With a net worth of more than $280 million and a fan base to match, Taylor Swift seemingly has it all. She’s incredibly wealthy, incredibly loved by her fans, and also has a fantastic pair of legs. So, why has she been so brooding? Since the dawn of the Taylor Swift era, there has been a great deal of apathetic scandal surrounding Ms. Swift. She’s a man-eater, she’s a money-making machine, she’s a “snake.”

But she’s also a 10 time Grammy award-winning artist with more fame and notoriety than most people could ever dream of. How can she not expect people to attack her, at any level? And why should she feel so inclined to reciprocate?

With all the “scandal” surrounding Taylor Swift, very little of it is actually reflective of her as an individual with morals, and very little of it really hurts her reputation. What hurts her reputation the most isn’t what other people say about her, it’s what she says about herself in response to others. It’s about her position on the defense, whereby she “redefines” her look in a spectacular fashion and then makes it a point to rehash old rumors and gossip and boyfriends. All of which she brings back to light the points of her that, to be honest, the average individual forgot about after they finished the quick play-by-play that they read about in People Magazine's Snapchat story.

With that, I beg the question, who really cares about Taylor Swift? This isn’t to say that we haven’t all been tuned into every ounce of the unfolding of the “Look What You Made Me Do” music video, that we haven’t been unintentionally feeding into the hype of it all. Instead, I'm saying that beyond the very base-level boredom driven interest, very few people that aren’t her die-hard fans really care about what she’s doing. We see it- she creates these big shows whereby she brings herself into the spotlight as if to say “Here I am! Better than ever before! Please pay attention to me!” but we don’t feel it. We comment on it, we say “This is so dumb”

or “This song sounds exactly like ‘I’m Too Sexy’ but possibly dumber,”

but we don’t feel with any amount of vehemence for what she’s doing.

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Most of the hype is solely over the fact that she’s drawing attention to herself, and whether or not she’s doing it intentionally is either confirmation or denial of the fact that she’s an attention-seeking pop menace. I happen to believe she is 100%, but it works for her. Again, she is literally worth a quarter of a billion dollars, so she should keep doing what she’s doing (at the sake of her reputation, unfortunately) if she wants to continue taking the industry by storm. Want to stop her reign? Stop feeding into it.

For every one of those 70 million views that her most recent video received in its first few days, there were probably at least two people who watched solely because they heard it was the most ridiculous publicity stunt ever. In case you were wondering, I was among that statistical percentage, and, spoiler alert, it is the most ridiculous publicity stunt ever.

Taylor Swift’s career is driven by her victimizing herself, playing it up to the public, and selling it to whoever will take it. We all remember when Taylor Swift went from America's sweetheart with rich curls and a country attitude to rockabilly-hip straight-across-bangs hanging out with Harry Styles. Then come 2017, she’s now making waves with her “alarming!”

transition from the latter to something of a pop-dominatrix pseudo-Lady Gaga something.

It’s because we tune in. It’s because we feed into the views and the likes and the shares, that Taylor Swift can maintain a slightly smeared reputation as 'The Woman of Many Famous Boyfriends' while not being deemed unworthy of fame. She is a marketing genius, and while we think of influential artists as being those that redefine music, Taylor Swift is influential in the sense that she has literally redefined being famous. She isn’t a Kardashian, or a President, or a Pop Singer. She’s a Taylor Swift: her own unique breed of power and influence over the public sphere and culture. She’s been working the crowd — literally molding the crowd- since she admitted to writing the song "Tim McGraw" about an old boyfriend.

So to answer the question: Who really cares about Taylor Swift?

If you’re reading this, the answer is, you.