can actually earn points on mortgage payments for the very first time ever. Soon, you'll be able to get rewarded absolutely wherever you live and unlock exclusive benefits with more than 45,000 restaurants, fitness studios, pharmacies and other neighborhood partners. Personally, I cannot think of one single thing I would not want to redeem my bill points toward because I simply love spending money. I do.
- [06:43]
Podcast Co-host
I. I just.
- [06:45]
Amanda Montell
I do on fun things, not on rent. Which is why I'm excited to partner with Built. It is really that simple. Paying rent is better with Built, and soon owning a home will be better with Built too. Join the loyalty program for renters at joinbuilt.com cult that's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T.com cult.
- [07:03]
Podcast Co-host
Make sure to use our URL so they know we sent you this gorgeous, gorgeous podcast is brought to you by Squarespace.
- [07:09]
Amanda Montell
Squarespace is the all in one website platform for entrepreneurs, artists, podcasters to stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it super easy to build the website of your dreams, to connect with your audience, and to sell absolutely anything from products to content to even your valuable time. Sounds like a cult.com is a Squarespace website. Check it out. It's got all kinds of exciting information on there. I'm actually I'm looking at it right now and it needs to be updated and I'm gonna do that and it' going to take me two seconds. Thanks to many of Squarespace's ultra useful features including their design intelligence which combines two decades of industry leading design expertise with cutting edge AI technology to help you build a website of your dreams. You've also got Squarespace Payments if you're in a selling sort of mood where your users, your customers can pay however they like, using Klarna or ACH or whatever to sign up for a subscription or a one time only purchase, Squarespace makes it easy to sell content online. If you don't sell stuff like pottery, whatever, you're more into selling I don't know photographs or digital marketing courses.
- [08:14]
Podcast Co-host
Lol.
- [08:15]
Amanda Montell
I don't know your business but you can do it on Squarespace. Head to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to Launch, go to squarespace.com cult to save 10% off.
- [08:24]
Podcast Co-host
Your first purchase of a website or domain. Chapter 1 Are you my mother? Taylor Swift A Note on the Halo Effect Talking about celebrities is talking about things that matter without actually talking about ourselves. Anne Helen Peterson the level of worship had gotten ravenous. Spiritually ravenous. Of course. People had always been overly worshipful. Religion had forever been way too much, honor killings and all that. But now our gods weren't imaginary figments painted as all knowing and faultless. They were mortal. Human celebrities who we knew for sure were not. The new extremists were called Stans, a term originated by the rapper Eminem, whose 2000 song Stan spins a demented parable about a guy who blows a gasket after his icon won't answer his fan letters conspicuously. The word is also a perfect hybrid of stalker and fan. The Stans all had monastic names like Barbs and Little Monsters and Beliebers and Swifties. They were said to be the death of dialogue. Critics stopped publishing negative reviews of pop star's albums for fear of the mob, of getting canceled and doxxed, of having their home addresses sleuthed and leaked and death threats sent. No one was leaving their couch, but everyone was afraid. No one was speaking out loud. But the world felt like one big shriek, an 8 billion piece orchestra tuning and tuning ad infinitum. The stands were powerless as individuals, but as a flock. They'd come for your neck, Lord of the Flies style. Journalists feared for their necks. Not war journalists. Music journalists. The stands would cancel anyone they'd even eat their own. They'd eat their very own God. If it came to it, they'd eat their own God especially. That's how ravenous things had gotten in 2023, a Taylor Swift devotee named Amy Long emailed me a 3,000 word document breaking down all the pop star's major stan scandals from the past five years emotional cataclysms where Swifties turned against their exalted queen for failing to live up to qualities she never had and commitments she didn't make. The scandals, involving everything from ticket sales fiascos to rumors about her sexuality, bore dramatic titles in the style of Watergate, Ticket Gate, Lavendergate, Jet Gate, Moviegate, Tumblrgate. This might be the most interesting, penned Long, creator of the Instagram account aylorswiftasbooks, in reference to the latter opprobrium. After years of casually interacting with fans on Tumblr, Swift permanently logged off the platform in 2020, feeling bulldozed by a throng of politically enraged obsessees. As Long explained it, Stans got pissed after Swift posted a few tweets condemning Donald Trump and police brutality, but she never took her political vocalizations any further from the Stans perspective. Their idol had dangled a new era of progressive activism in front of them, only to snatch it back like a mother betraying a promise to her daughters. Similar shouts of treason were echoed a