While you were ignoring all of your earthly responsibilities last week in favor of obsessively mining every last line of the masterpiece that is Taylor Swift’s Midnights, did you happen to notice that the mastermind herself came out as an adult hickey-haver?
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, kindly turn your attention to the chorus of “Maroon,” in which Ms. Swift sings about a certain deep-red mark on her collarbone in what is arguably the horniest line in the horniest song on the entire album. Why? Because, ahem, our girl is talking about a hickey.
Sure, there’s always room for interpretation when it comes to TS lyrics—that’s the whole point. But I know a hickey when I see one (er, hear one?), and the internet’s resident Swift Sleuths seem to agree that a hickey it is.
While some lovingly dragged Taylor for what is an arguably overwrought lyrical portrait of a bruise you get from some heated neck sucking, I, for one, could not be more thrilled with this poetic display of adult hickey representation.
Potentially weird take alert, but I’ve always been really into hickeys—giving them, getting them, and accidentally-on-purpose leaving them uncovered for my entire Catholic high school to see. This is partly because I, like most teenage girls, was debilitatingly insecure and desperately needed everyone to know that I was, in fact, fuckable. But I also like to think that even back then, I saw the expectation that people (hi, especially women) should hide, repress, or otherwise be ashamed of any sign of their sexuality for the load of nonsense it is.
While I no longer need a neck bruise to prove to the world that I am a verified sex-having human because I now have the privilege of simply writing about my sex life on the internet for a living instead (and, yes, also because I have since learned not to use my sexuality as a source of external validation and/or a measure of my value as a person, etc., etc.), I still kind of…want one?
Unfortunately, it would seem there’s really never an appropriate age to be exchanging visible neck bites in the eyes of society. As teens in our prime hickey-getting years, we’re supposed to cover up the marks left on our necks and inner thighs (just me?) after a heated back-seat make-out sesh because it’s “inappropriate” for teens to be having sex at all, at least according to our parents and teachers. But by the time we finally reach societally sanctioned sex-having adulthood, hickeys are considered juvenile—an embarrassing relic of adolescence, a sign of poor technique and inexperienced lovemaking that we’re supposed to grow out of by the time we graduate to more adult forms of sexing.
But here’s the thing: Like lots of other throwback sexperiences that tend to get written off as memories better left behind in a less mature era of our sex lives (see: car sex, dry humping, and marathon make-out sessions that were basically just forever foreplay), hickeys are actually great. They’re a horny little reminder that you’ve recently gotten some, like a post-sex souvenir—or as one of the most iconic hickey-givers in cinema history would put it, a Hallmark card.
Also, it’s worth pointing out that hickeys usually tend to be the result of some pretty intense fooling around. Like, you don’t usually feel compelled to suck someone’s skin so hard that you bruise them when you’re in the middle of a mediocre hookup with a meh Hinge match. That skin discoloration is a sign of a very specific kind of I-wanna-suck-out-your-soul-through-your-skin horniness, and frankly, I fail to see what’s so juvenile about that. I’m just gonna say it: The idea that someone is so into you and/or lost in the sauce making out with you that they lowkey brand you? Hot.
Look, I’m not saying everyone has to embrace hickeys. Some of you like your concealer and your turtlenecks and that’s fine. All I’m saying is that hickeys have been unfairly maligned and it is time to bring them back into our sex-having adult lives. If Taylor Swift can get hickeys as a grown woman, then we all should feel empowered to (consensually, obvs) suck each other’s necks with horny abandon and flaunt our love bites with pride, dammit.
Kayla Kibbe (she/her) is the Associate Sex and Relationships Editor at Cosmopolitan US, where she covers all things sex, love, dating and relationships. She lives in Astoria, Queens and probably won’t stop talking about how great it is if you bring it up. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
