To begin, I’d like to put this article into context. I, by my own admission, am not a perfect feminist. I even question whether critiquing people’s feminism, as I am about to do, is beneficial for feminism as a whole. It is especially hard being a famous figure – as Roxane Gay mentions in her TED Talk Confessions of a Bad Feminist – to live up to people’s expectations about your interpretation of feminism. Nonetheless, I shall begin to critique.
Most of the problems with Swift’s feminism hinge on one central theme: pitting girls against each other. Swift’s lyrics speak for themselves, most evidently in her songs ‘You Belong with Me’ and ‘Better Than Revenge’, where she sings:
She wears short skirts
I wear t-shirts
She’s cheer captain
And I’m on the bleachers
…
She’s not a saint
And she’s not what you think
She’s an actress, whoa
She’s better known
For the things that she does
On the mattress
Here we see Swift’s demonisation of the sexualised ‘other girl’, responsible for taking her love interest, but not worthy due to her provocative wardrobe and sexual history. This framing of worth based on appearance and sexual availability disregards notions of personality and character, reducing women to objects solely judged by their attractiveness and relations with men.
So, not only are Swift’s lyrics akin to those from the nineteenth century, her music videos also emphasise the presence of competing women. Many of her early videos – including Teardrops on My Guitar, Picture to Burn, White Horse, and You Belong With Me – clearly display Swift’s notion of the ‘other woman’ as a brunette, and serve as a juxtaposition to Swift as a blonde, virginal, innocent, and ‘moral’ woman. While we can broadly say that these stereotypical portrayals are dwindling as Swift’s career continues, we now see more prevalent images of female competition – take Bad Blood – which put women in direct confrontation with each other.
Perhaps what makes our view on Swift’s feminism so negative is our knowledge of her actions outside the realm of her lyrics and songs. Swift’s tweets in response to Nicki Minaj’s calling-out of the music industry – when her video Anaconda failed to receive a video of the year nomination at MTV’s 2015 Video Music Awards, while Swift’s Bad Blood did – display just how shallow Swift’s feminism is. While Minaj rightly highlighted the music industry’s bias towards ‘women with very slim bodies’, Swift replied that it was ‘unlike you to pit women against each other’. So, not only is Swift voiding any responsibility on her part by accusing Minaj of being unnecessarily competitive, and disregarding her inherent position of privilege, but she ignores the fact that she utilises the very thing she is accusing Minaj of. Or, in the immortal words of Katy Perry, via Twitter, ‘Finding it ironic to parade the pit women against other women argument about, as one unmeasurably capitalises on the take down of a woman’.
This relates to the type of feminism of which Swift, every now and again, becomes a proponent. It is a reflection of commercial feminism, which focuses on white, thin, well-off women, in an attempt to sell brands or products. This manifests itself in Swift, not only in her appearance (and apparent disregard of the struggles of women who do not fit this description, such as Minaj), but in the active formulation of her ‘brand’.
Take her ‘girl squad’, branded by feminist and cultural critic Camile Paglia as an ‘obnoxious Nazi Barbie routine’. Made up of famous actresses and models – including Cara Delevingne, Blake Lively, Gigi Hadid, Karlie Kloss, and Selena Gomez – not only is the squad mostly made up of the same skinny, white, attractive women – but it actively serves as a method of exclusion rather than inclusion. Think Mean Girls, and Gretchen Weiners’ ‘You can’t sit with us’. The ‘girl squad’ serves more as a method of projecting Swift’s shallow and elitist version of feminism to the media in an attempt to further her brand, and, ultimately, sell more of her music.
While we can only speculate as to the nature of Swift’s ‘squad’, Swift herself plays into the idea of the ‘girl squad’ as an exclusive club, as shown in her recent video for Look What You Made Me Do. It features a You Belong With Me-era Swift, wearing a t-shirt featuring the names of her current squad members. Noticeable absences include Karlie Kloss, Cara Delevingne, Lorde and Ruby Rose, creating an impression of Swift as the dictator to her own group of friends given that she cuts them out when they displease her. Demi Lovato even hit out at Swift in 2016, claiming ‘I don’t see anybody in any sort of squad that has a normal body. It’s kind of this false image of what people should look like. And what they should be like, and it’s not real’. Lovato went on to state that you should not ‘brand yourself a feminist if you don’t do the work’.
Nevertheless, we have seen a rather significant progression in Swift’s feminism. When asked if she considered herself a feminist by Red’s Ramin Setoodeh in 2012, Swift responded that ‘I don’t really think about things as guys versus girls. I never have. I was raised by parents who brought me up to think if you work as hard as guys, you can go far in life’. Make of that what you will.
However, when talking to Maxim in 2015, Swift stated that ‘to me, feminism is probably the most important movement that you could embrace, because it’s just basically another word for equality’. So, Swift, over the course of 3 years, has managed to grasp the meaning of feminism. Finding ourselves nearly in 2018, we can only hope that Taylor has managed to deepen her understanding a little more.