few years later when Swift started dating a sleazy edgelord from a pop rock band. Stans wrote an open letter begging the star to dump their problematic new stepdaddy, swearing they wouldn't step off his neck until she did. Long went on. A lot of fans have accused Taylor Swift of using allyship as an aesthetic, and they get mad at her for not doing what they want. But she's a capitalist to her core. Most of her security team is ex Special Forces, ex FBI, or other former law enforcement officers. I'm not sure why fans expect her to be all defund the police, tear down the system that made my dream come true. It's weird that thousands of strangers would morally lionize a famous singer based on conclusions about her character, for which there was barely any evidence. That attempt to shake her off the pedestal with commensurate zeal after those assumptions wound up false always seemed weird indeed. But the behavior is also explicable. I've come to attribute these increasingly common cycles of celebrity worship and dethronement, in addition to less parasocial love hate dynamics with figures we know in real life, to a cognitive bias known as the halo effect identified in the early 20th century. The halo effect describes the unconscious tendency to make positive assumptions about a person's overall character based on our impressions of one single trait. We meet someone with a witty sense of humor and figure. They must also be well read and observant. Someone good looking is presumed to be outgoing and confident. We think an artistic person is surely also sensitive and accepting. The term itself invokes the analogy of a halo, the power of good lighting alone to influence perceptions. Picture a 12th century religious painting commonly depicted wearing a crown of light. Angels and saints are bathed in heavenly lustre, a symbol of their overall goodness. Judging someone through the lens of the halo effect, our minds cast them in a one dimensionally warm glow, telling us to trust them wholesale when they've objectively given us little reason to. Behind the halo effect is a story of survival. Historically, aligning ourselves with a physically strong or attractive person proved a wise adaptive strategy. And it was generally fair to assume that one good quality indicated more. 20,000 years ago, if you encountered someone tall and muscular, you'd be reasonable to deduce they'd eaten more meat than average and were therefore likely a good hunter, someone you'd want in your corner. It was equally sensible to assume that a person with a symmetrical face and intact teeth had avoided disfigurement from lost battles and animal attacks. Another decent role model Today, singling out someone to look up to in life aids in identity formation. And when it comes to picking the right exemplar, we've learned to go with our gut. After all, how inefficient would it be to need all week to appraise a potential mentor? Or to assemble a whole panel of perfectly qualified specialists, one for career insights, one for creative inspiration, another for fashion advice? To choose a sole role model for everything based on hasty but overall sound generalizations is simply a superior use of one's tight psychological budget. Voila, the halo effect. Parental figures were the bias original subjects. Because our elders care for us and know things we don't, we figure they must know everything of my own mother. I believe this to an extreme. When it came to Dr. Denise Montel, the halo effect was inescapable. There was so much to live up to. A niche celebrity in her own right. My mother is a cancer cell biologist with a PhD from Stanford and a mantle full of awards for her research in molecular genetics. Last year she was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences for discovering a mechanism of cell movement that could one day help cure cancer. My mother actually cured her own cancer. The week before I started sixth grade, when Denise was 40, she was diagnosed with a deadly lymphoma. I wouldn't learn until she'd been in remission for half a decade that the doctors had told her she was probably going to die. But she didn't die, in part because she collaborated with her oncologists to help design her own experimental treatment plan. Her research lab at Johns Hopkins was right across the street from the hospital, where she'd squeeze in rounds of chemo on her lunch breaks. Now that course of treatment is standard practice for lymphoma patients all over the world. As a child, most of my friends had single mothers and absentee dads. It's a peculiar coincidence, looking back. My friends Gilmore Girl style relationships with their moms, more intimate gal pals than the formal parent offspring setup I knew, was no doubt part of what drew me to them in the first place. My friends mothers were so human. They wore their imperfections on their sleeves. They had sailor mouths, sang off key in the kitchen, and gave the silent treatment when they got angry. They spoke freely about period stains and bowel movements, body image and heartbreak. As a teenager, I found their vulnerability enamoring. Flaws weren't really Denise's style. No, not Denise, whose emotional cards were held close to the vest. Not Denise, whom I never saw make a single illogical mistake, who exercised for 45 minutes every morning, never