whitehotharlots - Tumblr blog

[whitehotharlots]

I don't know how a person could manage to find a post here on whitehotharlots dot tumblr dot com and somehow think I'm a fan of DEI regimes or the left's tendency to peformatively (and selectively) denounce western culture.

But, hey, maybe this means moving to Substack has increased my reach!

So here's the thing: yes, I'm primarily describing symptoms, because this essay is written from a first-person perspective as a series of anecdotes. I make some gestures toward more systemic causes of these trends but I don't go into much detail. That would be a completely fair criticism if this essay were purporting to do something it's not purporting to do.

The trends described in this piece have nothing to do with Marxism, nor with any other developments that most people would regard as explicitly ideological. Kids aren't depressed because they've been tricked into being antisemitic. I do think there's something to the notion that indoctrinating kids with pessimistic nihilism harms their mental health--it certainly fosters a "can't win, don't try" attitude, if nothing else--but the culture war shit this re-poster doesn't like are not the root cause of anything.

DEI bullshit is a salve. It's a means of establishing moral superiority and grasping toward a sense of agency while operating within a system that is very deeply broken on multiple fronts. There do exist people who perform land acknowledgements in the morning and then go straight to the synagogue to bid on freshly stolen Palestinian homes in the evening, but such profane creatures are thankfully pretty rare, even if they wield outsize influence over the state of the academy (and your brain). The vast majority of students are, at most, only tertiarily effected by the existence of mutants of this caliber. And while these students probably suffered some negative influence, at some point, by some variety of DEI stormtrooper, such experiences likewise didn't have that much direct or noticeable impact on their day-to-day experiences as students.

Ultimately, this all redounds to the McKinziefication of higher education. I'm sorry to break this to you, but the people who goad institutions (large and small, corporate and non-profit) to regard all labor costs as waste and all automation/dehumanization as a priori good are the exact same ones who want to subject all human interaction to HR review. These vampires fucking love therapy speak and tattletale culture, and they have no problems whatsoever with teaching kids that all laws were created because of chattel slavery or that whiteness is a poison or whatever. Wokeness is, ultimately, a bipartisan project.

You've fallen for the same culture war bullshit of the people you hate.

[whitehotharlots]

First Substack-exclusive post (still free to access) looks at a good but one-sided Harper’s piece that linked January 6th to the right having abandoned coherent political narratives.

[whitehotharlots]

Only been up for a day, and we're already hosting a scathing takedown of Andrea Long-Chu, an explanation of why "settler colonialism" is an ineffective approach to helping Palestinians, a meditation on the depressing influence the Columbine shooters have had upon American culture, and a thing about MeToo's malignancy.

And it's all free! Check it out!

[whitehotharlots]

whitehotharlots.substack.com

I have long resisted requests that I start a substack. I already have a decently sized reader base here, and I prize the anonymity that tumblr affords.

But tumblr just isn't a very good place for longer-form pieces, especially in regards to social media shares and google search results. There have been times where I could remember the exact title of a piece I wrote a few years ago as well as some key phrases, but google will tell me it simply does not exist.

I don't know if I've been intentionally buried in search results--I shouldn't be nearly important enough for something like that. But I do know the current system doesn't work very well, and if I'm gonna keep putting in the effort to bitch about stuff on the internet I'd like for the writing to be accessible.

Yes, there is a subscription option. If you feel like tossing me a few bucks a month, I'd appreciate it.

Right now, I'm gonna upload some of my more recent and popular pieces. The vast majority of new pieces will be free to access. We'll see if I get beyond a dozen or two paid subscribers maybe I'll start adding some paywalled stuff like a book club or whatever. I will also posts links to updates here.

So here we go. Enjoy.

[whitehotharlots]

Shut up

[whitehotharlots]

My point, dingus, is that the New Anti Racist project has failed to accomplish its purported goals. It has, in fact, accomplished the mirror opposite of these goals.

