Why is Everybody a Sexy Baby?
A hypothesis of why our best American songwriter feels like a monster.
By now, you probably know this line in Taylor Swift’s new song, Anti-Hero:
Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby
My sister and I were texting about the new Midnights album, and how Anti-Hero is one of our favorite songs.
“Except for the sexy baby line,” my sister wrote. “I don’t know what that’s all about.”
It is … odd. But I still think that Taylor Swift is one of our best American songwriters, so it’s clearly not a throwaway line. I think that sexy baby isn’t the most important part of the verse to learn what that phrase means. To understand it more deeply, look to the next few lines:
Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby
And I'm a monster on the hill
Too big to hang out
Slowly lurching toward your favorite city
Pierced through the heart but never killed
Indeed, in the video, Taylor Swift shows up as a literal giant, an unwelcome guest.
Here’s my hypothesis about what it all means:
It’s no revolution that youth is valued. Taylor Swift, like those of us in our 30s, grew up in an era when it was desirable to be SO young, that you’re essentially a child. (No body fat, no body hair, no intellectual stimulation.) What many girls saw as the ultra-thin allure in the mid-90s – Fiona Apple’s Criminal video, heroin chic – slid into Britney Spears’ “Baby One More Time”. Here, we witness a 16-year-old is sexing up a girl’s uniform under the direction of adults.
I remember girls sitting around cafeteria tables drinking Slim Fast at 14 instead of eating lunch, to literally make their bodies disappear. Girls shaved every hair off their body from the eyebrows down, to be as hairless as they were the day they were born. This is all what, allegedly, men wanted – and boys like me growing up in the era were told was appealing. (It seemed to apply to the gay ideal then as well, with thin, hairless twinks as the cover of gay life, a pivot from the hairy-chested beefcakes of an earlier generation.)
Wesley Morris, who up until recently was flying solo on the (excellent) podcast Still Processing, had a great episode where he and his guest explored this pivot into youth as 90s sexual capital. Fatal Attraction was a blockbuster movie and a key piece of the femme fatale canon. This was what was presented as sexy and alluring and dangerous in the late 80s and into the 90s. The woman with darker powers, knowledgeable and confident in sex, maybe a little dangerous and unhinged. (Everyone of course remembers the rabbit but I love the scene where the cassette tape is already in Michael Douglas’ car. Anyway.) This presentation coincided with the increase of women’s power in the boardroom – a dangerous thing for men, it seems; the narrative continued with Basic Instinct (why is Michael Douglas always falling for these women?) and countless other cultural references.
In the podcast, they explore that it likely fizzled when the AIDS crisis starting taking a larger toll (at least on straight people’s sex lives, anyway) and with the Clinton scandal (even the White House was sullied, which, ha). Enter: Britney, who was not only a literal child when she became famous, but was also put out there as a sex icon, as if the two weren’t a little … weird. It was innocence in the extreme.
And, so, here we are. Where a our best American songwriter continues to carry her insecurities from those years. It was a time when her body was changing and she felt like a monster, and everyone was talking in childish voices and removing any hair that would hint at adulthood and staying placid and quiet. I can imagine carrying that around, still, after all these years, you may feel like a monster. And sometimes it feels like everybody is a sexy baby.
Or, it’s a 30 Rock reference.
Thoughts? Does this resonate or am I way off?