left the house without blowing out her chestnut hair to perfection, and who seemed to know everything in the universe, from how a single cell grows into a fetus to which bakery in town sold the tastiest French baguettes. My mother spent almost all of her time poring over her research at the lab downtown, late nights every weekend, and her sang froid combined with her absence rendered her almost mythical to me. I don't recall a time when I was not aware of her reputation, which dazzled like a platinum wedding band in the sun. In theory, I wanted Denise to be rougher around the edges. I delighted in catching glimpses of it, like when she enjoyed half a margarita too many on a family vacation my junior year of high school and got all giggly as we jaunted back to the hotel room, or when she'd tell me edgy anecdotes from her young adulthood, like the one where she almost got kidnapped the summer she lived in Paris at 18, or the college spring break when her surfer boyfriend convinced her to drop acid at a Grateful Dead concert. I loved imagining the person Denise was aside from my mother. But then in practice whenever she exhibited what I deemed an out of character emotion. Even just losing her cool in traffic while running late to work, it appalled me. Her margin for error was so slim. She was the tailor, I was the unhinged swiftie. If Denise had a Tumblr, I definitely would have wanted her to like my posts and then bullied her off the platform the moment she wasn't the deity I built her up in my head to be. But young people don't just look up to their moms anymore. In 2019, a Japanese study found that about 30% of adolescents aspire to emulate a media figure like their favorite singer or athlete. A 2021 study published in the North American Journal of Psychology measured that celebrity worship had increased dramatically since two decades prior. The halo effect already makes it easy to deify someone you know in real life. As an adolescent, one of my unhealthiest social habits was engaging in lopsided friendships where I felt more like a fan than an equal, drawing false conclusions that because the popular girl in school had a bright smile and effortless charisma, she'd make a loyal confidant. It's even easier to engage in such infatuation from afar. Since we tend to view celebrities as attractive, wealthy and successful, we snap judge that they must also be sociable, self aware and worldly. Some admirers feel a deep closeness with their idols and figure their idols must cherish them too, even maternally. So not every fan is a Stan, but celebrity worship is growing more extreme and with measurable, deleterious consequences. The word fan stems from the Latin fanaticus, meaning insanely but divinely inspired. It wasn't until the 1960s and 70s that the public started perceiving celebrities as anything more than entertainers, much less role models or gods. This shift in perception was connected to the rise in celebrity activism, which corresponded with Americans loss of trust in politicians, traditional religious leaders, and healthcare authorities. In a New York Times op ed titled When Did We Start Taking Famous People Seriously? Jessica Gross reported that in 1958, 3/4 of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing. Almost always or most of the time, that's according to Pew Research. But then the Vietnam War happened and the economic recession of 1960 and actual Watergate, a tragic trifecta that suggested Americans needed to find a fresh kind of paragon. By the 1960s, baby boomers had become teenagers. There were more teens in the US than ever, and as the isolation and insecurity that accompany adolescents coalesced with post war prosperity in the itch of social change, young people found a new religion, the Beatles, whose members served not only as fans, artistic icons, but distant lovers and spiritual guides. In 1980, only about 25% of U.S. citizens trusted the government to do the right thing anymore, according to Gross. That's when the boundaries separating media figures, politicians, and spiritual authorities dissolved for good. In 1981, Ronald Reagan became America's first celebrity president, pitching himself as an insurgent outsider. Hollywood's collective Halo lit up like the burning bush as the Zeitgeist's new message implied that icons of the stage and screen weren't just here to entertain us they were here to save us. Pop stars became our new priests. Eventually, social media fertilized that religiosity like potent manure. At my local crystal shop in la, you can find prayer candles printed with images of hallowed musicians, Saint Dolly, Saint Stevie, Harry Styles face superimposed on the body of Christ, Grose quoted Dr. Paul Offit, a Children's Hospital of Philadelphia pediatrics professor and author of Bad Advice or why Celebrities, Politicians, and activists aren't your best source of health information. Who analyzed that? Americans put their faith in famous people because we think we know them. We see them in movies or on tv, and we assume they are the roles they play. But celebrities also play themselves, and online, that show broadcasts 24 7, even more disorienting than the Reagan era's Hollywood idolatry. When we see famous people air digital slices of their real Personas, we feel like we know them wholly. Instagram captions