On the center-right, you have the literal German government doing pogrom-style shit to left wing Jewish people. On the left, you have Nikole Hannah-Jones preaching straight-up blood & soil ethnic nationalism. And, in the halls of power, you have a Democrat party that's more race-focused than they've been since the Civil War sending tens of billions of dollars to fund the most openly intentional genocide since Rwanada.

You guys won the rhetorical race war. Everyone and everything is all about race, all the time. And this is the result.

[whitehotharlots]

Million dollar idea

You know how in the late 80's and early 90's, studios would reboot classic cartoons by turning the characters into children? There was The Flintstone Kids, Yo Yogi!, and, of course, the Tiny Toons.

There's no reason this precedent should be limited to the realm of our animated pals. And that leads us to one question: what intellectual property exists that's about 25-30 years old, something that still has oil left in its veins but we just need a new way of drillin' it?

Ladies and gentlemen: The Kid Rock Kids

There would be Kid Kid Rock. Kid Joe C. Kid Dido (because we need a girl). And then probably a black one.

[whitehotharlots]

We really need to reconsider the purpose and utility of the western conception of "anti racism" if it's brought us to a point where Germany is seizing the assets of dissident Jews and demanding a list of their names.

[whitehotharlots]

Tara Reade, Christine Blassey Ford, and the bleak limitations of pettiness feminism

For what it’s worth, I found the accusations made by Tara Reade and Christine Blassey Ford both imminently plausible. I’ve never met Joe Biden or Brett Kavanaugh, but I’ve spent more than enough time around entitled white collar pricks to realize that things like non-consensual workplace groping and wacky frat house sex pranks are a part of their worlds. There was nothing about either story that struck me as obviously false or otherwise disqualifying. Both very well may have happened.

But I also believe that there’s a wide chasm between plausibility and proof–especially in criminal matters, and extra especially in regards to the sort of accusations that could result in yearslong jail sentences. Sexual assault cases are notoriously hard to prosecute in their immediacy. If we’re talking about something that happened years or decades earlier, there’s no reasonable way to prove the accusations in a manner that would warrant a formal, judicial response.

By 2020, this belief of mine was considered hopelessly out of date, borderline sacrilegious. The Trump era ushered in a new diligence in regards to how the public was supposed to understand and react to accusations of sexual misconduct: women should be believed, full stop. Accused men should be punished, full stop. The crisis of the moment meant that all the old notions regarding due process and the fixed standards of what is or is not a crime had to be thrown out.

Remember that “Shitty Media Men” list from 2017? God, seems like forever ago. The list was a wholly anonymous Google Docs spreadsheet containing the names of several dozen men in media and a brief description of their alleged crimes. It was written about in glowing terms by publications big and small, heralded as a bold and exciting new chapter of social justice, and the list’s creator–Moria Donegan–was eventually granted status as a star commentator.

Did you read the list? I did. About one in every 15 or so entries contained a very severe accusation–something along the lines of “he raped me in the dumpster behind Arby’s” or “he keeps tricking me into getting stuck in a dryer.” But the vast, vast majority of entries alleged nothing more than minor interpersonal conflict: “he doesn’t respect my work,” “he raised his voice at me one time in 2012,” and other stuff along those lines. One entry really stuck out: the accuser admitted that she had never met the man. “But,” she said, “he must be a creep… just look at the stuff he writes!”

No doubt, at least some of these men were/are grade-A jerks. But the bulk of them appear to have just been disliked by a colleague or acquaintance who felt the need to take advantage of a social justice movement to exact revenge. This is how human interaction works. No one is beloved by everybody; everyone will experience some instances in which they treat others with less courtesy than they probably should; and, well, sometimes two people who are otherwise completely decent despise one another for reasons that are inscrutable to everyone but God.

