When I was in the eighth grade, “Teardrops on my Guitar” was my anthem. Taylor Swift and her angsty teenage ways really got me. All of her melodramatic ballads made me feel things; teenage girls nationwide knew that there was a Taylor Swift song for any and every occasion. I’ve seen her in concert, I’ve anxiously awaited album drops, and I’ve learned her lyrics. I was behind Taylor for a long time.

​

Taylor Swift has always promoted a “girl power” kind of mindset. She has a girl squad, and she’s committed to the idea that women should empower other women. In 2014, after a few years of evading the term, she finally declared herself a feminist, sharing the impact Lena Dunham had on her understanding of the word and the movement. There were years where I defended Taylor Swift against the hordes of people decrying her for her dating habits and for her song subject matter, which often revolved around her love life. That was in the early days, when that was the biggest controversy surrounding the pop star. I was happy to go to bat for her and remind people that, if she were a man, the conversation wouldn’t be happening. I miss the good old days.

​

The problem with Taylor Swift’s brand of feminism is that it only addresses problems that directly impact her. It is deeply exclusive and only concerned with the plight of a wealthy white woman while ignoring the struggles faced by women with other identities. There is no intersectionality in Taylor Swift’s feminism. On the subject, Jill Filipovic for the Washington Post wrote, “Feminism is more than just supporting your girlfriends or churning out charming catchphrases about girl power.” She might claim feminism, but she rarely speaks up or takes action regarding issues that women outside her identity face.

​

Her silence on women’s issues has been particularly noticeable in the recent climate. She didn’t have much of anything to say about the most talked-about issues of the recent election. Though she tweeted “So much love, pride, and respect for those who marched. I'm proud to be a woman today, and every day. #WomensMarch," she didn’t show up for the women’s march after the inauguration. And while this isn’t the most condemnable of sins, it fits her MO of touting feminism when it benefits her or enhances the image she’s promoting, but not taking any tangible steps to further feminism.

​

For a woman who claims the main tenet of her feminism is that women should support women, she sure has a lot of feuds. With other women. Last year, Elle magazine gave a rundown of all the feuds Taylor Swift is or has been involved in. And while some of them seem a lot like overblown drama, there are a few that are worth paying attention to.

​

Let’s look first at the song “Better Than Revenge.” Admittedly, it came out in 2010, long before Taylor Swift had accepted that she supposedly promotes feminist ideals, but still. It’s important to know the context of the song. “Better Than Revenge” was written about a girl (Camila Belle) who Taylor Swift’s ex-boyfriend (Joe Jonas) started dating shortly after he ended his relationship with Swift. It is most notable for the lines “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, whoa/Soon she's gonna find/Stealing other people's toys on the playground/Won't make you many friends.” This song feels very slut-shamey, especially considering how long Taylor has been defending herself against critics who call her out for the list of men she’s dated.

​

We turn next to Taylor's more recent feud with Katy Perry. It sounds like they had a pretty ambiguous relationship that turned strictly negative and resulted in the song “Bad Blood,” which is essentially a revenge anthem against Perry. On its face, the music video for the song might seem empowering: Swift gathers a whole company of badass women. But then you remember that these badass women are compiled so Taylor can carry out her revenge over a disagreement with another woman. It’s not great.

​

Swift has cultivated a particular image almost her entire career. When she became famous, she was young, country, blonde; she had a very innocent presence. And she’s tried to maintain this, even as she’s been in public spats. One of the reasons she fails to speak up for intersectional issues is that she’s, obviously, privileged by her whiteness. Stepping back and looking at the importance of women’s issues beyond just white women’s issues would necessitate that she confronts the way she uses her whiteness to elevate her above other artists, and the way it gives her a voice that others don’t have. In order to maintain the persona she’s crafted, she specializes in portraying herself as the victim in any narrative that shows her in controversy. This is a common theme for her, and one that has also disproportionately impacted artists who are people of color.

