When The Life of a Showgirl dropped last week, Taylor Swift’s newest album quickly generated buzz for featuring some of the raunchiest lyrics she’s ever released. The song “Wood,” in particular, turned out to be about exactly what many Swifties predicted when Taylor first revealed the tracklist—namely, Travis Kelce’s penis. But while Taylor’s innuendo-laden ode to the “ah”-matizing powers of her fiancé’s “Redwood tree” may contain the most overtly sexual references we’ve heard from her yet, I’m here to tell you that The Life of a Showgirl is not Taylor’s sexiest album. Reputation is.
As I’ve previously written, Taylor has been sneaking sexually suggestive lyrics into her music since practically the beginning of her career. But when Reputation dropped in 2017, it made a splash as the first TS album to directly reference “adult” themes like drinking and, of course, sex. Featuring the iconic line “only bought this dress so you could take it off,” “Dress” immediately stood out as the horniest track Taylor had ever released and still remains a front runner for her sexiest song of all time, even as subsequent albums have added bangers like “Guilty as Sin” and “False God” to the Horny Taylor Swift canon.
But while “Dress” is obviously the first track that comes to mind when you think “sexy Taylor Swift song from Reputation,” it’s far from the only steamy number on the album. In fact, I might go as far as to say it’s not even the horniest!
Ostensibly a revenge album marking Taylor’s comeback post the great Snakegate debacle of 2016, both fans and music critics have long noted that beneath the snake imagery and vengeance-coded visuals, Reputation is actually one of Taylor’s most romantic albums, rife with songs like “Delicate,” “Gorgeous,” and “King of My Heart,” thought to detail the early days of her relationship with then-boyfriend Joe Alwyn. What seems to fly under the radar is that many of these love songs are also quite erotic—and even, I’d argue, quite kinky!
Exhibit A: “So It Goes….” Featuring lines like, “Getting caught up in a moment, lipstick on your face,” “You know I’m not a bad girl but I do bad things with you,” and “Scratches down your back now,” this largely overlooked track is perhaps the most obvious example of a Reputation song that is every bit as horny as “Dress” but somehow seems to lay pretty low.
Meanwhile, themes of erotic possession arguably suggestive of Dom/sub kink dynamics show up again and again throughout the album, beginning with the very first track. In “Ready for It,” (which also alludes to sex dreams in the chorus: “In the middle of the night, in my dreams / You should see the things we do”) Taylor pledges her devotion to a lover in way that recalls submitting to a Dom within an ownership kink, saying, “He can be my jailer,” vowing to forget the names of any former lovers (“Every love I’ve known in comparison is a failure / I forget their names now”), and promising she’s “so very tame now.”
This theme of sexually submissive devotion can be identified throughout much of the album. In “Don’t Blame Me” (another clearly erotic song that contains the line, “I get so high every time you’re lovin’ me / Trip of my life every time you’re touchin’ me), Taylor sings, “My name is whatever you decide,” which suggests handing one’s identity to a lover’s control. On “Dress,” she sings, “Carve your name into my bedpost,” which invokes a kind of marking of territory. Even on the relatively chaste “Call It What You Want,” Taylor sings, “I want to wear his initial on a chain ’round my neck”—a line I always found extremely hot for reasons I couldn’t quite identify…until I discovered that I myself have an ownership kink!
And if you’re thinking, “Okay relax—what’s so kinky about a necklace?” I’ll tell you! The desire to wear a lover’s initial around her neck—in the context of all these other BDSM-y allusions—recalls the submission and possession symbolized by the sub collars often worn by submissive partners during ownership kink play. And yes, I am aware that the next line in “Call It What You Want” is literally, “Not because he owns me, but ’cause he really knows me.” But I might be willing to suggest Taylor’s editor made her put that disclaimer in because they were afraid to let her be too freaky. (It’s also worth noting that the necklace thing also comes up in “So It Goes…,”—“Wear you like a necklace”—which, as I’ve already established, is clearly a very horny song.)
So, am I saying that Reputation is a BDSM album (I mean, come on, “Dancing With Our Hands Tied”?!) Not if I’m not allowed to! But am I saying that Reputation’s lyrical eroticism puts The Life of a Showgirl’s dick jokes to shame? Also not if I’m not allowed to!
But what I am saying is that if this is the first you’re hearing of this, go give Reputation another listen. I promise you’ll never hear it the same way again.