The malignancy of the Shitty Media Men list is that it caused readers to conceptually associate minor interpersonal conflicts–some of which admittedly did not happen, most others of the sort that would cause no reasonable person to find one party entirely at fault, let alone worthy of expulsion from polite society–with major violations such as rape and assault. This was the new era: every accusation is proof of guilt, and all guilt is of the same severity. It’s too hard to definitively prove that a rape happened, ergo we needed to dismiss the usual evidentiary standards of criminal proceedings in regards to rape. And, also, mildly upsetting a female colleague is now the same thing as rape.

Wonderful stuff. Fantastic stuff.

A year passed. The Notorious RBG ascended to the great rap battle in the sky, and it was up to the dastard President Drumpf to appoint her successor. He settled upon a youth-pastor-cum-jurist who resembled a crude caricature from a late 1800’s anti-Irish political comic. The man had a rap sheet a mile long: lackey to Ken Starr (himself quite the defender of rape), Yalie, anti-abortion, corporate puppet, helped rig the Florida vote in 2000, Federalist Society member, blah blah blah all the horrible shit you expect from a GOP nominee to the Supreme Court.

None of these facts mattered much within the liberal imaginary, however, as they weren’t that far afield from the activities of the sort of justices liberals find inoffensive. No, the #Resistance had an ace up their sleeve: a lady said he had sexually assaulted her 30 years prior, and she was willing to say so in front of congress.

He must have been toast after that, right? Because everyone had spent the last few years hashtagging #BelieveWomen, right? They’re not gonna say they believe women and not believe them, right? It can’t be that this precedent we just set up would only be used to ruin the lives of low-level middle manager type guys who did inconsequential stuff, right? Right?

No. Of course not. Republicans never even pretended to care about that shit.

In the non-conservative press, Blassey Ford was treated as a hero. Her effort was brave, and her failure served to validate the premise upon which it was founded: women are not believed enough, and men can get away with anything.

Another few years passed. Due to a confluence of events of that ranged between skullduggery and outright rigging, the Democratic presidential primary narrowed down to a less-corrupt-than-average politician who was called a “socialist” because he was to the left of Grover Norquist, and a credit card lobbyist who was once accidentally appointed vice president.

The credit card lobbyist should have been considered especially ignominious, considering the degree to which the #BelieveWomen mantra was prevalent on the left. Decades earlier, in a situation quite similar to that faced by Blassey Ford, he led the charge in aggressively dismissing the accusations of a woman who had accused a SCOTUS nominee of sexual misconduct. Surely that was the sort of thing MeToo would not abide, right? Right?

Again, no. The semi-socialist was repeatedly smeared as a racist and sexist for reasons that no one could ever quite articulate. Social media figures openly solicited false allegations of sexual misconduct against him. In spite of being a leftist Jewish man, in spite studies showing that his supporters were actually far less aggressive and hateful than those of Hillary Clinton, he was still the most toxic and evil presence to ever enter into Democrat politics. #BelieveWomen and #MeToo precedents were very effectively invoked: there doesn’t need to be proof, and there doesn’t need even be an accusation. He’s evil because we say he’s evil. His name is on the spreadsheet.

But the guy who got Clarence Thomas onto the Supreme Court? That was regrettable, sure. But it was a youthful transgression! He’s apologized! It doesn’t matter.

Then we got a late-primary curveball: a woman who verifiably worked with Biden claimed he had jammed his hand down her pants. The allegation was decades old and therefore unprovable in a legal sense, and suddenly that was an issue where it hadn’t been just a few months before. The MeToo movement’s purveyors worked to clarify that she was a lying, mentally unstable, and possibly Russian slut.

A year earlier, we were told that due process was a misogynist construct, and that expressing skepticism toward politically opportune allegations was an expression of patriarchy and privilege. Now, faced with allegations that would force them to choose between a semi-leftist or Donald Trump, the progressive vanguard suddenly decided that these old principles of Enlightened Liberalism weren’t so evil after all.

Blassey Ford is about to embark on a book tour, receiving near-unanimous praise (and ample financial compensation) for her bravery. She might not be a household name, but among those who do remember her, she is revered as a hero.

