triggers: mentions of misogyny and sexual harassment
Although Taylor Swift has less than 25 seconds during three hour broadcasts of the Chiefs’ games and subsequently only receives 0.46% of available screen time, her mere presence at these football games has unleashed a torrent of rage and misogyny by sports fanatics and the media against the singer for appearing in this traditionally male-dominated space. This misogyny begins with the vicious and disturbing spread of A.I. generated, pornagraphic images of Swift at football games on X and other social media platforms. According to The Guardian, these images were viewed by millions and directly resulted in the proposal of a bill by U.S. senators that would criminalize the spread of non-consensual, pornographic images made by A.I or deepfakes. The use of artificial intelligence to create non-consensual deepfakes of women has become a rapidly growing problem, with 96% of these images being non-consensual and causing irreversible harm to its victims, most of which are women. In The Guardian’s interview with Laura Bates, the author of Men Who Hate Women, she states in regards to the rise of deepfakes, “[it is] just the new way of controlling women. You take somebody like Swift, who is extraordinarily successful and powerful, and it’s a way of putting her back into her box. It’s a way of saying to any woman: it doesn’t matter who you are, how powerful you are—we can reduce you to a sex object and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
In a similar vein, Swift’s presence at her boyfriend Travis Kelce’s football games has also resulted in her becoming the subject of MAGA conspiracy theories—conspiracies which have now been dubbed as “The MAGA meltdown” by the New York Times—that claim the Super Bowl is rigged so that Taylor Swift will endorse Biden’s re-election. This meltdown is best epitomized by Fox News host Jesse Waters’ probing viewers: “Do you ever wonder why she blew up like this?” before going on to argue that Swift’s success is owed to the fact she is a psy-op run by the Defense Department. Ultimately, MAGA republicans fear her success and have reduced it as a ploy made by the democrats. Trump’s allies have also pledged a “holy war” against Taylor Swift and Trump has privately admitted to his jealousy of the singer.
In Lily E. Hirsch’s chapter “Nasty” Swift from her book Insulting Music, Hirsch dissects perceptions of female musicians and argues that Taylor Swift’s continuous public perception is highly shaped by gendered ideologies. Hirsch argues that although Taylor Swift undeniably possesses an extremely high level of privilege, her treatment by the public is reflective of “an informative and enduring tradition of insult confounding female musicians.” This tradition begins in the Romantic Period in which the rise of French female pianists conflicted with “the traditional praise of the piano virtuoso—language that involved conquest and physicality” that was traditionally used to assess pianists. Hirsch similarly claims that Romantic Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was known to believe that women should avoid the acquirement of any skills that took them outside the home yet praised the veiled performances of the female singers of the Venetian ospedali, would have argued that the greatest threat of watching women perform was its effeminizing effect; a take that she summarized as “Unable to turn us into men, women turn us into women” (Lily E. Hirsch). This fear of femininity propels misogyny and hatred towards Taylor Swift, as well as her fans, by the sports media and sports fanatics, who exist in what is considered a traditionally male-dominated space i.e. Travis Kelce’s football games.
Although Taylor Swift has faced a new onslaught of misogyny as of late due to her mere presence at her boyfriend’s football games, Swift is no stranger to sexism and double standards. Similarly to many women under the spotlight, she has been notoriously slutshamed for her dating life, endured endless scrutiny of her body and weight, been characterized by the media as duplicitous, dramatic, obsessive, jealous, and self-victimizing—a persona she parodied in Blank Space—and suffered her music being trivialized as shallow documentations of romantic affairs in spite of the fact her male counterparts also write about the same subjects. Some have even claimed that she is not capable of writing her own lyrics to which she responded by releasing Speak Now, an album written solely by her. Her success is constantly degraded and devalued by men such as “Barstool Sports personalities Dan “Big Cat” Katz and Eric “PFT Commenter” Sollenberger…calling her “bad for football” and making lewd jokes about “Taylor Swift’s vagina.”” Katz similarly degraded her further, admitting he would accept her presence at football games if she made a sex tape with Travis Kelce. Alongside dislike of Taylor Swift and female musicians more broadly speaking, there has been a prominent dislike of primarily female fandoms, which Neta Yodovich argues are constantly “stigmatized as childish, obsessive, and uncritical” in comparison to male fandoms; this stigmatization can be witnessed within Taylor Swift’s own fanbase, who in comparison to sports fans, has been made out to be a group of “obsessive and childish women.”
This widespread fear of and disdain for femininity, which has so clearly been expressed in the media’s hatred of Taylor Swift and her fanbase, is also an expression of a deep-rooted, patriarchal fear of female power. Taylor Swift is undeniably a woman who has amassed unbeknownst cultural, political, economic, and social influence. Throughout her career, she has time-and-time again transformed, switching from country to pop, achieving the “celestial echelons” of stardom, profoundly impacting the music industry, and ultimately evolving into an unrivaled, global cultural phenomenon. This is evidenced by the past two years alone, in which Taylor Swift won more grammys than any other artist in history and her 2023 Eras Tour shattered world records, becoming the highest grossing music tour and surpassing $1 billion in revenue, its effects reverberating throughout the economy and solidifying her as a self-made billionaire. She has similarly amassed more No 1. albums than any other woman in history, and 3 of her albums charted at No. 1 in under one year, breaking a record previously only held by The Beatles. Times, who named her person of the year in 2023, detailed how her “midas touch” has brought joy to thousands of people, bringing them together in a sea of glittering lights to scream her lyrics and exchange friendship bracelets. In fact, Taylor Swift’s popularity even ironically caused the NFL to hit its highest regular season viewership among women since 2000 and added the equivalent of around $330 million in brand value to the Chiefs and their league.
Yet in spite of fitting into the most privileged category of women in the world, Taylor Swift is reduced to a sex object, her writing trivialized, and her immense presence in the arts is boiled down to the men she dates time and time again. The onslaught of sexism towards Taylor Swift, and other female musicians and celebrities, who are beloved and seen as inspiring figures to so many young women, profoundly impacts the female audiences who love them. Through the relentless misogyny faced by singers like Taylor Swift, young women are taught over and over, no matter what level of success they achieve, they will constantly be reduced to a sex object, degraded, and disrespected professionally simply for taking up space, for speaking, for writing about their life, and expressing their femininity. They are taught that they should be ashamed of donning friendship bracelets, wearing sparkly outfits and make up, screaming along to the lyrics of their favorite singer, and loving a woman society has dictated has “too much power.” They watch her and other female celebrities get torn apart online for their every social interaction, made out to be rude, dramatic, disrespectful, self-centered, and shallow for stepping outside the box with their success. It is time to respect the women, who in the words of Taylor Swift herself, if they were suddenly to become men, would be the man.