Camilla Fitzsimons, Maynooth University. Co. Kildare, Ireland.
December, 2024
Let’s start by getting the obvious out of the way. I love Taylor Swift. Well, I love Taylor Swift’s music, I don’t actually know Taylor herself, aside from the many aspects of her life that I regularly learn about through her strongly biographical songs, most of which rely on deeply personal lyrics. When I went to the Eras Tour in June 2024, I paid €200 for a pit ticket; a relative bargain compared to what others paid around the world. For example, when she launched the first US leg of the tour, she caused Ticketmaster to crash with dynamic pricing reportedly resulting in tickets being offered for up to $2,200.
My entry into the Taylorverse came through my daughters. My eldest, Anna became a fan when she was about ten when she heard some songs from the 2008 album Fearless. She became fully invested through 1989, which was released in 2014. Isobel, my youngest, prefers Red released in 2012.
The first album I properly devoured was Folklore, released to critical acclaim in 2020 during the global coronavirus pandemic. I then listened back, and discovered that Reputation was ‘my era’. This has since been overtaken by what I consider the masterful The Tortured Poets Department, written in 2023, and in the middle of a hectic world tour. The Tortured Poets Department offers a juxtaposition between being surrounded by adoring fans and at the same time struggling with feelings of isolation and heartbreak. The opening lines of the album are:
I was supposed to be sent away, but they forgot to come and get me, I was a functioning alcoholic, till nobody noticed my new aesthetic.
These words, from the song fortnight, are an entry point into a 16 track album that is mostly about love and loss, the emotional distance between people, and the loneliness that failed relationships can bring. You can read a great review of TTPD by Anna MacNeill here.
Outing oneself as a Swiftie leads to all sorts of reactions. Some people don’t find her music to their taste but can see and respect her artistry and talent nonetheless. Others are immediately contemptuous of her music, a dismissal that often comes with minimal engagement with her work beyond hit songs like Blank Space or Style. These cynics help fuel a longstanding pattern of undermining the choices, passions and perceptions of women, especially when their fandom is towards a female artist. Their reaction equally reflects a broader tendency to devalue the musical talents of women. As anti-Swifties turn their noses up through claims that she is shallow or over-commercial, they rarely use these same benchmarks when evaluating the many male artists who explore similar themes.
Among 'Swifties', there tends to be two camps. First, there are devotees who support Taylor unconditionally believing she can do no wrong. These Swifties will rally behind her through thick and thin and will uncritically celebrate every move she makes. Secondly, there are people like me, who reside in The Tortured Swiftie Department meaning we have a more complicated and contradictory relationship with the artist and her music. For me, the biggest aspect of my fandom is the sheer pleasure I get from listening, often on repeat, to her beautiful melodies and her relatable lyrics across a huge catalogue of universally appealing high-quality tunes. I suspect other Tortured Swiftie Department fans feel the same way.
Stretching beyond her music, there are other things to like about Taylor Swift indeed some of her actions have led to her being branded a feminist icon. Swift has publicly supported abortion access and has taken a stance on LGBTQ+ rights (both of which I will return to). In particular though, she regularly speaks out about her experiences of sexism and unequal treatment within the music industry. One of the earliest and most blatant displays of this sexism was when, in full blown male-protector mode, Kanye West interrupted 19-yr-old Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 Video Music Awards by grabbing the microphone from her hands and declaring Beyoncé the real winner.
The repercussions of this humiliation lasted for years and included a public apology by West, then an apparent reconciliation which was thwarted by retaliations across both artist’s music. Click here for a timeline of their ups and downs. I, like others, wonder if things have finally ended with what many people believe to be a diss track about West and his ex-wife Kim Kardasian (ThanK you aIMee - on The Tortured Poets Department), as well as West’s very separate fall from grace for all sorts of reasons.
By 2017, Swift’s more solid footing as a star probably played a part in her first public pro-active step to address sexism in the music industry when she successfully took a sexual harassment lawsuit against DJ David Muller who openly groped her during a pre concert photo shoot some four years earlier. Muller had sued Swift when he lost his job over the incident, so she counter-sued for one dollar. A couple of years later, and perhaps in her best known course of activism, she responded promptly and unequivocally to serious bullying and manipulation by talent manager Scooter Braun who, among other things, acquired the record company which owned the masters' of her first six albums. Swift publicly called out Braun’s behavour and has since re-recorded four of these albums to regain control of her music rights.
