As mentioned before in Affinity, Taylor Swift is not a bad person, she’s a bad feminist. Taylor is actually loved by millions and makes mainstream yet catchy and relatable songs. She is one of the wealthiest women on earth and has a huge fan base. With all of this, it is obvious that Swift lives no private life and the media tracks every aspect of her life from where she bought her socks from to whom they’ll think she’ll marry.
This said, yesterday it was publicly announced that Swift broke up her 15 months relationship with record producer Calvin Harris. Fifteen months is a fairly long time and one can only imagine how terrible the both of them are feeling to be separated. Yet, the media, social and more, thought this is time to mention, and ridicule, how Taylor Swift – like all other artists – will write about this break up. Generally, social media was flooded with ridiculous and misogynistic comments. Big so-called feminist accounts sent tweets out saying “when’s the next album going to be realised though?!”. What kind of example are they setting if they join in the sexism fiesta? If you have a hundred followers or a hundred thousand, you need to make sure you’re not hypocritical in what you believe in and stand for.
However, it didn’t stop there. TMZ said despite the breakup being friendly, she’ll still write a song about him. Hollywood Life said Harris is freaked out Swift will write a song about him. Us weekly said he’ll be joining her list of exes who’ve had songs written about them soon. And the infamous Daily Mail questioned why can’t she keep a man. Swift’s life doesn’t depend on men, Daily Mail. She can’t keep them because that’s what life is like. You get into one relationship, it doesn’t work, and you keep trying till you find the person you’re meant to be with.
It is irrelevant if these people thought of it as funny and relatable tweets. They are offensive and sexist because Swift is not the first or last artist to write about breakups and relationships. People only make fun of her because she’s a woman. When she does it, she’s dramatic, annoying and crazy but when Ed Sheeran does it, he’s brave, emotional and romantic.
Swift doesn’t do anything diffrent from what other artists do in their song writing process. However, she became a victim of a vicious cycle of misogyny and what’s terrible is that a lot of it is internalised. She just went through a breakup from a long and romantic relationship and all people care to do is make fun of her because she’s a woman; the gender that’s sensitive and complains too much.
She is not a monster for being in relationships and falling in and out of love for wanting to express about it. Our big media outlets make her out to be one though and deceive us into believing this image. They made the world unsafe for women to make and create art. They’re silencing them and because we think it’s funny we’re helping them with it.
Make sure to ask yourself if your comment about Taylor Swift’s next single misogynistic, and make sure to call out those who make those comments. We fall into this trap without noticing it and it’s time that we do. You don’t have to love Swift to defend her from sexist ideologies and work to make the world a safer place for women to make art and be creative.
Comments are closed.