Holding her guitar and staring straight at the camera, singer Taylor Swift posed for the cover of Vanity Fair's April 2013 issue.

In her interview with the magazine she talked about men - her love life constantly making headlines - new music and the subject of "mean girls."

At this year's Golden Globes, hosts Amy Poehler and Tina Fey mocked Swift's love life. They joked on stage and told her to stay away from Michael J. Fox's son, who was at the awards ceremony helping celebrities on and off the stage.

"Or go for it," co-host Poehler said.

"No!" Fey added. "She needs some 'me' time to learn about herself."

While discussing the topic, Swift told Vanity Fair contributing editor Nancy Jo Sales that Katie Couric is one of her "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,' " Swift said.

Her love life has been talked about in numerous media reports and telling her own side of the story she said to Sales, "if you want some big revelation, since 2010 I have dated exactly two people." Those two, though Swift did not say it herself, were Conor Kennedy and One Direction's Harry Styles. A source told Sales Styles "wore her down" and that their relationship ended after he texted Swift to alert her of a picture circulating on the Internet of him kissing a friend good-bye, though the picture looked like they were "making out."

Swift's past boyfriends are rumored to include Jake Gyllenhaal, Taylor Lautner, Joe Jonas and John Mayer.

"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," she said.

Sales asked Swift if she is "boy-crazy" and the 23-year-old first smiled then replied with the following:

"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 - who also posed for the magazine in a gold dress in front of a mirror - said tabloids create stories saying "Taylor's boy crazy" and that she now avoids reading those kinds of reports because they turn her "into a fictional character."

"If I could find someone who just looked at me like I'm a girl, like a girl they want to be their girlfriend, with all my accomplishments and my criticisms," she said, "without this big cartoon character that most people see me as."