November 8, 2025—Alex Cooper, the 31-year-old host of the massively popular podcast Call Her Daddy, stirred up social media with a candid joke about pop superstar Taylor Swift, whom she referred to as her “sexual awakening for women.”
Cooper made the comment during the November 7 episode of actor and influencer Owen Thiele’s podcast, In Your Dreams. The revelation came after Cooper spotted a poster of Swift’s sophomore album, Fearless, in the studio background. Released in 2008, Fearless is one of the most decorated country-pop albums of all time, winning the Album of the Year Grammy in 2010.
A Soundtrack for Teen Romance and Rejection
Cooper, who has leveraged her frank discussions of sex, relationships, and celebrity into a major media empire, reflected on how the album defined her adolescence.
“I can’t stop staring and looking at the Fearless album behind your head,” Cooper began. “Those songs changed my life. Like, Fearless was my era of girlhood where I was really starting to like boys… I just really found that I was such a loser and [Swift] was my connector of like, ‘He doesn’t love me.’ But I almost romanticized guys hating me at one point — like I thought it was cool that they were turning me down because then I had Taylor to listen to.”
When Thiele responded, “You were in love with Taylor,” Cooper joked: “Yeah, she was my sexual awakening for women. Sorry, Taylor, that’s weird.”
The Pursuit of Male Validation
The podcaster later clarified her comment, explaining that her most significant romantic experiment with a woman in high school was performative. She confessed to making out with a girl “to turn the boys on,” a move she now calls “so pick-me and disgusting.”
Cooper used this personal anecdote to illustrate a broader cultural phenomenon during her high school years, stating, “It’s so sad that, when you’re in high school, that’s all that matters — the male validation, gay or straight. And I was obsessed with these boys and I wanted them to think that it was hot…”
Swift’s Empire Continues to Dominate
Cooper’s long-standing admiration for Swift is well-documented. In an interview with PEOPLE last year (2024), Cooper named the “Cruel Summer” singer and Rihanna as the two women at the top of her dream guest list for Call Her Daddy, stating, “I feel like those two women have built such incredible empires and I respect both of them so much.”
The conversation on the In Your Dreams podcast occurred shortly after the release of Swift’s latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, which was released on October 3, 2025. The album, which Swift announced on the New Heights podcast hosted by her fiancé Travis Kelce and his brother, has spent several weeks atop the Billboard 200 chart, highlighting Swift’s continued cultural and commercial dominance even as Cooper’s attention was focused on the superstar’s earlier work.