Not Just Your “Teammate’s Girlfriend”
Butker's Blasphemy
Hitherto, our articles have been penned by Editor in Chief and paragon of prudism Charlotte Collins. Today, we are thrilled to present this offering from another Prude: the ever-witty Effie Shins-Fyve. Effie joined the Prudes because she, like them, has a deep and abiding belief in the power of the written word to change lives and insult people.
If we’re all going to decide that the entire trajectory of Western culture hinges on the opinions of a 28-year-old football player, let’s at least criticize the right points. We’ve all heard the outraged cries against Harrison Butker following his commencement speech at Benedictine College. Accusations of anti-semitism, anti-feminism, and anti-fun-priest-ism fly through the digital air — and yet each of these critiques misses the key issue. Butker’s real sin, gone painfully unnoticed, is his blatant disrespect toward our feminine overlady and madam, Her Excellency Taylor Swift, to whom he referred so crudely as “my teammate’s girlfriend.”
“My teammate’s girlfriend”? That’s like St. Peter’s mother-in-law referring to Jesus as “my son’s fishing buddy.” How absurd! This year’s Super Bowl was viewed by 2 million more young people than usual. Hate to break it to you, Butker, but it wasn’t because the teens wanted to see you kick your little pigskin around. To them, it was a cosmic event — the girl who once sang that she would “do things greater than dating the boy on the football team” was now a woman, dating the boy (superstar tight end Travis Kelce) on the football team (four-time Super Bowl champions, the Kansas City Chiefs), and still ruling the world. Each of the eleven times that the NFL videographers trained the fan cam on Lady Swift’s visage, I heard a collective guttural scream burst through the atmosphere and cause my electricity to flicker, Monsters Inc-style.
Impoverished former English majors, desperate to use their degrees, might say that Butker was simply using the rhetorical devices of “irony” or “understatement” when he referred to Her Sovereign Ladyship, T. Swift. I disagree. As we all know, Butker is a trained professional public speaker with a team of well-paid speechwriters. Nothing he says in front of a crowd is hasty or accidental. So why the veiled reference to this household name; why use a line from a song that’s not even in her top five on Spotify? I chalk it up to one thing: fear. Not the kind of holy fear we should expect when one refers to the Queen Regnant T. S., but a deep and abiding terror that she, of all people, would be the one figure to undercut his later point about A Woman’s Happiness.
For context, I will briefly summarize the main points of Butker’s speech that are really making the internet go bananas. He addresses the female graduates, congratulates them on their accomplishments, guesses that many of them are “most excited” about becoming wives and mothers, then starts to cry as he reminisces about being in band class with his now-wife Isabelle whom he loves, blah, blah, blah. Basically, he is a fan of his wife, who raises their kids and supports his mission of being good at kicking. And like most moony young husbands, if he had it his way, all women would be like his wife, i.e. happy and fulfilled in her role as homemaker. Not so fast, buddy! I know of one very smiley lady who has NO kids and NO husband, and you yourself quoted her nary a few minutes heretofore. We’re talking about the queen of sequin bodysuits herself: Kansas City’s very own Hot Supportive Girlfriend, Taylor Alison Swift. Checkmate! Cue the blaring sparkly pop music!
If anyone’s life “started” before marriage, it was hers. And if anyone’s life has continued without marriage, it’s hers. Which, I might add, is so annoying. Because I, like any young woman raised in the early 2000s, personally modeled my life after her early work. Remember that a decade ago, the Swift songs that captured our hearts spoke of twinkling, lifelong romance in misty gardens. These were tales of Romeo-and-Juliet-style courtship that ended not with death, but with a very polite young man Asking Your Father For Permission. She made a life of committed love sound awesome, plus she wore pretty dresses and played guitar. I, too, desired these things.
And with a little hard work and elbow grease, I did it! I found a clean-cut young swain, fell head over heels, attempted the garden rendezvous (too many mosquitoes). My dad actually liked the guy, so he thought it was weird that I kept begging him on my knees to let us see each other. But I had to go through the motions. After the young gallant approached my father with (albeit unnecessary) fear and trembling, he returned to me, knelt to the ground and pulled out a ring, and the rest is history. Now here I sit, young and married and deeply in love, having attained the culmination of Swift’s early work and dreams, and meanwhile, she steamrolls right past all the marriage/family nonsense and becomes a Boss Babe!
I can’t fault her too much. Because, as we know, she’s over the moon about her life right now. Just check her Instagram. Her accomplishments in the past two years have skyrocketed her to a level of worldwide fame not seen since either Alexander the Great or Michael Jackson, depending on who you ask. Pollstar estimated that her average gross earnings per concert on the Eras Tour chalk up to about 17 million dollars. That’s six million dollars more than her boyfriend’s base NFL salary in 2023 — as in, the money he made in an entire year of playing professional football. She is officially #winning, #slayqueen. And to top it all off, she released a brand-new double album in April, “The Tortured Poets Department,” packed with dozens of songs written over the past two incredibly busy, wonderfully magical years of her life.
The genius of this new album lies in its irony. As always, Swift has her finger poised on the pulse of culture — she knows that depression is IN. So, despite her obviously joyful life as a spicy bachelorette, she uses her skill as a storyteller to produce no fewer than thirty-one gutwrenching songs that make you wonder, “Is she ok?”
Of course she’s ok! That’s the big secret. Swift’s new album is rife with references to lost youth, unhappy long-term noncommittal relationships, and the total lack of privacy that results from a life of unimaginable fame. But only her true followers know the truth: she’s having the time of her life. In fact, she literally says so in the first verse of her song about the Eras Tour, entitled “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart.” All the stuff that comes later in the song, those lines about her joyful onstage persona being “lies,” having to perform for screaming crowds while feeling “miserable,” and secretly “cry[ing] a lot” about the end of her six-year relationship that she thought was going to last “a lifetime” — these are just further examples of her power to sympathize. All she has to do is think about the lonely, sad women listening to her music: the ones who will never make the billions club, the ones who, like me, will just slog through their days managing a brood of children and a loving husband. That’s where she gets the idea of misery from. She will, blissfully, never have to experience such petit bourgeois sorrow for herself.
Obviously Butker, who has certainly attended at least one party with Swift, is aware of her prowess as an artist and businesswoman. It’s impossible to ignore. And of course, he would have realized, in rubbing elbows with her at said party, that she is living her very best life. And so, when he made those comments to Benedictine’s graduating class of 2024, he was too sheepish to mention her by name, so as not to remind the ladies in attendance of just how great life can be when you excel in a career, unhindered by husband or kiddos. But I saw through your little masquerade, Butker! You can’t escape her, that shimmering pillar of ageless beauty and success. To quote your teammate’s girlfriend, “Try and come for my job.”
This is utter perfection. 👏👏👏
Cool.