Reade, meanwhile, is a permanent disgrace who had to defect to Russia.

In a sad way, the disparity between how these two women were treated demonstrates the conditions that spawned MeToo: a woman who makes an accusation against an unpopular or hated man will be, at least, believed. She will not suffer negative consequences. She may even be rewarded, even if the man himself isn’t punished. But a woman who goes against a man who is too important, too well-connected? She won’t even get a chance to testify. She’s actually even worse than the abusers. Every aspect of her account and character will be placed under a microscope, and anything she cannot prove with 100% fidelity will be held up as proof of how horrible she is. She’s also on the spreadsheet.

And in an even sadder way, this disparity demonstrates why the MeToo and BelieveWomen stuff was horribly misguided from the start. Removing the structures that allow society to function will not magically result in a more just society manifesting from the wreckage of the old. You might–might–remove some of the most malignant shitheads. But in the process you will ruin the lives of many who are either innocent or marginally guilty, and you will entrench the utter empowerment of those who are, only in some small ways, the lesser evils. There’s no path forward, here. There is no hope here.

[whitehotharlots]

TikTok, chopping block

I'm not going to dignify the assertion that the United States congress cares so deeply about the privacy of American citizens they have to ban a social media platform to protect us. Mass, consistent surveillance is an untouchable political reality that we will never be rid of. House Republicans claiming to care about privacy is like Jeffrey Dahmer appearing in an ad for PETA.

But the even more stupefying claim is that TikTok is bad because it's owned by Scary Foreigners who might poison the minds of America's youth with their terrifying Chinese magic. Where the hell did this come from?

I'm not going to say there's no logic to a position of complete media isolationism. I don't agree with it, and it runs counter to every prevailing ideological trend within left-liberalism for the past half century, but I can see where its advocates are coming from. There's an argument there, if nothing else.

But... why now? Why just this one platform? Fox News was founded and run by an Australian psychopath. Twitter was majority owned by Saudis for about a decade and is now owned and operated by a South African. Google was co-founded by a Russian man. The opinions of Israeli genocide freaks matter far more to nearly every member of our government than the concerns of this country's own citizens. Etc, etc.

You get the drift: American media and politics are heavily influenced by foreign nationals, and the bipartisan consensus for decades has been that this is at worst tolerable or at best something so pure and good and valid only a nazi would complain about it.

[whitehotharlots]

It appears the manic safetyism the left has mandated for the past 15 years has begun to harm their ability to report issues that generate the demand for said safetyism.

A shame, really. Media overrun by guardrails protecting people against threats that were so fleeting and phantasmal they were forgotten long ago, everyone forced to pretend that terms like "unalive" replaced "dead" organically, or at least for reasons understandable to someone, somewhere, who is not completely insane.

I saw a thing the other day--one of the slimiest forms of clickbait where someone re-posts a piece of social media on a different platform, from a bigger account, presumably reaping ad revenue off someone else's content. It was one of them "Am I the Asshole" threads from Reddit. Don't remember its content at all--those are mostly fake, anyway--but it stood out to me because the word "Control" had been censored in the headline and throughout the piece. Apparently that's bad brand association, gives people the ick in regards to whatever Chinese boner pills or Keto supplements or knockoff contraceptive devices need to be sold to keep the internet functioning.

That got me thinking about all the times you'll see a video that contains naughty words that are spoken clearly in the audio but replaced with asterisks in the captioning. I had presumed this was a simple extension of trigger warnings, people wanting to avoid getting yelled at or having their accounts suspended. It's just "being a decent fucking person," after all. Any psychologist will tell you that the profound trauma survivors suffer upon seeing the word rape in print goes away entirely if the word is spelled r*pe. Words are violence, after all. They cause hurt to vulnerable folx. Do you want to be violent? Do you realize how many people you're killing every time you speak? Just do what what we tell you, obey our ever-increasing slew of incessantly weird and petty linguistic mandates or else I'll call your boss, tell your teachers, get you fired, put you in prison, etc etc.

