Taylor Swift has been called a prodigy, a “feminist’s nightmare,” and – most annoyingly and most often – boy-crazy. People are so obsessed with Swift’s supposedly too-active dating life that there’s an entire wiki dedicated to her ex-boyfriends. Timelines of her relationships have been published by Billboard, Business Insider and Glamour magazine. Any song that Swift releases immediately sparks speculation about which famous ex is featured therein – her creative output always somehow ends up tied to a list of men.

It can’t be fun for a young, talented, wildly-successful woman to constantly have her music bonafides attached to her love life. So when a Vanity Fair reporter asked the singer-songwriter last year if she was “boy-crazy”, Swift called her out:

For a female to write about her feelings, and then be portrayed as some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend in need of making you marry her and have kids with her, I think that’s taking something that potentially should be celebrated – a woman writing about her feelings in a confessional way – that’s taking it and turning it and twisting it into something that is frankly a little sexist.

And now, in her new Blank Space video, Swift performs the very unflattering image that the public has foisted upon her, as if to say: You want boy-crazy? I’ll give you boy-crazy!

Did Taylor Swift make you mad? (Courtesy of Ryan Seacrest)

This is the Taylor Swift we’ve been waiting for: the Taylor Swift who smiles while she offers up a hearty “fuck you”.

The video for Blank Space is a sort of dystopian feminist fairy tale: Swift is surrounded by woodland creatures and dressed in gorgeous gowns. She has picnics of champagne and sweets, all while in the company of a generically handsome, if unremarkable, man. (Blank Space, indeed!)

But things swiftly go awry in fantasy land with her Ken-doll boyfriend – he texts someone else, the bastard. Swift goes full-on Fatal Attraction: she screams and cries with a mascara-streaked face, throws a plant at him, cuts up his shirts, tries to chop down a rather large tree upon which she had carved their names, bashes his expensive car with a golf club and wields one very large knife in a crime against pastry.

Taylor Swift prefers her cake and her emotions raw. (Courtesy of BuzzFeed)

“Got a long list of ex-lovers, they’ll tell you I’m insane,” Swift sings in the middle of her meltdown. Finally, when her prince is passed out in the driveway – we don’t see why – she doesn’t wake him up with a kiss but with a firm bite to the lip. He then drives off in a rush ... and another generically handsome man drives up to take his place.

Swift has made no secret that Blank Space is about the media depictions of her relationships with men. “There’s been sort of a sensational fictionalization of my personal life”, Swift said in an interview about the song.

They’ve drawn up this profile of a girl who is a serial dater, jetsetting around with all her boyfriends and she get them but she can’t keep them because she’s too emotional and she’s needy. Then she gets her heart broken because they leave and she’s jilted, so she goes to her evil lair and writes songs about it for revenge.

Swift sings in Blank Space that she’s “a nightmare dressed like a daydream”, and indeed, this video – where the men are interchangeable, the girlfriend is crazy (and crazy hot), and the joke is on anyone who takes her image too seriously – is a certain kind of feminist daydream. It’s a world where the narrow and sexist caricatures attached to women are acted out for our amusement, their full ridiculousness on display. And for those who would try to pigeonhole Swift as little more than the sum of her dating life, the real nightmare is the woman behind the character: a woman who has full creative control over her image and isn’t afraid to use it to mock your efforts to stereotype her.