Importantly though, and a major reason why people like me like her music, Swift also uses her songs as a vehicle for social change. By way of example, she might not explicitly name Braun in her 2020 song Mad Woman, but the track is largely thought to be about being silenced and wronged by his actions. But Mad Woman is also about so much more. It details how women the world over are regularly punished for confronting injustice and how their perfectly understandable emotional reactions to abuses of power are repeatedly re-framed to paint women as the problem. Mad woman is one of several songs across her repertoire to offer a powerful critique of the decades long societal labeling and dismissal of women as unstable every time they challenge the structures of patriarchal power. There are other ways her lyrics contribute to the emancipation of women. Time and again, Swift's message is one of self-worth, emotional intelligence, and a refusal to accept sexism. Her lyrics are validating, empowering, and a sea change from the messaging I grew up with when it was perfectly normal for top ten hits to normalize obsession, stalking, grooming, love-bombing and gaslighting. Even jealousy, we were told, was desirable. Women and girls who resisted were portrayed as traitors. I know firsthand that these songs helped normalize toxic masculinity, rape culture and abusive behaviours especially in the 1980s and 1990s.
And if more evidence is needed that Swift’s songs are effective in calling out misogyny and hitting a patriarchal nerve, compare how she gets called petty and vindictive for writing about bad behaviour, to how the actual perpetrators of harm are treated, which often includes expressions of sympathy and solidarity. Can we really decouple Swift's repeated calling out of interpersonal misogyny from a noticeable backlash in 2016 during which hashtags like #TaylorSwiftIsOverParty was trending worldwide to such an extent that she was forced to retreat from the spotlight. One of her actions upon re-emerging with a brand new image a couple of years later was to release a ten-minute version of All too Well, a song about gaslighting among other things that is widely speculated to be about her relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal.
Although her fandom by this stage enabled her to weather the storm of what some critic’s described as bitterness and an inability to move on, Gyllenhaal’s response was to distance himself from the whole affair. This was a missed opportunity by the actor, who could have centred himself as a role model for boys and men by expressing even the most modest inclination of remorse.
It is also no harm to point out at this stage how critics negatively and obsessively jump all over the fact that, at 35 and having lived most of her life in the public’s glare, Swift has had several high-profile relationships. When men behave in the same way, they are valorised.
The trouble with Taylor's white feminism
But there are serious problems with Swift’s brand of feminism, a philosophy she first aligned herself with in an interview with the Guardian magazine in 2014. Let's, for example, compare her stance on abortion in the aftermath of the overturning of Roe with another female artist, Olivia Rodrigo. During her US tour, this younger and less established star handed out the morning after pill via her own Fund 4 Good campaign for reproductive rights. She has repeatedly used public appearances and social media platforms to advocate for abortion access in particular. Swift, who has much more power and influence than Rodrigo, has failed to do this rather has ignored the issue during acceptance speeches and other public engagements at a time when her voice would have made a big impact. On LGBTQ+ rights, Swift has been praised for advocating the US Equality Act that prohibits discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity and she endorsed the act at the 2019 VMAs. However, her inconsistency, especially on trans rights, is important to call out. Swift has been roundly and rightly criticized for not doing more about a slew of anti-trans laws being passed across the US. When the Eras Tour visited US states with so-called 'bathroom bans' why did she never address this onstage, especially given how she repeatedly incorporates LGBTQ+ iconography when performing the hit song You Need to Calm Down.
Perhaps most egregious of all, let's talk about Taylor Swift's unconditional decision to pledge support for Kamala Harris in the 2024 US election, an endorsement that led to 400,000 people registering to vote. This backing of Harris was amidst Swift’s deafening silence on the genocide in Palestine. Conservative estimates put the 2024 death toll, at the hands of the Israeli army, at 45,000 Palestinian civilians. These people were murdered during the same year that Swift played around 150 shows across five continents. Swift could have behaved differently and taken courage from the actions of Chappell Roan, who, like Rodrigo, is a star with a less stable footing in the music industry. Roan also publicly announced that she would be voting for Harris. But she refused to endorse the candidate and has explained, on multiple occasions, that she does not support the Democrat's support and funding of Israel’s continued attacks on the Palestinian people. Other female artists touring at the same time also managed to repeatedly and equivocally express solidarity with the Palestinian people including Paloma Faith and Boygenius. If Swift had even just once used her platform to call for a ceasefire or express solidarity with the Palestinian people, who knows just how powerful that moment of advocacy might have been. She would certainly have had the support of many millions of her fans.
