12: “Wood”— superstition, satire, and the subversive power of female desire

Perhaps the most divisive song on the album, “Wood” might sound like little more than raunchy puns about how much Taylor loves her fiancé’s… assets. But beneath the playful surface lies a daring critique of patriarchy, double standards, and the policing of female desire. 

In this episode, we unpack this audacious performance’s cheeky innuendo and Shakespearean echoes to reveal how the showgirl flips centuries of expectation on its head, manipulates the audience, reclaims her power.

Scandalous wordplay, bold sexuality, and literary mischief await!

Plus discussion questions and writing prompts to help you take it even deeper. (No pun intended!)

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Transcript

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Wood isn't just a playful ode to Travis's manhood, it's performance art. On the surface, the song is about superstition, love and lust, all packaged in a playful funk groove. But beneath that, it satirizes the way sexually expressive women are reduced to cliches, boy-crazy shallow, desperate, slutty, and presents a parody of the male fantasy, one epitomized by the showgirl persona. In that sense, it's the most Shakespearean track on the album, a play within a play with raunchy humor for the groundlings and deeper meaning for the balcony. It reveals our showgirl reclaiming her agency by performing a stereotype in order to expose it, deliberately manipulating the audience, provoking judgment and outrage, all while making them part of the act. Welcome to Lit one 12, the Life of a Showgirl where we treat Taylor Swift's latest album like a novel I'm your host, Mara Eller, a literature and writing teacher with 16 years of experience at the high school and college level. I just retired to focus on editing and book coaching, but when I started getting requests for this series on social media, I couldn't resist. Whether you're a veteran swifty or just an AP lit nerd like me who happens to like her music, all are welcome here. I've even got something for you writers, creative prompts inspired by the subject of each lesson. You can find them at the end of the episodes. So grab your metaphorical notebook and let's unpack this record together, chapter by chapter, song by song. Today we're discussing Track Nine Wood, and I'm super excited to finally dispel some misconceptions about this song and reveal its deeper layers. And yes, this episode will contain some explicit language and adult topics. We begin to see those deeper layers right away in verse one. It begins, Daisy's bare naked. I was distraught. He loves me not. This is about the game of picking petals from a daisy to see if a boy loves you or not as determined by which one you land on for the last petal. So it's a superstition, which is what Taylor said the song started out being all about. But here she uses it to immediately bring in some innuendo right from the first line. Daisies bear naked. She literally means here that the daisy, the flower is out of petals. And she's distraught or upset because it landed on he loves me not. Now, the fact that she opens the song with a flower is worth more consideration. First, flowers are by definition sexual. They are the reproductive organs of plants meant to attract pollinators for fertilization, so they're also more of a female sexual organ. Bare naked, of course, emphasizes that sexual aspect and then the fact that it's a daisy, a not uncommon female name makes us even more likely to picture a naked woman with those first three words. There's a fun tension right from the start here between the innocent girlish game of picking petals to see if a boy loves her and the sexual innuendo, not to mention the Jackson five esque guitar riff. It's not a sensual sound, but a playful one. Already, we should realize that this is a song that is going to play with sexual images and ideas, that it's not meant to be taken seriously. Even the word distraught is funny here. It means deeply upset. It is silly to be deeply upset about the petals on a daisy, meaning he doesn't love you. She's exaggerating. To show us how absurd this kind of thinking really is, which only continues in the rest of the song. The flower reference here also introduces the third layer of meaning that I see in this song by using a subtle reference to Hamlet. Considering this song in isolation, this might be a bit of a stretch, but when you consider the opening track, the fate of Ophelia, making explicit reverence to not only the play, but also the character Ophelia, and then if you also consider the content of actually romantic only two songs previous, I think this connection can be supported. Okay, so in Hamlet, Ophelia's most important scene has her giving imaginary flowers to all the main characters who are still alive and singing what for that time was a very raunchy song. She sings, and I a maid at your window. Hoping for love and then he got up and dressed and let the maid in that out a maid never departed more. So she went in a maid, a virgin, and she came out not a virgin. Ophelia continues, a lack and fi for shame. Young men will do it if they come to it. By cock, they are to blame. Quote, she before you tumbled me, you promised me wed. He answers so I would've done by yonder sun and thou hanst not come to my bed. The translation is that this guy promised to marry the girl if she would sleep with him, but then after she does, he says, well, I would've married you if you hadn't slept with me. The implication is that men will steal a girl's virginity any chance they get. Sung by Ophelia, a young, proper, noble woman. The song is a scathing critique of the impossible