​

Vrinda Jagota, in an article entitled “On Loving Taylor Swift While Brown,” writes about the complicated relationship she and her friends have with Swift's music, which was the pop music they grew up on. She says, “We found solace in Swift’s audacity to feel so much, and so publicly. Of course the people who hurt her (and us) deserved to be held accountable. At the time, we didn’t realize that as a white woman, she could weaponize her position as a victim when she felt wronged by people of color.” Jagota goes on to discuss the issues that can be found in Swift's music regarding race: her ideals of beauty are very narrow, usually involving blonde hair and blue or green eyes; Swift has a music video that romanticizes pre-colonial Africa and features almost no black people; and she canonizes and references almost exclusively white artists. She writes, “To some degree, all listeners have to do the work of empathizing with art that speaks to experiences different than their own… But a lifetime spent stretching your experiences to fit into a canon that never tells your story is exhausting. It makes you feel like your story is not worth telling.”

​

When the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards failed to recognize Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” and “Feeling Myself,” Minaj took to Twitter to talk “about the music industry's continuing marginalization of black bodies.” Minaj used the platform to talk about how frequently black artists create great content, only to have it co-opted and appropriated by others who are rewarded for it. She also tweeted, “If your video celebrates women with very slim bodies, you will be nominated for vid of the year.” Taylor Swift jumped into the fray in response to this, assuming that the tweets were calling her out directly; she wrote, “I've done nothing but love & support you. It's unlike you to pit women against each other. Maybe one of the men took your slot..” Instead of thinking about what Minaj was saying, instead of considering the truth behind her words, Swift read the situation as a personal attack and framed herself as the victim. Minaj made sure Swift understood that the tweets weren’t about her directly and that she had an obligation to speak up; in response, Swift invited Minaj to join her on the stage if won and later apologized. And while these actions are nice, I guess, they show that Swift fundamentally misunderstood the issue at hand. And rather than stepping up to support women whose experiences differ from her own, she used a platform to incite debate that distracted from the cause.

​

Swift also found herself embroiled in a feud with Kanye West. The artist included a line in one of his songs that said “I feel like me and Taylor still might have sex/ Why? I made that bitch famous.” According to West, he called Swift and let her know what he was thinking and asked for her consent before releasing the song. After the song came out, Swift’s publicity team released a statement saying that Swift had cautioned West against releasing a song with misogynistic lyrics. There are video recordings of their phone conversation—which were later released by West’s wife, Kim Kardashian-West—that seemed to show that Swift approved the lines and thanked West for calling her. It appeared that it wasn’t until the public had a negative reaction to the misogyny present in his song that she turned. She later dedicates the entire song “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” from her newest album, reputation, to throwing shade at Kim and Kanye, singing, “Friends don't try to trick you/Get you on the phone and mind-twist you/And so I took an axe to a mended fence.”

​

The accounts are a little fuzzy still—maybe she approved the line about him making her famous, but she didn’t know that he was going to call her a bitch. Of course, if she were put into a position where she felt she had to say yes, or where she wasn’t given the whole account and was later blindsided, she has every right to be upset. However, if this was the case, I think she handled it very poorly. She was also upset to find that their conversation was secretly recorded; which, fair, that’s an invasion of privacy. But I don’t understand why she would have behaved differently had she known that there would be evidence later on. I think it’s fine for her to be upset about the lyrics she didn’t know about, but instead of giving (what seems to be) the truthful account, that she approved of at least some of the work, she took the same stance of villianizing another artist and shifting the blame entirely to someone else. Which isn’t cool.

​

What especially complicates this narrative is that Kanye West is a black man. Swift’s attempt to frame herself, a white woman, as the victim of a black man, in a strategy to maintain her innocent reputation, is problematic. She uses her past image of the innocent one and the stereotypes often perpetuated against black men to cover up for something she did. She throws West under the bus and turns people against him, seemingly because she was later uncomfortable having given her blessing to misogynistic lyrics. And it was easy for her to do so, because of the privilege afforded to her because of her whiteness.

​

The public has an interesting attitude toward celebrities using their platform for anything other than what they’re famous for. Whether they’re a celebrity at an awards show or an athlete on Twitter, fans (or trolls) love to call them out for speaking up on issues that concern them. There is this weird notion that just because you like someone’s music or how they play football, they’re not longer entitled to the right to speak up about flaws they see in society or changes they want to help make. Given this, maybe we can understand why Taylor Swift hasn’t been vocal about women’s issues or about

intersectionality. Maybe we can understand why she doesn’t respond to be asked to speak up, why she doesn’t go to bat for women of color after talking about the importance of girl power. There are plenty of people out there to alienate, and until somewhat recently, she’s cruised through her career as an artist who is catchy and inoffensive. (Inoffensive mostly because she focuses her music on heteronormative roles and traditional expectations of young women, but whatever).