appear like letters from a loved one direct to cam. Posts seem like FaceTimes from a friend. In the age of magical oversharing, platforms like Tumblr, TikTok, Instagram, and Patreon offer fans exponentially more access to personal information about their heroes, bridging the parasocial gap to make them feel ever more connected. After all, unlike tv, there is a real possibility that Taylor Swift could respond to your Instagram comment herself, the almighty saint answering her believer's prayer or demand. If motivated enough, stands that congregate on social media actually can change the trajectory of their artist's path and the life of anyone who stands in the way, analyzed NPR music reporter Sydney Madden. She continued, this shift in power dynamics creates a feedback loop that can reward performative online Personas more than genuine artistic vision. Modern fandom falls on a spectrum ranging from healthy admiration to pathological mania. The constructive end offers something transcendent. Tumblr opened my eyes to scores of nuanced opinions from an array of people in a space that wasn't intimidating to me, penned Bustle editor Danielle Collin Tome in an essay on Stand Culture's quote empowering and at times wildly problematic role in the lives of marginalized youth. She continued, our fandoms were vehicles to talk about larger issues, feminism, race, and LGBTQ representation. But the dogmatic end is no joke. A 2014 clinical examination of celebrity worship concluded that high levels of Standom are associated with psychological difficulties, including concerns about body image, greater proneness to cosmetic surgery, sensation seeking, cognitive rigidity, identity diffusion, and poor interpersonal boundaries. Among other observed struggles were depression, anxiety, dissociation, narcissistic personality tendencies, thirst for fame, compulsive shopping and gambling, stalking behavior, excessive fantasizing to the point of social dysfunction. This was termed maladaptive, daydreaming. Addiction and criminality A 2005 study found that addiction and criminal activity were more strongly connected with celebrity worship than calcium intake with bone mass or lead exposure with children's IQs. This 2005 study, published in the Psychology, Crime and Law Journal, identified four categories along the celebrity worship continuum. First, there was the entertainment social level, defined by attitudes like my friends and I like to discuss what my favorite celebrity has done. Then there was the intense personal feelings category, classified by statements like I have frequent thoughts about my favorite celebrity even when I don't want to. Third was the borderline pathological level, characterized by delusional thoughts. My favorite celebrity and I have our own code so we can communicate with each other secretly Implausible expectations if I walk through the door of my favorite celebrity's home without an invitation, she or he would be happy to see me and self sacrifice I would gladly die in order to save the life of my favorite celebrity. A fourth category, labeled deleterious imitation, described stans willing to engage in licentious behaviors on behalf of their fave if I were lucky enough to meet my favorite celebrity and she asked me to do something illegal as a favor, I would probably do it. She could push me pretty far morally, said Jill Gudowitz, a pop culture reporter, author of the essay collection Girls Can Kiss now and unwavering Taylor swift Stan of 10 years. Gudowitz has personally suffered at the hands of her fellow Swifties. She once found herself at the bottom of a vitriolic Twitter dogpile after penning a humorous review of Swift's lover album for Vulture, in which she playfully poked fun at the singer's then boyfriend, actor Joe Alwyn, for being too bland to serve as her museum. Alwyn is a cup of plain oat milk were Gudowitz's exact words. People got really mad at me for that, she reflected. It was just one of those pile on stand moments. I had an experience one time where the FBI knocked on my door because of something I tweeted, and still I felt more scared when the Swifties came for me. But the mob was not enough to compromise Gutterowitz's loyalty to the singer. Not even close. A few weeks of Twitter venom was par for the course, a nominal tax for the privilege of exalting Taylor Swift. Precarious for both star and Stan, the celebrity Halo effect boasts the power to elevate a mortal being so high off the ground that the throng can't see their humanity anymore. By then, the worship itself becomes the subject, the celebrity something more like a mascot. In severe cases, the obsession grows so intense a rat king of catharsis that the wires between love and hate go scrambled. It's like that feeling of cute aggression where you squeeze a stuffed kitten so hard its head pops off. In 2023, after the chaotic rollout of Taylor Swift's live tour, sales on Ticketmaster stands erupted with charges of betrayal that went far beyond concert access. People acted as though tickets were a human right, Taylor denied them, amy Long wrote in her email. They kept moving the goalposts to the point that Taylor could only make up for it by giving them tickets or playing acoustic sets at their houses. Taylor is not someone who doesn't care about her fans, and it's as delusional