Taylor Swift and the Curse of Womanhood

Why are men so angry at Taylor Swift? (No, not ALL MEN. But if you're mad, then yes! Probably you!)

After a recent Chiefs loss, Skip Bayless tweeted, “Feels like it’s about time to call Taylor Swift a distraction. What do you think, Patrick? Andy? How about you, Travis?” And like, first of all, Skip Bayless, fuck you! In what world is a woman in the stands to blame for a team’s loss? Also, what grown man is calling himself Skip with a straight face? But if you think this was the opinion of one washed up sportscaster alone, you’d be wrong. Men all over the internet have decided that Taylor Swift is a curse. Keyshawn Johnson and Michael Irvin, two football legends in their own right, blamed her on national televison, calling her presence ‘a lot’. There were internet commenters everywhere collectively saying “And god, why do they have to show her on the screen so often? Stop shoving her down our throats!”

Obviously, anyone with a brain can see they’re being ridiculous, whiny babies. So the question is, why does it matter? Why does it matter that men are angry at Taylor Swift for attending a football game? Why does it bother me more than it should— why should it matter to someone who isn’t a Taylor Swift fan?

We’re living in somewhat of a reactionary period for men. There are dozens of podcasts that seemingly popped up overnight where some ‘Alpha Male’ is telling you how women are bitches, how you need to be masculine, how you should hate feminism. Inceldom is at an all-time high— and men are blaming their ‘loneliness’ on the fact that women will not date them. There’s a new tik tok on my timeline every day of some guy asking men on the street how many ‘bodies’ a woman can have, a new thread explaining that men won’t date ‘career women’, a new snippet from a youtube video where a man WELL past his prime is telling women that our biological clocks are ticking and we’d better get married or we are nothing.

I call this behavior reactionary because it is— they are acting out and throwing tantrums over something. I think what they are reacting to is the need to change. Have you noticed how many of these Alpha Male bros talk about needing to return to ‘traditional’ values? How they tell men that a woman’s place is where it has been historically, the kitchen and the bedroom? Women are at least trying to progress. We are de-centering men, raising our standards, creating community with one another and defying the idea that marriage and motherhood should be our only goals. We are moving forward, and we are asking men to come with us, and they are laying on the floor screaming and telling us we can either join them on the floor or go on without them. And so, like you do with a tantrum-ing child, we are moving on without them.

These men hate feminism because they see it as a threat to a world where they are not required to grow, change, be better—learn to cook, learn to clean, learn to be self-sufficient. The goal of Feminism is to lift everyone up, not just women. We want men in community with us. All people would be better off in a world without the painful trappings of traditional masculinity! But men against feminism don’t want to stand in community. Men’s rights activists are protesting for men’s right to stay exactly the same and not grow at all. But unfortunately for them, the world trends toward progress. You can slow it, but you’ll never stop it.

When I see men whining and bitching and moaning about Taylor Swift, I know it’s because she represents that change they’re so scared of. Football is THEIR space, after all. A space for MEN to be MaNLY and stinky and tough and cruel. A woman being welcomed into that space, especially a woman whose music is revered by women and girls, is an invasion to them. They don’t want to make room for anyone except themselves.

Insecurity is a big part of this too— and a need to feel superior. If your sense of self is built on a foundation of believing you are automatically better than another kind of person, naturally if that type of person is equal to you or surpasses you, you’re going to react poorly. Women and men don’t compete together, not because men are naturally better, but because when women were allowed to compete with men they kept winning and men could not fucking handle that. Any type of reactionary ideology can be traced back to this. People who are racist, sexist, homophobic, whatever else— so often it’s because they NEED to feel superior and can’t handle the fact that they are not. It’s why to these people, inclusion feels like an attack.

The way men are reacting to Taylor Swift at the football games matters. Taylor Swift is a powerful, wealthy, beautiful white woman. She has just about every privilege in the book, and she still faces this kind of bullshit— what the hell do people without those privileges experience? It just shows me that we still have so far to go. It shows me that feminsim, as it stands, is not doing enough. If we lived in a world where women were NOT murdered for rejecting men, could walk alone at night without fearing death or worse, were not sexually assaulted at staggeringly high rates (25% of college-aged women, for example), maybe it wouldn’t matter so much that men say mean things about women. But it does, because it all adds to the dehumanization and degradation of women that leads to violence.

I’m a Taylor Swift stan. I am very biased towards her, but it’s important to recognize that for as much as we can poke fun of her girlboss feminism (I call it ‘The Man-core’), she is very much a victim of misogyny. What always comes to mind is when she took a man to trial for sexually harassing and groping her. She sued him for one dollar, and she won. It wasn’t about money, it was about making a point AND setting a legal precedent so more women in the future could potentially sue their harassers. It was important. And when she was on the cover of Time Magazine along with other ‘Me Too’ survivors, people mocked her— as though what she experienced wasn’t “bad enough”, as though she was money-hungry for suing. All that did was make women who have also been groped feel like what happened to them was not worth speaking up about. The way we speak about women MATTERS.

Men have been blaming women for their problems for centuries— it was Anne Boleyn’s fault that Henry VIII was infertile, it was a 22 year old Monica Lewinsky’s fault that the leader of the free world couldn’t keep it in his pants, and as Maisie Peters so eloquently put it, “the men start wars, yet Troy hates Helen”. It’s not new rhetoric, but it’s no less depressing to hear it in 2024. So when I get overly mad at the Taylor Swift comments, it’s not just because I love her more than some of my family members. It’s because it’s not just a mean comment. And we can’t let these whiny little bitch babies continue to have their tantrums without recourse.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: boys, You Need To Calm Down.