But taking away ad revenue? Oh no, oh shit, that's a bridge too far! Won't someone think of the click merchants?!? Weep for all the important stories that shall no longer be profitably told--the trans influencers changing our perception about public architecture through dance poetry, the brave women exposing the inherent sexism within Behtesda, Maryland public sanitation department, the bold new Alf conspiracy theory that's drivin' fans insane, the development of 6 new cocktails inspired by the third season of HBO's Arli$... all gone, beaten, washed away like tears in the rain...

[whitehotharlots]

Also this is so fucked up man Sascha Baron Cohen is so fucking lame

[whitehotharlots]

Hamster wheel

My first experience with active shooter drills came the autumn after Columbine. I was in a study hall course in our high school’s cafeteria. My seat was approximately ten feet from the exit, then it’d be just a thirty or forty yard dash through the parking lot to safety. 

We were walked through the steps. This is what a shooter alarm sounds like, and here’s how it’s different from a tornado alarm and fire alarm. When you hear the shooter alarm, you need to get beneath one of the spacious, fairly high-topped cafeteria tables and place your hands above your head. Whatever you do, you should not attempt to flee.

This was insane enough that even the kids who usually nodded along to everything teachers told them expressed some incredulity. I asked if they were being serious. Like, for real are you being serious? The door is right fucking there. We can leave, instead of putting ourselves in a physical position that would make us much easier targets.

I was told that, yes, this is for real. And any more questions would be met with detention. Now, wait for the alarm and assume your positions. We all complied.

A decade later, I and hundred or so incoming instructors at a large university went through more advanced training--by this point it’d become a cottage industry, and they had instructional videos. We were told not to panic, shut the classroom door, instruct students to get beneath their desks, and don’t let anyone flee. 

The good news was that in so large a campus, the odds of the shooter targeting your particular classroom were quite slim. Goodie. And in this case, you’ll never know who’s a cop and who’s a shooter--cops like showing up to active shooting scenarios in plain clothes while wielding large weapons, and what if a good guy mistook you for a bad guy? Also, if the shooter does enter your room, you and your students should throw whatever you have at your disposal toward him, try and disrupt his flow. 

In a room full of putative intellectuals, no one bothered to ask how it was that if a man with a gun attempted to enter our classrooms during a mass murder event, we were supposed to be able to tell if he was a bad guy shooter who needed to be stopped, or a good guy police man who would not be legally liable if you spooked him and he killed you.

Of course, I thought back to my high school training. And it finally made sense: the point of active shooter drills is not to mitigate loss of life during a mass shooting. It’s to deflect liability to the institutions that offer the drills. If codifying these procedures actually results in more casualties during a worst case scenario, well... that’s a small price for legal protection.

Columbine is now the touchstone for retro-90′s era school shootings, but to me, at the time, it wasn’t the most horrible or gripping. It all seemed too random, too much like an amateurish media fabrication; a pair of shitheads doing what they thought they needed to do to get nationwide attention. 

The one that really scared me, at a young age, was the Westside Middle School shooting a year before. The Columbine shooters were disaffected high school shitheads, like myself, and I felt I could diagnose such a situation on my home turf beforehand and either defuse it or, at the very least, make certain I myself would be in no real danger. The Westside kids were kids, aged thirteen and eleven. They didn’t wander about the halls of their school picking off any random enemy. They had a plan. They gathered a cache of weapons beforehand and pulled a fire alarm knowing where their classmates would congregate after the building had been evacuated. They perched atop a hill and used the high ground to pick off their classmates and teachers amidst the confusion.

What got me about that shooting was the tactics. Literal children, even at the time younger than me, could somehow figure out the value of having the high ground and preying upon mild, manufactured chaos. You didn’t need to be a genius to be very good at murder. You just needed intuition, guns, and some very basic training. This shit could therefore happen anywhere, at any time, and for any reason.