to think that as it is to think she's actually your best friend. Nearly every Stan worshipped a Lister has seen their Flox Mania pervert overnight, from devotion to disdain. Even Beyonce, who is exceptionally private holding her admirers at a proscenium stage's length and mostly skirting tabloid controversy, has seen her disciples turn. The performer's ardent bayhive supposedly lusted for any glimpse they could get into the life of their flawless queen. That was until she appeared on Good Morning America in 2015 to share the announcement that she'd gone vegan. Her Stans thought she'd be blessing them with news of a pregnancy, a new sibling or live tour. When their expectations weren't met, they unleashed a deluge of relentless mockery, spamming the singer's social media comments with emojis of hamburgers and drumsticks. Arguably, some of the decade's most venomous Stan dynamics belong to English electropop artist Charli xcx. A particularly fervent corner of Charlie's Fan Sect is occupied by white gay men whose passion has been known to descend into bullying and objectification, treating their diva as more of a prop than a person. Charlie's Angels have coerced the singer into autographing and posing for photos with indecent objects, including bottles of poppers, an anal douche, and a vial containing the ashes of one Stan's deceased mother. They viciously lambasted top 40 hits of Charli's they didn't like twisting her arm to alter her set lists on tour to meet their demands. I've seen tweets where Charlie Stans roasted her new releases as tragic flops, then claimed her as their queen legend Mother in the same sentence. These Charli singles so far not doing it for me whatsoever, but she's still in my mother list the Mother the Cremains of a Dead Mother Celebrity Stan's tempestuous vacillations between adoration and retribution are indeed connected to mothering. One study from the mid-2000s found a correlation between celebrity stalking behavior and insecure parent child attachment. A similar survey out of Hong Kong analyzed 401 Chinese secondary school students and identified that parental absence exacerbated participants inclinations towards celebrity worship. A pair of studies from 2020 and 2022 confirmed that young people lacking in positive stressors from real life activities and family members were poised to fixate on media surrogates. According to the latter study, early life isolation may cause emotional deficits that can make someone more likely to focus on trauma in the virtual world, dividing famous figures into immaculate saints and disgraced demons. In psychology literature, this is called splitting. The traumas of everyday life can easily make us feel like a motherless child, said psychotherapist Mark Epstein. It's really no wonder then, that so many Taylor Swift acolytes slip into the borderline pathological category of standom with Swift's sundry albums, each of which offers not only new music but a new era, a rich wellspring of aesthetics and rituals in which to steep the small town innocence of her self titled debut, the vampiric vengefulness of reputation, the nostalgic fantasy of folklore. She's built a whole cinematic universe of mothers. It makes as much sense that pop Idol's queer Stans are sometimes their most zealous, so often deprived of the parental support and acceptance they need. In 2023, New Yorker music journalist Amanda Petrasich reviewed Taylor Swift's Billion Dollar Eras tour. In her analysis of the Bash, she remarked that while Swifty's online possessiveness seems both mighty and frightening, it took a totally different shape in person amid the rabble of rainbow sequins and ecstasy, the feeling, not the drug, Petrasic could see how protecting a sense of Swifty solidarity could drive someone to delirium. She wrote, Community, one of our most elemental human pleasures, has been decimated by Covid politics, technology, capitalism. Swift's performance might be fixed, perfect, but what happens in the crowd is messy, wild, benevolent and beautiful. As diverting as online gathering spaces can be, they are no stand in for the real stuff, which is why virtual fan interactions can turn so brutal and hallucinatory. Captioning an Instagram carousel from the road, Swift posted, this tour has become my entire personality. How could a fan know Swift wholly, then defend or chastise her accordingly? If, after so many years of conflating her Personas both on and off stage, Swift might not even fully know herself? In 2003, a survey of 833 Chinese teenagers found that those who worshiped people they really knew, like parents and teachers who could make tangible contributions to their lives, had overall higher self esteem and educational achievement. Glorifying pop stars and athletes predicted the lower confidence, weaker sense of self. This finding supports the absorption addiction model of celebrity worship, which suggests that Stans pursue parasocial relationships to make up for shortages within their real lives. But in their attempts to establish personal identities through standom, they wind up losing themselves. When the modern mind is starved of nourishment, sometimes it tries to nurse. In uncanny places where no milk can be found in both private and public spheres, worship is dehumanizing. To be deified is not so flattering. The