position. Women are put in where they have to be sexually available in order for men to want them, but then as soon as they are, they're scorned for being impure. The consequences back then were of course much worse. You basically ceased to have value as a wife if you weren't a virgin, especially for higher class women like Ophelia. But the double standard still persist today. Essentially, Ophelia is singing about slut shaming, which shocks the court. It confirms their suspicions that she has lost her mind because what else would lead a good obedient girl like Ophelia to sing a raunchy tavern song? Much less in public? Taken a layer deeper, a girl would have to be crazy to openly critique the patriarchy. It's also an indication that Ophelia may have suffered a similar fate to the girl in the song that she may have slept with Hamlet on promises he was going to marry her, only to have him call her a whore, quite literally, and completely reject her and then kill her father just for good measure, even if that was an accident. The flowers she gives out later in this scene confirm this implication. She gives her brother Laertes, Rosemary for remembrance and pansies for thoughts, perhaps to instruct him to remember what Hamlet did to her. Then she gives King Claudius, the one who killed his brother in order to steal both the crown and the queen from himself. Fennel, symbolizing, flattering deceit, and Columbine symbolizing in gratitude and adultery. Then she gives Queen Gertrude rue, the symbol for bitterness used to cause abortions and often connected with adultery. She's saying, I know you're complicit. You might need this. Notably, Ophelia keeps some of the rue for herself. Does she need an abortion? If she were pregnant, that would entirely explain her suicide shortly after this. To have a child out of wedlock at that time was a fate worse than death. She ends by mentioning violets and a daisy. Violet symbolize, faithfulness, and true love, but she says she has none. And the daisy symbolizes innocence, but she doesn't give it to anyone. It's there but not hers. Almost like not anymore. So Ophelia uses flowers to obliquely insult everyone while on the surface giving them gifts. This is a little like the dynamic in actually romantic that blends insults with love. And Ophelia also gets quite raunchy in her own way, which we also saw at the bridge of actually romantic. And now wood opens with a bare naked daisy. What was once innocent is now naked plucked, as it were, a euphemism for taking a girl's virginity. And on top of all that, we have to layer the social commentary from that scene of Hamlet about how women are condemned and cast out for engaging their sexuality, even though it's fine and even expected for men to do so, including with unmarried women. The picture we get in these first lines of wood is of a young woman who slept with her boyfriend and now isn't sure if he loves her. Consumed with anxiety, she consults her daisy fortune teller and is distraught when it tells her he doesn't love her. Now, her being distraught actually makes sense, right? If she gave him her virginity and he doesn't love her, and especially if she's pregnant, she's in big trouble. But the song's playful, tone and lyrics tell us, this is not a tragedy, but a comedy. Taylor, and by extension, the showgirl is rewriting Ophelia's story. The Daisy becomes a playful but pointed signal that the showgirl will claim what Ophelia could not agency pleasure and control over her narrative. For Ophelia and so many other women throughout history, this situation was a fate worse than death, but not for this showgirl. In fact, she's going to sing about how great it is. She's going to flaunt it and dare people to hate her for it. The following lines are filled with superstitions, unlucky pennies stepped on a crack. Black cat laughed, fingers crossed. Wishing on a falling star, and most obviously knocking on wood. There's a ton of word play and innuendo. But the superstition part is not a fun but meaningless exercise born of a b rather, it's an incisive comment on female agency. It places the showgirl inside a long lineage of women who turn to superstition. Not because they were foolish, but because the world allowed them no real control over their own lives. For most of history, women were property with almost no say over what happened to them. Omens, charms, prayers, lucky objects, silly as they may seem to us now, gave women a sense of power in a world where they had none. This is the true root of Ophelia's tragedy. Not heartbreak, but powerlessness. And that is the fate our showgirl refuses to succumb to. The shift from the false agency of superstition to real self-directed action begins in wishlist, the previous song. A wish is a superstition, especially wishing on a star. But it's also a declaration of desire. The first spark of agency. Wishing alone won't change her life, but knowing what she wants and moving toward it will. Though not every dream becomes a reality, every creation begins first in the imagination. You have to be able to imagine it in order to make it happen. And that's what she does in wishlist. She imagines a future that holds both love and the showgirl life. Wood shows her acting on that dream, but as usual, not quite in the way we might expect. That's what we see in the first verse of wood. The girl who once had only superstition and was distraught about it, notice the past tense there now has something much better. She's no longer asking fate for a favor. Instead, she's accepted the world as it is, and she's learned the rules of the game and started using them to her advantage. Let's go back to the lyrics. The pre chorus says, and baby, I'll admit, I've been a little