Just about the time that Pam Bondi was shouting “Don’t call me a liar” in a Senate hearing, Taylor Swift was truthing through American airwaves with her song, Wood, from her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, celebrating the great sex she has been getting

The album that has divided even Swifties. Album image: taylorswift/Instagram. Collage: Just So

It’s a snapshot of a cultural contradiction: institutional breakdown on one channel, sexual rapture on another. U.S. attorney general Pam Bondi put up quite a performance at her first senate hearing on 7 October. Just four days earlier, Taylor Swift launched a performance, too—her new album, Life of a Showgirl. In it, one track stood out: Wood. The title should be a clue enough to the song’s overt sexual innuendo. We are no Swiftie, so we are not aware of the significance of the song until it was brought to our attention. So we gave it a listen. Wood is, at best, commercial; at worst, a schlock for schlong. Don’t be surprised if it becomes the number one song to soundtrack OnlyFans posts. It is not known when it was the last time that a woman sang of how enamoured and impressed, and contented she was with a man’s dick, but that was exactly Ms Swift’s clickbait.

She showed what a wordsmith she is by not directly saying that the subject of her affection, fiancé Travis Kelce, has an impressive manhood, which, of course, rhymes with Wood. It is not clear how her scores of friendship-bracelet-wearing teenaged fans will react to the song, but given the juvenile quality of the lyrics, they would be as enamoured as the singer is with “redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see’ or “new heights of manhood”, or “the curse on me was broken by your magic wand”. The cumulative effect? “His love was the key that opened my thighs.” Seriously. She keeps it all rather girlish, of course, but her soul-spill feels more like prepubescent diary entries than mature poetic revelations. This is not the witty, and emotionally insightful tone of Sex and the City. Wood, by contrast, is as arousing as stale French fries.

She keeps it all rather girlish, of course, but they feel more like prepubescent diary entries than mature poetic revelations

This, then, is the Swift shift: a move from dialogue-driven intimacy to broadcasted, explicit sensuality. She’s not asking questions like Carrie Bradshaw did: “Are we sluts if we enjoy sex?” She does not need to question. She has no time for that. She is enjoying the red wood inside her, too much. Ms Swift has spent nearly two decades crafting a lyrical universe built on longing, heartbreak, and emotional introspection. After singing You Belong With Me, perhaps it is a natural progression to now sing you belong inside me. And the fact that this shift is happening while American politics broadcasts its own emotional extremes—Pam Bondi’s fury, hearings as spectacle—makes it even more symbolic. The U.S., it seems, is exporting maximalism: in rage, in rhetoric, and, believe it, romance.

The two events, senate hearing and album launch, point to one unfortunate reality: the collapse of the middle. In its place, a culture of stridency, spectacle, and emotional maximalism now dominates. Political extremes of the fiery right and the “radical left lunatics”, as Donald Trump calls them, are not just factions, but performative identities. They loudly broadcast certainty, outrage, and cultural might. Similarly, the crucial middle ground between emotional candor and true lyrical depth has slipped away, replaced by the equivalent spectacle of Pam Bondi’s confrontation and Taylor Swift’s confession. If a “middle” exists at all, it is the choreography itself. What rises to the surface is the sheer intensity that has become the dominant mode of female power in the American public sphere, whether wielded for political combat or personal narrative. Make way, world.