dynamic risks annihilating a person's room for complexity and blunders, and this sets up everyone for suffering. Overanalyze a mortal's words like biblical scripture, only to find out the interpretations were false and you can start a crusade. When Stans feel betrayed by their heroes, they often revolt, and punishments are not distributed equally. With few exceptions, female idols, the mothers suffer the harshest penance for the mildest crimes, and the more marginalized a female celebrity is, the less humanity we allow. I wonder if Taylor Swift instead of Beyonce had gone on Good Morning America to announce a new vegan era, would Stans have behaved as caustically as Canadian political columnist Sabrina Maddow wrote in 2016, Women who are objects of simultaneous worship and disgust in the public eye become both victim and villain. Queer music journalists have noted a sinister misogyny underlying certain gay male consumers engagement with female pop icons. Women artists have long offered fans a kind of mouthpiece for a femininity they couldn't always express. With meme culture and Twitter belligerence, this treatment has grown even more denigrating. Once, we may have merely ventriloquized women's voices as our own. Now we speak over them, said queer entertainment critic Jared Richards. In my own family, my attitude toward my mother was once not so different from that of a rabid celebrity worshiper. Growing up, whenever either of my parents exhibited any hint of human fallibility, I always felt twice as acrimonious toward Denise. Posed on a higher and narrower pedestal, she simply had further to fall. A few years before I graduated high school, after a nasty spat where I excoriated my mother for, God forbid, acting so aloof all the time, she started emailing me long letters like a pen pal. For months, Denise shared a series of confessional memoirs from her life before I was born, stories she'd never felt comfortable divulging before. These stories, mostly about her vibrant love life, are not mine to tell, but they were crucially humanizing. They didn't extinguish my mother's halo rather, they lit up the environment around her so I could appreciate the context. Grasping her in more dimensions alleviated some pressure. With time, communication, and empathy, Denise and I were able to see one another more completely. Stans treat famous women with all the veneration and vitriol of a mother, but parasocial as the relationship is, it can never truly feed them. The mob can demand catchier singles, more progressive politics, and restitution for the concert tickets their years of loyalty earned them. However, I'm skeptical that any kind of public response, inherently removed as it would be, could be satiating enough to thwart the cycle of worship and dethronement. Naturally, we like it when our heroes are a little bit relatable, daintily human when a pop star forgets the opening line to her own song and has to start again when the president sneaks a cigarette, when your mom gets a little tipsy on vacation, like sea salt on a chocolate chip cookie, the garnish of imperfection brings out their holiness even more. But when it comes to people on pedestals, sometimes the fullness of their humanity feels like it just might kill us. Last spring I was comparing childhoods over lunch with a British novelist when she brought up the concept of the good enough mother. In 1953, English pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott coined this term after observing that children actually benefit when their mothers fail them in manageable ways. Even if it were somehow possible to be the perfect mother. The end result would be a delicate, fragile child who couldn't tolerate even the slightest disappointment. Summarize Dr. Carla Nomberg, a clinical social worker and author of youf Are Not a Shitty Parent. She continued, if we are good enough, which I believe most of us are, then we mostly get it right. And sometimes we get it wrong. A Stan who paints their idol as a flawless mother figure seems bound for fragility. I wonder if our artistic icons just need to be good enough. In some parts of the animal kingdom, species engage in filial cannibalism, where a mother eats her own young. But there's also matriphagy, or mother eating, which is found in some insects, spiders, scorpions and nematode worms. Crab spider mothers supply their young with unfertilized eggs to eat, but it's not enough. Over the course of several weeks, the baby spiders also eat their mother. It's a sacrifice that aids the next generation. Spiderlings that engage in mother eating turn out with higher body weights and survival odds than those that don't. Rolling stone called 2022 the year of the Cannibal. Hollywood produced a stunning surplus of cannibal themed media. Hulu's Fresh, Showtime's Yellowjackets, Netflix's Dahmer, the Jeffrey Dahmer story, Luca Guadagnino's bones and all. Like the spiders, we were clearly starved of something connection and protection, selfhood and guidance, the most human nutrition. We were ravenous. Some couldn't help themselves. But the celebrity metrifagy was never enough. It didn't make anyone stronger because the stars weren't our mothers. They were made of pixels and maladaptive daydreams. The hatchlings could devour leg after leg of the mother spider and never get full.
