Taylor Swift Says Sexist Critics Turned Her Into A 'Character'

While Taylor Swift sticks to her policy of never naming names in her April cover story for Vanity Fair, she does address speculation about her personal life quite candidly.

"If you want some big revelation, since 2010 I have dated exactly two people," she tells the magazine, which points out she's referring to One Direction's Harry Styles and Conor Kennedy. "The fact that there are slide shows of a dozen guys that I either hugged on a red carpet or met for lunch or wrote a song with. . . it's just kind of ridiculous. It's why I have to avoid the tabloid part of our culture, because they turn you into a fictional character."

Swift finds it "a little sexist" that people so frequently use her songs as tabloid fodder. She said, "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."

Swift never goes into any specifics, except she does have some words for Tina Fey and Amy Poehler who joked about her love life while hosting the Golden Globes earlier this year. "You know, Katie Couric is one of my favorite people. Because she said to me she had heard a quote that she loved, that said, 'There's a special place in hell for women who don't help other women,' " she said.

While the singer speaks about her love life in more general terms, she did allow one anonymous source to address it more specifically, particularly her relationship with One Direction's Harry Styles. "He wore her down," a source told their relationship before it ended over the holidays. "He was all, like, 'You're amazing — I want to be with you. I want to do this.'"

But their on-again, off-again relationship, the source says, eventually became too much. They broke up a first time after a photo was leaked of him kissing another girl goodbye, but it looked like more, according to the source. After he pursued her again, they got back together. "But the whole time she says she feels like he's looking at every girl ... It was like a pendulum for her, swinging back and forth," her source says, but his rep denies the claims.

The source also confirms her relationships with Kennedy ("just like a two-month thing"), Jake Gyllenhaal and John Mayer (adding, "She was really young and they were in their 30s, and she got really hurt. So it was like 'That hurt — this won't. But then it did.'")

Swift does address the speculation that she "if I like you I will apparently buy up the real-estate market just to freak you out so you leave me. One of these things I say to myself to calm myself down when I feel like it's all too much . . . If there's a pregnancy rumor, people will find out it's not true when you wind up not being pregnant, like nine months from now, and if there's a house rumor, they'll find out it's not true when you are actively not ever spotted at that house."

The Vanity Fair source does confirm one more rumor. She did buy a house in Hyannis Port after Rory Kennedy had prompted her to. Eventually she sold it as a house flip.