Back to Columbine: it might be hard for younger people to grasp this, but way back in the ancient year of 1999 a school shooting that killed a mere dozen-plus was could capture the nation’s attention enough to remain in the headlines for months. 

The internet was still very young at the time; the ubiquitous online-ness afforded by smartphones wouldn’t been seen for another decade, and social media as we know it was still 6-7 years away. Nonetheless, Columbine was the first hyper-modern domestic tragedy. The coverage of previous school shootings focused primarily on the event itself, with minimal attention paid to the shooters’ backgrounds and motivations. Like nearly every other tragedy that proceeded it, Columbine was used a backdrop against which preexisting and mostly unrelated culture war battles could be litigated. 

My, how the narratives flowed. The shooters were godless, perhaps even satanic. They were so incensed at their low placement on the social totem pole they exacted horrific revenge against the popular, god fearing masses. Before taking the pure and virginal life of an especially sympathetic, blonde victim, they mockingly asked her if she truly believed in our lord and savior. She was martyred for her affirmative response. 

This, we were told, is what happens when the natural social order breaks down. Marilyn Manson, Beavis and Butt-Head, dark clothing, loud music, divorce, feminism, homosexuality... these things are all connected, people! And if we as a society continue allowing for their proliferation, we can only expect more and more horror. 

None of the narratives passed scrutiny. The shooters were not disaffected loaners; they were relatively popular and Harris was an athlete. They were not bullied. They did not ask a girl if she believed in God before they shot her. They were not picking off the popular kids while sparing the misbegotten nerds and weirdos. They didn’t even like Marilyn Manson--their favorite band was the avowedly non-violent KMFDM, a group whose lyrics usually sound like something taken from a Dick and Jane book.

In spite of the thorough wrongness of nearly every aspect of the shooting’s coverage, Columbine remains the template for how we process acts of mass domestic violence. There’s no shortage of cultural grievances on either side of aisle, and zero popular or political will to question why it is that a society so inured to needless and manufactured deaths might keep suffering these paroxysms of horror whose targets and scale grow increasingly profane with each passing year. Like every other social problem, the causes are always obvious, always wholly subjective, and yet somehow always just beyond our capacity to control.

The vulnerability is inevitable. Always has been. The only thing preventing the people you pass on the street from ripping your throat out is a shared sense of human connection that was once so basic it didn’t need to be enunciated but now seems like a quaint illusion, perhaps even a malignant trick, a sheet of wool pulled over our once-naive eyes that prevented us from understanding the evil depth of those whose cultural and consumer preferences do not align with our own. The fact that this sort of petty, superficial dehumanization appeared to be driving factor of the initial shootings is ignored. We do not possess the moral bandwidth to acknowledge that we are living in the world idealized by the likes of Eric Harris and Dylan Kleibold. 

The terrors keep coming. Our responses make us dumber and more hateful. Our preparations render us much more vulnerable to future horror. The wheel keeps spinning. It will never stop.

[whitehotharlots]

A quick note re: 2 exciting innovations in Anti-Racist Science

First, there's this piece from CNN titled "Major Hollywood stars press Academy to include Jews in representation and inclusion standards." Low-IQ actors such as Debra Messing and David Schwimmer have requested that the Academy of Motion Pictures begin auditing the number of Jews in their ranks, explaining that refusing to do so might cause people to believe Jews are white, instead of a completely separate racial entity. Very neat!

Second--and this is from a conservative source, sure, but the documents are verifiable--we have some new DEI materials that were taught to employess of the University of Wisconsin health system. These include many of the greatest hits from older DEI materials: it's racist to cry when someone yells at you, it's racist to disagree with a black person about anything, it's racist to say you're not racist, etc etc. But there are two exciting new twists: it's racist to have supported the 1960's Civil Rights movement and it's only possible for anyone to feel comfortable when they're interacting solely with people who "look and think" like themselves.