superstitious, fingers crossed until you put your hand on mine, seems to be that you and me, we make our own luck. A bad sign is all good. I ain't got a knock on wood. So until he touched her hand, she was superstitious, believing that the only way she could influence her fate was by using these silly superstitions. But now she says she doesn't care about the bad signs or worry that things might go wrong because together they make their own luck. This should remind us of Opalite, where the manmade gem represented making your own happiness. Only, as we discussed in that deep dive, that song left it unclear whether opalite was really as good as opal. So we have to wonder now, is this as good as she seems to think it is? Given that she said and actually romantic that no man had ever truly loved her. It doesn't seem like her relationship in Opalite lasted. What's different now? Then we have the chorus, all of that bitching, wishing on a falling star. This should clearly remind us of the line from wishlist, the previous song. I made wishes on all of the stars. Please God bring me a best friend who I think is hot. But here she says, that never did me any good. I ain't got to knock on wood. She said something similar in wishlist. I don't need to make stupid wishes like that anymore because I have you. It is you and me forever dancing in the dark. Should again remind us of Opalite where she was dancing through the lightning strikes, but now she's dancing in the dark. Maybe some horizontal dancing, if you know what I mean, and it's forever, just like she wanted in Elizabeth Taylor. All over me. It's understood. I ain't got a knock on wood. All over me implies sex again. It's understood. There's some ambiguity here. Again, is it understood because they talked about it? Or does she assume they're on the same page? This makes me think of the song Ophelia sang again, where the girl thought sleeping with him meant he was going to marry her, and it makes me a little nervous for our showgirl, but then in the next line, she kind of acknowledges it. She says, forgive me, it sounds cocky. It sounds cocky, meaning overconfident. It's also a phallic euphemism. So she's admitting that her assertion that this is a sure thing sounds overconfident, and she's okay with it. She's almost making fun of herself here saying, I know you'll mock me for this, but I don't care. And here's a dick joke for you while you're at it. Next line. He ah-matized me and opened my eyes. Opened my eyes reminds me of the fate of Ophelia again. Now I can see it all My reading is that she did not see it all clearly then, so we wonder, does she see it clearly now? Are her eyes actually open? The clean version of this song says he hypnotized me. I think that's an interesting choice because it indicates a level of coercion. To hypnotize someone is to put them under a spell of sorts where they are no longer in control of their actions, which brings it back to agency. Is she in control of her choices here? ah-matized is another interesting word. It seems to be a play on Dickmatized, which is supposed to be when a woman is so overcome with the sexual pleasure she's getting from her man, that she becomes blind to any fault he might have. Essentially, she falls in love with his penis and thinks she's in love with him. But Taylor's choice here is ah-matized. Why didn't she go with dick-matized? Given that it would be another phallic reference and that she's already used that word on the album, so why not go for it here? My take is that the change to ah-matized subtly switches the focus away from the male member and to female pleasure. I mean, given all the other phallic references, it's a pretty small shift, but it's there nonetheless. Female sexual desire and pleasure has always been taboo. Women can be sexual objects for men to ogle, fantasize about and enjoy for their own pleasure. But women aren't allowed to be sexual agents. This is perhaps nowhere clearer than with a showgirl. Their career is built on performing for the male gaze, looking sexy, dancing and singing alluringly. Entertaining, amusing, titillating, but when they're exposed as having sex lives of their own, it's scandalous. Think of Elizabeth Taylor here. Women are allowed to be sexual when it's performative, so it can be commodified and consumed. But if they talk about their own desires or pleasure, that's considered trashy, offensive, immoral. Our showgirl like Taylor herself is painfully aware of this double standard. It used to crush her, but not anymore. Instead of trying to avoid crossing the unspoken lines for acceptable female sexuality, she's doing something far more subversive. She's saturating them. Satire is a form of art that uses exaggeration, humor, and irony to ridicule and criticize some aspect of an individual or society. So in this case, Taylor and the showgirl are exaggerating two things. One, the stereotype that reduces sexual women to sluts, or at least man obsessed sex objects. And two, the male fantasy of having a woman who is made completely powerless by the magic of his wand to quote this song. She takes both of these concepts united by their shared connection to the male sex organ, to such an extreme that they become ridiculous. She's intentionally over the top in this song, which is most obvious in her repeated and heavy handed euphemisms. People have criticized the song for being so heavy handed, but that's the point. She's saying you want it. Here you go. The fact that it becomes almost repulsive, certainly absurd, is meant to point out how absurd and problematic these stereotypes already and always are. She's saying, if you're going to reduce me to the girl dick-matized by a man, I'm gonna play that role bigger than Shakespeare