​

Maybe she’s not interested in trolls calling her out for politicizing her platform, for supporting a candidate, for speaking up against prejudice in the industry. Maybe she feels that she can affect change from the inside and that’s enough. After all, she donated $250,000 to Kesha while Kesha was embroiled in a legal fight to get out of a contract with a producer she claimed sexually assaulted her. And Swift took a stand in her own trial against a DJ who groped her and then sued her after he was fired from his job. Her countersuit was for just $1; she said that her “hope is to help those whose voices should also be heard,” and pledged to donate to "organizations that help sexual assault victims.”

​

So why isn’t this enough? It’s a hard question, because of course these are good things; her financial help and the support it showed Kesha was important, and the stand she took in her trial might inspire other women to come forward and speak up when they are mistreated. I don’t want to downplay the impact of those things. But I think it’s important to consider that there’s a spectrum, that she can do good things and still have farther to go. And what’s important too is to realize that there are voices who have been calling for her to speak up. Ignorance is excusable to a point, but there’s a line where it becomes willful, where a person seems to decide to go on the defense instead of educating themselves, like Swift did in her spat with Minaj, like Swift did with Kanye West.

​

I don’t know if it would be better if Taylor Swift were neutral, if she didn’t try to promote a girl power, feminist attitude and fall short. I am genuinely unsure if that would be better. But the reason I have such an issue with her behavior is because she doesn’t acknowledge what she’s doing; she’s investing in her portrayal as a victim, she’s all-in as far as blaming other people for controversy. You don’t get to say that you want to lift women up and then be entirely one-sided; you don’t get to use this supposed “women supporting women” platform only to call out women who are trying to get you to see where you’re missing them mark. You don’t get to say that you want to lift up women only to derail Nicki Minaj’s Twitter discussion of race disparity in media recognition and awards shows because you make it about yourself and you don’t want to see how privileged you are. My issue isn’t that Taylor Swift should be held responsible for trying to right the wrongs of society (although I think people who have a platform to speak up should take advantage of it, regardless of what the trolls want), but that she shouldn’t use feminism and then only apply it when it is an issue that directly impacts her. Feminism that isn’t intersectional—that only applies to the issues of white women, particularly wealthy white women—just isn’t feminism.

​

I don’t know what this all means for me as a consumer of media. Taylor Swift’s music was present all during my middle and high school years; there are songs that I know inside and out. I think they’re fun to sing to in the shower, and they’re easy to listen to with friends, because we all know them. And I acknowledge that this love was formed before I was thinking about the issues I’ve confronted here, but I can’t unknow the things I’ve thought about since then. Jagota grapples with the complications, too, writing, ”Though she marginalized my (already marginalized) experiences as an Indian girl, Swift’s music gave me a roadmap for brazen vulnerability, for allowing myself to be confused and hurt and bold all at once.” There's a spectrum here, too: although Taylor Swift wrote narratives that were pretty exclusively for her or people like her, she still gave young women music that we could try to apply to our own experiences and use to validate the heartbreak, the confusion, the experience of growing up and being told they were too young or too loud or too much.

​

I hold other artists to a certain standard. I stop listening to any artists who have domestic abuse in their past, who are outwardly racist or sexist, etc, because listening to that music and in that way supporting or at least condoning the lyrics or history of the artist makes me feel gross. Just because Swift’s racism and manipulation of feminist attitudes seems more implicit doesn’t mean I shouldn’t treat my support of her work in the same way. If I’m holding myself to a certain standard where I stop giving attention to artists whose views I find troubling, then I need to do that beyond just when it’s convenient for me. It was a lot easier to phase Chris Brown out of my listening repertoire than it would be for Taylor Swift, but that’s not a good excuse. And even though my standards are self-imposed and somewhat arbitrary, and I know that one person won’t make a dent in her audience, they don’t really count for anything if I’m not applying them across the board. Plus, there are so many other women who can fulfill my catchy pop needs (see the playlist) who have lyrics that reflect female empowerment, who have lyrics that recognize that heterosexuality isn’t the only way, who are women of color or women in the LGBTQ+ community or who in other way represent voices that aren’t found as easily in the mainstream media.

 

So maybe it’s not just about getting Taylor Swift out of my library, but about paying attention to women whose views I believe in, who are creating music that aligns with the kind of feminism and women empowerment that I want to live.