https://samkriss.wordpress.com/2015/02/10/taylor-swift-swallows-the-world/
They follow her, while Taylor Swift is one of those dangerous rarities: a
person that doesn’t look like anything. Not strange-looking, exactly,
not amorphous or indistinct, but vast: a trackless and uncharted
infinity. Something hungry.
Taylor Swift has always resisted the crude general categories that
female recording artists are usually shunted into: never quite
succumbing to the coruscatingly coquettish malice of the teen icon, or
steatopygous sexual auto-objectification, or modish androgyny.
...
For years now, she’s made a point of never showing her navel, carefully
engineering various crop tops and swimsuits to keep it hidden from
paparazzi and their slobbering navel-crazed public. Fine: I don’t tend
to make a point of parading around my naked umbilicus either. It’s a
revolting hole, a foetid salty lint-clogged scar, a gaping absence
that’s only a reminder of something irretrievably lost. With only that
hole remaining the condition of humanity must always be one of absolute
disconnection; we’ve been snipped apart from a primal unity, and it’s
not coming back until the day we die. Our genitals tell us that we can
bring ourselves together, and even create something new; our navels
whisper bitterly that we will always be alone.