so you see just how ridiculous it is. I think we also have to remember that this album has already used the word dick as a symbol for power. Thinking father figure here. So while this song is undoubtedly referencing the male genitalia, it's also a song about power, about male sexuality as a source of power, power over women. And how society has traditionally used women's sexuality as a weapon against them. She's also mocking the tabloid fantasy that she's a good girl, gone bad, and she's like, oh, you think that was a lot? You know, whatever happened before, I'll show you unhinged. We see that with lines like his love was the key that opened my thighs and new heights of manhood. This is definitely not a good girl. Yes, that's also a reference to the New Heights podcast, and yes, Taylor has clearly woven specific references to Travis into this song, but that doesn't mean it's not also a chapter in the larger narrative about the showgirl. In a way, making it so obvious that it's about Travis, at least on this surface level, is another layer to this game of trying to make the listener uncomfortable. Some people have said that knowing exactly who this song is about makes it gross, compared to similarly explicit, phallic focused songs like Lady Gaga's Love Game, where she wants to ride on his disco stick. But that one was okay because it was just an abstract man and his parts So it's okay for a woman to be graphically sexual as long as it's about an imaginary person? Plus like every other sexual innuendo in this song, new Heights also has a second meaning. It implies not just being tall, but also new levels of success or achievement. So maybe it's not only this guy's penis that has her ah-matized. Maybe it's also his character. The strongest support for that idea is found in her reference to the Redwood Tree The redwood tree is of course, another phallic euphemism, and I've read a few interpretations explaining why that might be apt for Travis Kelce. But let's take him out of the equation for a minute and read the text on its own. She names a tree here. It's an obvious connection to wood. But why redwood? Other than it having the word wood in the name. Redwoods are the tallest, biggest trees on earth with some reaching 380 feet tall. So there's that innuendo layer, but they're also very long lived with the oldest one on record, having been alive for 2000 years. They're also evergreen, meaning they don't lose their leaves in winter. So they're consistent, dependable, and they thrive in adverse conditions like forest fires. So they're resilient. And their root systems spread out up to a hundred feet to make them really, really strong. But get this, they can only live in groups called Groves. They are interdependent. They're also, at this point, rare. So those are all really positive signs about this lover's character. Trees are also a symbolic part of Ophelia's story since she is said to have fallen from a willow tree into the river where she drowned. The willow tree symbolizes forsaken love and fragility. So the redwood is perhaps the most opposite tree there is. Just one more indication that Taylor is intentionally rewriting Ophelia's story here. The Redwood is about stability, not just size. And if there's one thing this showgirl has lacked it's stability. So beneath the raunchy puns and lusty innuendo, she's quietly proclaiming something much more profound. She's found a man who is grounded, strong, and resilient, and also good in bed. It's the best friend she thinks is hot Only, instead of making the friendship, the focus of the song, she gives people, the stereotype they would try to reduce her to anyway. And in so doing, by turning the cliche into theater, she takes control of the narrative. She's letting the audience laugh, blush, recoil, or judge, all while making sure she's the one directing the scene. On the surface, the singer is ecstatic through the roof, to use another height pun, about this guy. She's confident that he's going to do what others didn't propose and commit and stay with her forever. She's thrilled both emotionally and sexually, but that's just the first surface layer The second level presents a satire of superstition, slut shaming, and male fantasy, but we still need to explore the deepest level, the showgirl reclaiming her agency in act three of this larger narrative. Let's pull back and look at this song in context of the album as a whole again. I see the previous song wishlist as the game changing revelation that comes at the end of Act two in a three act structure. She knows what she wants, finally. She has two equal desires, a quiet, normal life with her best friend who's hot and the showgirl career she's unwilling to sacrifice. We still don't know how she will balance having a committed relationship with the showgirl life she loves. But what we do know is that she has decided it is possible and that she's gonna go after it. I think the realization is on a deeper level that she will fight harder than she's ever fought before to make it possible to have both. She knows it won't be perfect, but she finally sees a vision for how she might be able to have real committed love without sacrificing her career and vice versa. It has to do with the man she's found as we learn in wood and honey, but it also has to do with her new understanding of herself, her confidence, her sense of her own power. As we see in the next three songs, she's finally starting to understand exactly where her power lies and how to wield it despite its limitations. She's decided to write a new story for herself, and Wood shows her trying on this new narrative, one where she can have love and the showgirl life. It's a foil or mirror image to Elizabeth Taylor where she