Taylor Swift has reached a scary new level of fame

Plenty of ink has been spilled on the persistence, the obsessiveness, the slavish devotion of Swifties. “Swifties” here means a particular kind of Taylor Swift fan, the ones who monitor her every move and track every broken record intently on social media, who follow clues down the rabbit hole in a manner reminiscent of QAnon, who police each other and the culture at large to make sure that everyone is paying proper respect to their god-queen. Occasionally, these super fans use their powers for good. But all too often, their obsession serves as an ugly reflection of stan culture as a whole.

The most recent example of this phenomenon is the wedding of Swift’s close friend and producer Jack Antonoff, who married actor Margaret Qualley in Long Beach Island, New Jersey this weekend. Viral videos from the rehearsal dinner on Friday show a huge crowd of fans hovering outside the venue after apparently learning of Swift’s presence. One clip shows the pop star emerging from the venue to screams from the crowd, waving at those gathered like it’s a film premiere rather than a supposedly private and personal event.

Onlookers of the onlookers called the fan display “disgusting,” “disrespectful,” and “unacceptable” on social media. For what it’s worth, resident Margery Miller told USA Today that the situation was “Very orderly and nothing out of control.” There were some excited young girls, yes, “but it was like the Fourth of July.” And while there have been a few low-level celebs on Long Beach Island before, “Taylor Swift took it over the top,” Miller said.

Does Taylor Swift bear any responsibility for her fans encroaching on a friend’s special day? The Grammy winner has made clear that she can disappear when she wants to, in her music and beyond. This is a woman long-rumored to exit buildings carried in a large suitcase just to avoid being seen. Yet it seems entirely unreasonable to camouflage herself to such a degree simply to attend a loved one’s wedding. Most celebrities accept, either enthusiastically or begrudgingly, that the glare of fan attention is part of the social contract of being an entertainer. But are there limits to what they’re forced to endure?

There is a history of this kind of fan behavior

The problem for Taylor Swift is that the Midnights album and the Eras Tour have elevated her to a new stratosphere of fame, which barely seemed possible for an already extremely famous woman. Now, the feverish excitement around Swift at the moment has swept up everyone from the most casual fan to the most intense Swiftie. “The only thing I can compare it to is the phenomenon of Beatlemania,” Billy Joel observed to The New York Times in a recent piece on Swift’s world domination.

The Swift sensation has long-reaching effects. In the Philippines, thousands of fans gathered to see impersonator Taylor Sheesh do their own drag version of the Eras Tour at a mall in May. The same weekend as Antonoff and Qualley’s wedding, TikTok’s favorite (or least favorite) Swift lookalike Ashley Leechin caused a stir in California by showing up at a mall with security guards, a move that shortly had her swarmed by curious shoppers (via PopCrush). Just the possibility of a Taylor Swift sighting, even a Taylor Swift-adjacent sighting, is enough to awaken mob mentality.

Following Billy Joel’s Beatles comparison, and following the phenomenon all the way back to, say, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, this kind of rabid fan behavior has always existed. If we accept it as an intrinsic part of human nature, then maybe the fans aren’t completely to blame for their interruption of a private event. By that logic, maybe Antonoff and Qualley should have gotten better security or chosen a more secluded venue. If you’re hosting Taylor Swift, maybe there are certain considerations you need to keep in mind, or certain concessions you have to make.

And yet… there is still a sense that this fan behavior has gotten worse and more dangerous, even if it has always existed. The Beatles never had fans on social media tracking their private planes. Jesus was never conked on the head with a cell phone. (Of course, he had other problems.) The attention Swift receives could perhaps be compared to Princess Diana, who was killed amidst a car chase with paparazzi in 1997—and the amount of access to and obsession with celebrity has only increased exponentially since then. Swift herself, weeping about her political frustrations in her documentary Miss Americana, cited laws around stalkers as one of her primary concerns. It’s not a leap to imagine that she’d feel unsafe around a crowd of fans, even as she performs to thousands upon thousands on her best-selling tour.

It is the fans’ job to check themselves and treat their idols with the same respect and dignity afforded to any other person, but the entitlement many fans feel towards those idols runs deep. Can this kind of obsessive fandom be course corrected? Can we manage to moderate the mob mentality? Hopefully, before something worse than a ruined rehearsal dinner occurs.