For years, I have complained that the left's all-consuming obsession with identity has accidentally turned progressives into Bush-era Republicans. Sadly, they have blasted beyond that. These people now have the politics of a fringe 1960's Birch Society candidate who thinks fluoridation causes race mixing. They have been Spiro Agnew-pilled.

This would all be a dumb little thing to snicker at if it were, indeed, confined to tumblr and X studies courses at liberal arts colleges. But it's not. It's absolutely not. It's being normalized in a staggering number of white collar spaces and people can and do face formal discipline for pointing out how utterly fucking insane it is.

Does anyone truly want this? Is this what you marched for in 2020? Is this what your workplaces and schools should look like? Are these the people we truly desire to empower? Because we are barreling toward the point of no return with this stuff.

You gotta stop it with the "golly gee we're just trying to teach folks about racism and slavery" bullshit. That was annoying in 2020; it's outright dangerous now. This is not education. This is not a process of healing. This is an extremely reactionary ideological project that's going to have negative reverberations for decades to come.

[whitehotharlots]

Taylor Swift: The BPD Christ

The New York Times just ran a reeeaaalllly creepy, 5,000 word piece speculating that Taylor Swift is secretly queer. It follows a pattern familiar to those of us who spent any time on schizoid identity tumblr in the early twenty-teens, purporting that Swift has long been issuing secret, coded messages in her lyrics and manner of dress:

When looking back on the artifacts of the months before that album’s release, any close reader of Ms. Swift has a choice. We can consider the album’s aesthetics and activism as performative allyship, as they were largely considered to be at the time. Or we can ask a question, knowing full well that we may never learn the answer: What if the “Lover Era” was merely Ms. Swift’s attempt to douse her work — and herself — in rainbows, as so many baby queers feel compelled to do as they come out to the world?

Understandably, the piece generated a strong sense of confusion and disgust among people whose brains have not yet completely melted. And you might be wondering... just, how? This shit was disquieting enough when it was confined to the blogs of mentally unwell pre-teens. How did this get printed in the country's largest newspaper? A-and not even in the Entertainment section, this was a featured OpEd.

Well, I got a theory. Stick with me:

It's very common for pre-pubescent girls to develop strong emotional/romantic attachments to celebrities and pretend that they're dating. These fantasies usually resolve themselves by the the time the girls fully enter puberty and begin experiencing sexual attraction to people around their own age.

I read an academic paper about this years ago. I can't find it now, but here's a good summary from Psychology Today:

Consider crushes are of two kinds – identity crushes and romantic crushes. In both cases, the teenager feels smitten by a compelling person who captivates their attention, for good and ill. (A third kind is the celebrity crush that shapes ideals and stirs fantasies, but there is usually no interpersonal contact to play them out. However, this is definitely where the market for celebrity posters comes in, to decorate teenage bedroom walls.)In all three cases, the young person largely projects onto another person idealized attributes the admirer highly values and wants to be associated with. Then she or he attaches strong positive feelings to the perfectly wonderful image that has been created. Crushes have more to do with fantasy than with reality, and they tell much more about the admirer than the admired. It’s because they usually prove unrealistic that in a relatively short time they soon wear off. But it is because of the idealization that crushes have such momentary power. This is why parents need to respect an adolescent crush and not dismiss or put it down. After all, it is an early approximation of love. While it lasts it is seriously held, so it should be seriously treated.

Again, this is completely normal when it's done by young girls.

My theory is as follows: I think people stop emotionally developing at whatever age they become terminally online. If you start posting at age 11, you're going to emotionally be 11 years old until you die.

I sincerely believe this is the only explanation for Swift's messianic popularity. She is the Christ figure for grown women with severe personality disorders, which is basically every woman who was born after 1990 or so. Taylor is not just an artist, nor even an aspirational figure. They've all convinced themselves that Taylor is their best friend and that she just happens to evince all the traits they desire in a woman who exists without sin. Anything that contradicts this--such as Taylor being a straight woman--must be refuted.