This Is How Taylor Swift Shaves Her Ass

Art by Ava Sophia Hiss

So ran the headline of People Magazine. Forget about everything else – this is the biggest, most earth-shattering event of our current day. Forget about the government’s current dedication to dismantling itself, the collapsing economy, the mass deportations. Ignore those snotty boys with facemasks and rifles, the hotblooded murders, the dead-eyed plutocrats and their assurances of total annihilation. Pay no heed to the distant death tolls, the ongoing wars in faraway countries, which “probably should have ended by now” (or so implied Taylor Swift, once – controversially)

Taylor Swift’s estate operations dismissed the assistance of local police authorities, and shunned the FBI. The Head of Staff (aka “operations host” aka “head butler”) of Swift’s mansion in Tennessee – no, not the one in Belle Meade, or the one in Brentwood, but the largest one stationed in Northumberland – immediately began investigations into how this severe breach of privacy had been committed, and by whom. Extremely difficult, considering that Swift’s private bathroom was the only room which wasn't under 24/hr surveillance with 360-degree rotating cameras.

He directed the staff to run metal detectors across every inch of the bathroom, and they finally retrieved a tick-sized camera lens embedded inside the showerhead. The staff then swept their mechanical arms across every room of the mansion until they had found over two dozen micro-cameras, hidden in every room of the estate – cameras hidden inside houseplants, clocks, doorknobs, couches, outlets, vases, fireplaces, welcome mats, print photographs, drawers, floorboards and Grammy awards. 

And then the interrogations began. Mister Head-of-Staff interrogated every staff member under his command, from doorman to cleaner to maid to in-house repairman to architect to masseuse to plumber to shopper to bartender to stylist to laundry boy, to determine who had planted the camera bug in Swift’s bathroom. Staff were questioned, intimidated – their livelihoods and their families were threatened. It came to nothing. No single culprit was found, despite the estate’s desperate need for a scapegoat. And from then on, the T. Swift property estate operations continued with a strengthened culture of suspicion and fear, and a universal sentiment across the grounds that the enemy could be within our ranks, within our bathrooms, within our very souls. 

The different heads of staff in the employment of Taylor Swift Inc. gathered for a meeting, inexplicably in Wisconsin, to discuss what might be done to eliminate the possibility of this happening again. Swift Inc.’s public-facing management company, Thirteen Management, arranged for a representative to sit in the corner and do nothing. The table was instead headed by an unknown set of high-ranking Swift Inc. officials. These square-shouldered men, with black ties snaking from their white collars, had been hired directly from the Chantilly CIA University for their well-trained secrecy, their carefully maintained anonymity, their general schemery. These were the real brains behind the shadowy organization of Taylor Swift Inc. – Men distinctive for their logical, ruthless dedication to duty, and (most importantly) their unmemorable faces.

They ultimately decided to organize massive private retrieval efforts for every bit of metallic camera equipment they could find, in every single Swift-owned estate, and instituted an obsessive schedule for camera-checking procedures. They developed a marketing and image-correcting scheme. They devoured an obscene amount of donuts from the local Dunkies. And then they each entered their separate private planes and went off to their own nondescript hidey-holes of the nation, to go about their strange and unusual business.

And, just two hundred miles away, a member of the Paparazzi Underground Intelligence Agency popped a bottle of Prosecco. The employees roared with laughter. Theirs was an independent illegal operation with no title and no hierarchy. In their basement shelter, they worked endlessly to retrieve illicit footage from the topmost deities of society. Their most recent dealings with People Magazine had been a fantastic win. On the wall, a humongous computer monitor tracked the separate bathrooms and living spaces of thousands of celebrities across the nation, and autonomously created and sold these films on a generative, automatic basis, one for every second. They popped another bottle of Prosecco. 

People Magazine had struck gold with their latest issue. The absurdity was no mistake. Every aspect of the magazine had been designed to be as ridiculous, as attention-grabbing, as possible – the shamelessly obscene title, the horrific front cover (which was a color-blasted image of Swift’s face, edited to bear an expression of shock, with a massive razor copy-pasted over her gaping eyes) not to mention its upsetting and bizarre contents. Their sales did not suffer. The magazine was sold on convenience store racks, on bookstore shelves, and at self-checkout lines. Children flipped through the pictures silently while their mothers scanned groceries. Their brains were permanently altered.

For weeks afterward, the front page of every newspaper splashed a headline about this sensational pop culture event. USA Today ran half a dozen opinion pieces regarding it. The Washington Post wrote countless stories about it, and public figures’ varied reactions to it. The Guardian had an entire segment dedicated to the ongoing outrage surrounding it. CNN ran an exclusive interview with one of Swift’s publicity agents. Even the lead executive of The New York Times okayed an extensive front-page article about the subject. (The head editor lit a cigarette out the window, his eyes filling with tears as he received sentimental flashbacks to a more innocent time from his youth, when he’d proofread typewritten pages for his middle school newspaper, The Monthly Hummingbird.)

And the compounding obscenity of these articles caused such a stir that news of Swift’s ass-shaving controversy spread across the Americas, across Europe, across Asia, and bombarded across the planet with the mind-numbing devastation of a journalistic atom bomb. 

Alt-right commentators used this Swift incident as further proof of the media’s untrustworthiness, and as a further argument for abolition of the free press – “If they’re too busy talking about Taylor Swift’s grooming habits, instead of the ongoing war on masculinity" – and, in response, the news cycles churned out endless articles about how ridiculous, how utterly attention-seeking, such an opinion was. And millions of faceless entities on the internet reacted with shock and nihilistic hilarity. And Fox News conducted a slew of interviews with nazi-aligned anchormen to understand the true root cause of this phenomenon. 

At a 9/11 remembrance ceremony, the President suddenly went off-script and began a diatribe about the “badness” of the media, and Taylor Swift’s “nasty” article, and out of nowhere he gave a poorly veiled hint about his own asshair preferences. Someone in the audience could be heard sobbing. 

Some tenured professor published an opinion piece in The New York Times about the social implications of ass-shaving, posted alongside an ongoing report of the orphanage bombings in Palestine. And bored nightshift fast food workers all across the nation slouched over their aluminum countertops to watch the nightmare-inducing raw footage on XxxVids.com. And Taylor Swift fans (Swifties) in limited edition, two hundred dollar sweatshop-stitched Swift inc. brand cardigans, conglomerated outside the People Magazine headquarters to protest the blasphemous headline that had degraded their queen. 

For five o’clock cable news, which earned half a million Youtube views, news anchors on CNN and CBS formed an alliance for the first time in a decade and gathered together in front of the camera with a sense of unease, like wartime Christmasgoers, perched on their white-wrapped modernist furniture, posture erect and eye contact maintained, to discuss the ethics of celebrity surveillance paparazzism. And, most of all, to speculate on the thoughts of Swift regarding this whole situation.

Taylor Swift, in actuality, was too focused on her foreign agents’ negotiations with a Saudi Arabian celebrity fund firm to think much at all. And four days later, outside her thirty-million dollar estate (not the one in Northumberland, but the one in Beverly Hills) when the paparazzi crowded her nondescript Mercedes-Benz to receive her comment, she drew up her practiced smile and delivered the brief, strikingly brave statement her third agent in her private plane had composed for her – that it's really none of anyone else's business how she shaves or doesn't shave her ass.

Ava Sophia Hiss