In the Red era, Swift's romantic life became the subject of intense media scrutiny. Gawker remarked that Swift had dated "every man in the universe."^[192] The Westboro Baptist Church protested Swift's concerts, labelling her "the whorish face of doomed America," while Abercrombie and Fitch marketed a slogan t-shirt with a "slut-shaming" Swift reference.^[193] The New York Times asserted that her "dating history has begun to stir what feels like the beginning of a backlash" and questioned whether Swift was in the midst of a "quarter-life crisis."^[194] The Village Voice suggested that Swift's embrace of "traditional femininity" was the cause of the backlash: "She's young, she can be contentiously dramatic, she puts herself in the center of her stories, and obviously she's dated a lot of famous people in a relatively short amount of time. But none of that is exceptionally rare."^[195] At the Golden Globes award ceremony, comediennes Tina Fey and Amy Poehler poked fun at Swift's serial dating reputation, with Fey warning her to "stay away" from young men in the audience: "She needs some 'me' time to learn about herself." Swift was later asked about the incident in a Vanity Fair profile: “I was just sort of like, Oh well, you know, I can laugh at myself. But what it ended up adding to was this whole kind of everyone jumping on the bandwagon of ‘Taylor dates too much’—which, you know, if you want some big revelation, since 2010 I have dated exactly two people.” Elsewhere in the article, whilst discussing what the journalist describes as "the Golden Globes, and mean girls in general," Swift approvingly quoted Madeline Albright's remark that ‘There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.’^[196]

Swift began writing songs for her fifth album in July 2013. While she hopes to re-team with some past collaborators,^[197] she also has "a really long list of the people I admire and I would really love to go and contact ... I never want to make the same record twice. Why do it? What's the point? It's so overwhelming that when you're starting a project there are such endless possibilities if you're willing to evolve and experiment."^[198] In November 2013, Billboard reported that Swift has been "doing much of her work with Max Martin again."^[199]333