In June 2024, and the day after an Israeli airstrike on Rafah killed at least 45 Palestinians, the hashtag #SwiftiesforPalestine garnered more than 100,000 posts on X in one day as Swifties all over the world demanded that Taylor Swift “Speak Now” on Gaza. These are not the actions of fickle, disengaged, sheep-like fans but critical thinkers who, like me, believe Taylor must do more. Their demand was ignored. Even the fact that her silence has been bad for business, reportedly losing her hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, hasn't spurred the star into action.
What makes things even worse is that Swift champions herself as a philanthropist. She makes hefty, well publicised donations to food banks in every city she tours in and pays millions in bonuses to lower-paid tour workers including riggers, sound technicians, drivers and catering staff. She also made sure that her first public appearance following the end of her Era’s Tour was to a children’s hospital in Kansas City, where she posted for photographs and filmed TikToks with sick children. But what of the children in Gaza who don't even have hospitals to go to as most have been damaged or completely destroyed by the Israeli military. And what about other low-paid workers who are caught up in the Taylorverse, like the factory workers who ensure an endless and excessive supply of merchandise. Taylor Swift branded sweaters, hats, t-shirt and even friendship bracelets encourage damaging norms in consumerism that put pressure on often low-income families to buy plenty and to buy often.
There are other problems with her excessive merchandising including significant environmental impacts. Swift may claim that her clothing range is ethical, but there is little evidence of this beyond some public statements and a brief partnership with the designer Stella McCartney. Her clothing may not be, strictly speaking, made in sweatshops, but it will have been manufactured by mostly female, low-paid workers many of who likely have no trade union protection. When Taylor branded clothing is discarded along with its millions of dupes, much of it will end up in the clothes mountains that are now a permanent feature across West Africa particularly in Ghana as well as in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Somewhat of an aside but also on the topic of environmentalism, her claims to offset her immense carbon footprint, much of which is through use of her private jet, have also been challenged.
So where does this leave me, and others in the Tortured Swiftie Department? I guess it's okay for us to listen to and celebrate her music and to be thankful for an albeit limited feminist discourse that challenges misogyny. There is no denying the fact that millions of people across the world, but especially women and girls, feel empowered by Swift's unapologetic expression of self-worth as she inspires people to stand up against interpersonal sexism. Her activism has also likely helped address sexism in the music industry, at least for privileged women.
But Swift's version of feminism only addresses the issues that affect people like her. For me, being a Swiftie comes with responsibilities that include calling out her repeated blindness to the intersectional struggles of marginalized women. She has never, to my knowledge, addressed how people’s life chances are not evenly spread and how factors including class, race, ethnicity, ability, citizenship and geographical location affect people's access to justice, the level of sexism they endure and their proximity to wealth. The advanced capitalism her version of feminism supports may have made her billions, but it is not a model of economic progress for everyone indeed it is mostly the polar opposite. Rafia Zakaria eloquently and informatively explains the many shortfalls in the sort of feminism Swift endorses in Against White Feminism which I recommend to all readers. You can also read my own critique of liberal feminism here. Being a Swiftie also means not letting her off the hook for her unforgivable silence as Israeli forces, principally armed by the UK and the US murder and maim tens of thousands of children. Has Taylor ever stopped to ask herself how many of these children were also devoted Swifties?
[1] photograph taken from https://www.smh.com.au/culture/music/taylor-swift-meets-a-lucky-fan-at-every-live-show-how-are-they-chosen-20240220-p5f6d8.html
[2] photograph taken from https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/kanye-west-storms-the-vmas-stage-during-taylor-swifts-speech-83468/
[3] photograph taken from https://www.hola.com/us/celebrities/20211112306472/taylor-swift-jake-gyllenhaal-breakup-reason/
[4] photograph taken from https://x.com/DahliaKurtz/status/1821891557777100945
[5] photograph taken from https://www.gathered.how/arts-crafts/taylor-swift-friendship-bracelets
I am a Professor in Adult and Community Education at Maynooth University, Co. Kildare, Ireland. I am the author of several books and articles about adult and community education and about feminism which are listed in other sections of this website or at this link. My latest book, Rethinking Feminism in Ireland, will be published by Bloomsbury Press in 2025. Thanks to Anna who read an earlier version of this and gave me some important steers.
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