implied she was expecting a proposal but remained insecure, uncertain if any man would truly love her and could stay true under the bright lights. In contrast, now she's singing brazenly and joyfully about the hard rock that's on its way, a diamond that will be forever. Elizabeth Taylor gave off a sense of powerlessness, a sense that her fame was causing her lovers and her own self-confidence to wither. But now she's flaunting both her relationship and her sexuality playing with the public gaze in a way that puts her in the driver's seat. The transformation is clear when we compare her to her earlier selves. Gone is the anxious controlling figure of Elizabeth Taylor. unable to trust anyone fully and crushed under public scrutiny. Also gone is the young woman who tried to pretend she was too cool to care, but clearly did care a lot as we saw an eldest daughter and actually romantic and even a little in Opalite. Now she cares unapologetically. Now she boldly proclaims her love, her happiness and her expectations. She's taking the risk like she learned to do and ruin the friendship, even leaning into potential ridicule by giving critics an easy target. Instead of avoiding judgment, she invites it, controlling the narrative on her own terms. She's saving herself from the fate of Ophelia. Where ophelia drowned under double standards, shame and insecurity, the showgirl in wood turns everything on its head. Confidence so strong. It borders on cocky, sexual puns pushed to cartoonish extremes, playful, and over the top. Superstitions once her only avenue of agency, exaggerated and then rejected as unnecessary. Female sexual pleasure celebrated so brazenly, she dares the listener to blush first. So make no mistake. Wood is not primarily about Travis's anatomy. It's a commentary on women's power under patriarchy, how female desire is policed, how public women are reduced to sexual cartoons, and how she finally claims agency in a world designed to keep her powerless. This showgirl is no longer lost in fantasy. She is fully present to reality, the good and the bad. She's playing her own game, taking risks, and refusing to shrink to meet anyone else's expectations. She's fully aware that being this bold, this brazen will rub some people the wrong way, that it might even get her canceled. But she is ready and she's gonna make sure that she has the last laugh. That's it for today's lesson. Next time we'll look at Cancelled the song where she pushes that fearlessness even further challenging the world to try and take her down while opening her arms to provide sanctuary for other women facing similar backlash. So I would love to hear what you think about this analysis. Did I convince you? What questions do you have? Where do you think I might be taking things a little too far? Specifically, I'd love to hear your answers to the following discussion questions In your opinion, are things significantly better for women today than they were in Ophelia's day? Have you seen this double standard at play in our society still? Then can you think of other media, songs, shows, or movies that satirize these same dynamics, or at least comment on them? How does Wood compare and contrast? Could be even some other Taylor Swift songs that you might want to consider for some comparison. And now for your writing prompts. Memoir, what messages did you receive growing up, or even as an adult about sexuality? How did those affect you? Pick one and go into detail, perhaps describing a specific moment when that message came into play. Number two, did you ever use a superstition or a ritual to feel more in control? Describe it. Then. Why do you think you turned to that superstition? Could it have had something to do with a lack of agency? Number three, Write about a personal transformation where you reclaimed a part of yourself that others tried to control or diminish. And now for fiction, construct a story or a scene where a character uses humor, exaggeration, or provocation as a form of social critique or personal empowerment. See just how over the top you could make it. Number two, create a character who has two conflicting desires. Write a scene where they test whether both can coexist and what happens when reality pushes back. Number three, if you have a work in progress, consider what a fate worse than death would be for your main character. Then how can you make that fate a threat in your story to raise the stakes and increase the tension? Remember, you can find these prompts all in one place, updated with each episode at maraeller.com/prompts. And don't forget to sign up for write like Taylor Swift. That's my new live workshop on December 10th, Replay's included, where we're gonna be, unpacking Taylor's most successful writing strategies and teaching you to apply them to your own writing, whatever type of writing that might be. We'll be talking about narrative structures, so you can tell really compelling, engaging stories wordplay so you can delight your reader and add layers of meaning. Plus how to write really specific vivid imagery that immerses your reader in your story and brings it to life. It's gonna be a lot of fun. So do yourself a favor and go ahead and sign up now so you don't forget. You can learn more and register by going to maraeller.com/writeliketaylor. And that is it for today's lesson. If you're loving these deep dives. Make sure to follow the podcast or come join the discussion on social media. My links are in the show notes. I'd love to hear your questions, comments, and insights. Class is always about bringing you into the conversation, helping you to do your own thinking and come to your own conclusions, so I'd love to see you involved. Until next time, class dismissed.