November 8, 2025—Alex Cooper, the 31-year-old media mogul behind the immensely successful Call Her Daddy podcast, sparked conversation across social media with a humorous yet candid comment during the November 7 episode of actor and podcaster Owen Thiele’s show, In Your Dreams. Cooper—who secured a landmark $60 million exclusive deal with Spotify in 2021 before signing an even larger $125 million deal with Sirius XM in 2024—jokingly declared that pop icon Taylor Swift was her “sexual awakening for women.”
The moment began when Cooper noticed a poster for Swift’s sophomore album, Fearless, in the studio. Released in 2008, the album cemented Swift’s crossover appeal, becoming the most-awarded country album in history and winning the coveted Album of the Year Grammy Award in 2010.
From Rejection to Romance: The Fearless Era
Cooper reflected on the profound impact the album’s songs had on her during her teenage years:
“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 suggested, “You were in love with Taylor,” the Call Her Daddy host responded with the viral quip: “Yeah, she was my sexual awakening for women. Sorry, Taylor, that’s weird.”
The Confession of “Pick-Me” Culture
In a characteristic moment of frankness, Cooper clarified that her only high school romantic experience with a woman was purely performative, a calculated move “to turn the boys on,” which she now labels “so pick-me and disgusting.” She contextualized this behavior within the pressure to seek external validation, stating, “It’s so sad that, when you’re in high school, that’s all that matters — the male validation, gay or straight.”
Swift’s Unstoppable Reign
The timing of Cooper’s interview is notable, occurring just weeks after Taylor Swift released her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, on October 3, 2025. Swift, who announced the album on the New Heights podcast hosted by her fiancé Travis Kelce and his brother, has seen the new release dominate global charts.
The Life of a Showgirl had an explosive debut, setting a record for the biggest opening week for an album in the UK in 2025, moving 432,000 combined units in its first week. The album, which Swift co-produced with Max Martin and Shellback, quickly secured the No. 1 position on the UK Official Albums Chart for multiple consecutive weeks in October 2025, further illustrating her unrivaled cultural impact, a legacy that clearly began shaping listeners like Alex Cooper over a decade prior with albums like Fearless.