The megawatt coupling of Kansas City Chiefs player Travis Kelce and pop superstar Taylor Swift defined cozy companionship this fall. Swift has supported her new boyfriend at NFL games from New Jersey to Wisconsin, and Kelce has flown thousands of miles to watch her perform around the globe. The pair has been the subject of breathless coverage and sometimes unhinged social media speculation. But something shifted on Christmas Day, after the Chiefs were upset in a key game by the Las Vegas Raiders. Kelce, one of the Chiefs’ most important offensive weapons, failed to score a touchdown for the fifth game in a row.
“Feels like it’s about time to call Taylor Swift a distraction,” influential Fox Sports host Skip Bayless wrote on X. “What do you think, Patrick? Andy? How about you, Travis?”
And Bayless wasn’t the only one who blamed Swift, at least in part, for the loss. Clay Travis, founder of conservative site OutKick and an outspoken Covid-19 conspiracy theorist, launched a dusty comparison to Yoko Ono: “Travis Kelce looks like he should retire. He’s been worthless the last seven or eight weeks. The double worthless Pfizer shots may have caught up with him. Either that or Taylor Swift is the Chiefs Yoko Ono. Maybe both.”
Once upon a time, a woman became a byword for destroying men’s professional lives, and yet here we are, still invoking Yoko Ono as if time and history haven’t shifted our perceptions of both feminism and John Lennon. Avant-garde artist Ono was once blamed for breaking up the Beatles, but people who can read should now understand the myriad factors behind the band’s dissolution, as well as the anti-Asian sentiment that fueled much of the hate.
Blaming Yoko Ono was never about the facts. It was about trying to tear down women who seemed to have power over men.
But of course, blaming Yoko Ono was never about the facts. It was about trying to tear down women who seemed to have power over men. Women who changed how we saw our…
Read the full article here