Taylor Swift stands as a multigenerational icon with her tremendous cultural impact cementing her legacy. Her influence extends beyond the billion-dollar-grossing Era’s Tour and numerous streaming records. despite her fandom’s impenetrable loyalty and respect, her image as a feminist icon is flawed and inaccurate because….
Swift has expressed her views on female empowerment often. In a 2013 interview with Vanity Fair, she famously proclaimed, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t support other women.”
However, the pop star’s behavior has often been hypocritical to her feminist messaging.
In the viral 2016 music video for “Bad Blood,” Swift and her best friends, armed with machetes and dressed head to toe in leather, viciously attacked and set fire to an office full of men. Under this disguise, it’s easy to label the video as a triumphant feminist work displaying the strength of women.
*Swift and her supermodel entourage in “Bad Blood”
However, the video was Swift’s scathing hit piece against fellow pop star Katy Perry, stemming from a trivial feud over allegedly stolen background dancers. “Bad Blood” was crafted to tear Perry down and taint her reputation. Both the song and video contained witty innuendos to Perry, one being the lyric, “You say sorry just for show. If you live like that, you live with ghosts,”—an ode to a song called “Ghost” Perry had released the previous year.
In the aftermath of the video’s premiere, Swifties (Swift’s fanbase) flooded Perry’s comment sections and sent her direct messages with overwhelming hate, including some death threats; yet Swift never once urged them to stop. This diss track pits women against each other under the guise of empowerment, leaving it as a stark contrast against Swift’s feminist statements.
Swift has also been called out for opportunistic and self-serving feminism on multiple occasions. On Donald Trump’s inauguration day in 2017, thousands of women flooded the streets all over the country to support gender equality and civil rights, which they feared were under threat from Trump’s presidency.
Swift had remained silent about the election up until election day when she encouraged people to vote. As a self-proclaimed feminist, it would have made sense for Swift to reprimand Trump throughout the course of his campaign, but Swift’s choice to send out a singular vague tweet was lazy, performative, and seemed as though it was her way of jumping onto a trend to perpetuate her relevance.
While many A-listers attended marches to show their support, Swift chose to send out a simple tweet reading, “So much love, pride, and respect for those who marched. I’m proud to be a woman today, and every day. #WomensMarch.” Protests are extremely impactful and create real change, so regardless of why these celebrities chose to attend, they still effectively contributed.
Though she never meaningfully protested for the feminist movement, Swift routinely uses feminism to respond to criticism or hate she receives online. In 2021, the Netflix show “Ginny & Georgia” aired an episode that contained the line, “What do you care? You go through men faster than Taylor Swift.” Swift, of course, was not a fan of this line and took to Twitter to write, “Hey Ginny & Georgia, 2010 called and it wants its lazy, deeply sexist joke back. How about we stop degrading hard-working women by defining this horse shit as FuNnY…Happy Women’s History Month I guess.”
*Swift’s controversial tweet
This response was not an act of feminism. Her one and only post for Women’s History Month was centered around defending herself from an insignificant one-liner and had no real impact on women as a whole.
While lifting herself up, Swift simultaneously unleashed her fanbase to drag actress Antonia Gentry, who delivered the line, even though she did not write the line herself. Still, the Swifites attacked Gentry and nearly bullied her off social media. Swift knows the lengths to which her loyal fanbase fights for her, and it would have been more feminist to consider this before sending out a tweet that facilitated a hate train on another woman.
Arguably her most contradictory act as a “feminist” was Swift’s short-lived relationship with the infamous Matty Healy, the lead vocalist of the pop-rock band The 1975, in 2023.
Healy has an extensive history of making derogatory remarks against women, amplified by various other scandals, including him doing the Nazi salute at one of his concerts.
In 2016, Healy told Q Magazine that dating Swift would be emasculating due to her fame and power. Last September, he went on a podcast with comedians Nick Mullen and Adam Friedlan and made crude jokes about a website that centers on the degradation and humiliation of black women. His response to upset fans was, “It doesn’t actually matter.”
Most importantly, however, were his remarks about female rapper Ice Spice.
On the same podcast, he also taunted Ice Spice. She is of Nigerian and Dominican descent, but Healy referred to her as “a chubby Chinese lady,” and followed this remark by mocking Hawaiian and Chinese accents.
Swift was not obliged to speak for her boyfriend’s actions, but persisting in a relationship with someone so shamelessly misogynistic was another clear contradiction to her feminist persona.
Then, seemingly as damage control, Swift befriended Ice Spice herself. Instead of addressing the situation at hand, Swift chose to remix her hit song “Karma” with the addition of a quick verse by Ice Spice. Swift also invited the rapper to join her inner circle in viewing the 2024 Super Bowl from her exclusive private box.
A calculated PR move by Swift and her team, the friendship ultimately aimed to take the heat off her romance with Healy and may not have been as genuine as it appears to fans.
While it is false to say that Swift disregards feminism at every turn, it is essential to acknowledge these instances to avoid labeling her as a prominent feminist leader and icon. As a singer, it is not her job to campaign across the globe for women’s rights and speak out on a daily basis. Still, because she doesn’t partake in such activism, it is unfair to applaud her feminism, especially when she has perpetuated and been associated with anti-feminism. A-listers, best exemplified by actress Emma Watson, who use their platform on a consistent basis and devote their time to meaningful campaigns, deserve the icon status granted to Swift.
Swift brings joy to millions of women and men across the globe. She is beyond talented and an incredible role model in many other ways. But with all of this in mind, she is still not a feminist icon, and pop-culture needs to stop labeling her as one
The Scribe Circle 
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