- [42:47]
Amanda Montell
Welcome to our ugly home.
- [42:49]
Advertiser/Promoter
Reddit is back for a historically hideous season. It's our 100th ugly house. This place is mayhem. That is impressive. And if these walls could talk. Do you cry a lot?
- [43:02]
Podcast Co-host
I do.
- [43:04]
Advertiser/Promoter
They'd have a lot to say. What in God's name is this pit? Don't get too close if you've seen the show.
- [43:11]
Podcast Co-host
I'm scared of that.
- [43:12]
Advertiser/Promoter
Ugliest House in America Season premiere Wednesday at 8 on HGTV.
- [43:18]
Jake Halpern
I'm Jake Halpern, host of Deep Cover, a show about people who lead double lives. We're presenting a special series from Australia. It's all about a family who is conned by a charming American.
- [43:31]
Advertiser/Promoter
When you marry someone, you feel like you really know them.
- [43:33]
Podcast Co-host
I was just gobsmacked as to what's.
- [43:36]
Advertiser/Promoter
Going on here, does the name Leslie Mnookian mean anything to you? Oh, you bet.
- [43:41]
Podcast Co-host
Never forget her.
- [43:43]
Jake Halpern
Listen to Deep Cover Presents Snowball wherever you get your podcasts.
- [43:50]
Amanda Montell
Thank you Kulti so much for tuning in to this exclusive audio excerpt from the Age of Magical Overthinking. I still maintain that the Cult of Swifties slash Taylor Swift is a light watch your back. Feel free to comment on Spotify or on our Instagram at Sounds Like a Cult Pod with any thoughts of yours if you agree or disagree. And with that, that is our show. Thank you so much for listening. Stick around for a new cult in a couple of weeks and in the meantime stay culty but not too culty.
- [44:31]
Podcast Co-host
Sounds Like a Cult was created by Amanda Montel and edited by Jordan Moore of the Pod Cabin. This episode was hosted by Amanda Montel. Our managing producer is Katie Epperson. Our theme music is by Casey Kolb.
- [44:43]
Amanda Montell
If you enjoyed the show, we'd really.
- [44:44]
Podcast Co-host
Appreciate it if you could leave it 5 stars on Spotify or Apple Podcasts Maths.
- [44:49]
Amanda Montell
It really helps the show a lot. And if you like this podcast, feel.
- [44:52]
Podcast Co-host
Free to check out my book Cultish the Language of Fanaticism, which inspired the show. You might also enjoy my other books, the Age of Magical Notes on Modern Irrationality and Word A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language. Thanks as well to our network studio 71 and be sure to follow the Sounds Like a Cult cult on Instagram for all the discourse. Sounds Like a Cult Pod or support us on Patreon to listen to the show ad free at patreon.com soundslikeacult.
- [45:28]
Advertiser/Promoter
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- [45:58]
Amanda Montell
Hello my lovely listeners.
- [45:59]
It's your host Amanda here with a little announcement. I just wanted to share that the paperback edition of my third book, the Age of Magical Overthinking is finally coming out on Tuesday, January 6th, and if you click the link@amandamontel.com events you can pre order a signed copy inscribed with the unhinged message and or doodle of your choosing. I'm also throwing a free launch party in Los Angeles on January 12th at Skylight Books at 7pm it's gonna be super fun. I'm bringing wine and cookies and a special guest. Some of you may know or be a fan of her. It's Tracy Thomas of the Stacks Podcast. There's gonna be a little conversation and.
- [46:41]
A Q and A and a book.
- [46:42]
Signing and just kind of a fun hang. No RSVP needed. It is totally free. So again, go to amandamontel.comevents to pre order your signed copy and come celebrate with me on January 12th in LA at Skylight Books.