Kylie Chen (’24) and Kiana Allard (’24) | March 1, 2024
Over the past year, Taylor Swift has experienced a meteoric rise in fame, performing over one hundred shows and earning over one billion dollars in the past year as part of her global Eras Tour. Her latest album Midnights also made history, earning her a fourth Album of the Year Grammy award and her thirteenth Grammy overall.
However, her success has not come without criticism, and while she has undoubtedly faced unfair, and frankly silly, controversies, some of the more serious criticisms leveled against her have solid backing—one of the biggest ones being her carbon emissions. The number one celebrity carbon dioxide polluter of 2022, Swift spent the past year getting as thorough use of her own luxury airline as possible. Despite private jets producing at least ten times more carbon emissions than commercial flights, Swift decided to put her romance first, emitting more than 200,000 pounds of carbon dioxide with her flight from Tokyo to the Super Bowl in Las Vegas alone. And while the pop star announced that she bought double the amount of carbon offsets needed to compensate for her excessive traveling, many climate scientists agree that offsets do not actually reduce the amount of emissions entering the atmosphere—they are more of a monetary incentive to fund environmental programs that often do not see that money.
Perhaps more concerning is how Swift has become a symbol of a particular brand of feminism: white feminism, commonly referred to as liberal or corporate feminism. White feminism is a type of feminism that focuses on the plight of thin, white, cisgender, able-bodied, middle-class women. As a result, it assumes that all women experience misogyny in the same way and tends to focus on empowering women through capitalist means (think “girlboss feminism”), ultimately excluding other women by ignoring the inherent connection between sexism and other forms of oppression that are perpetuated by a capitalist society. White feminism gives the women who fit into its narrow category permission to, under the guise of liberation, become complacent while living within a system that continues to oppress all women.
Of course, celebrities like Swift are not obligated to speak out about oppression, but in her documentary, Taylor Swift: Miss Americana, Swift portrayed herself as a political activist and discussed her goals of amplifying marginalized voices. Since her introduction to the political world, however, she has not used her advocacy to demonstrate her commitment to those goals in a meaningful way, avoiding issues that are not trendy or on-brand, despite the immense amount of change she could create with her activism through the collective power of her devoted fanbase.
And yes, Swift has songs that seem to empower women, but take a closer look at her lyrics: “What’s it like to brag about / Raking in dollars / And getting [b*tch*s] and models… If I was out flashing my dollars / I’d be a [b*tch], not a baller.” Her song, “The Man,” clearly shows that her attempt at activism through songwriting has an extremely narrow focus on elements related to her own privileged and unique life—specifically, she chooses to criticize the fact that men can flaunt their dating lives and wealth, but it is not socially acceptable for her to do so. Instead of trying to dismantle the system that pushes all women down by encouraging such—for lack of better words—jerk behavior by men, she bemoans the fact that she cannot participate in this manifestation of hustle culture (a central part of both the patriarchy and capitalism) in the same way rich white men can because she is a rich white woman.
Additionally, Swift has a reputation for weaponizing feminism for her own benefit. Time and time again, she has attacked jokes and criticisms of her for targeting her gender and accused many of the women who criticized her of “girl-on-girl crime.” Again, she echoes the white feminist sentiment that any critique of a woman is sexist—and she passes that idea down to her fan base, which often steps in to defend her “in the name of feminism.”
As a result, Swift’s brand of feminism comes off as performative, disingenuous, and self-serving.
Despite our condemnation of Swift’s actions, we want to emphasize that the root problem here is the misleading nature of white feminism and how it upholds the very systems it claims to fight against. Taylor Swift is not necessarily the reason white feminism is becoming more and more mainstream, but her position and her loyal defenders point to a much larger underlying problem.
It is also equally important to understand the role that the media plays in amplifying white feminism over important intersectional and grassroots feminist movements. The harsh reality is that TikTok trends, awards season drama, and Taylor Swift are much more appealing to consumers looking for entertainment. As a result, those are the “feminist” news stories that get coverage. The media has also taken part in upholding white feminism by using criticism against Taylor Swift (and white feminism in general) to label the modern intersectional feminist movement as exclusive.
It is discouraging to see the progress the intersectional feminist movement made slowly be lost, but we can work to push back against the regression by acknowledging our positions of privilege and being mindful of how our words and actions perpetuate oppression. It is unrealistic to expect celebrities to have the best, most nuanced takes on feminism and other social justice issues, but if Swift is truly the feminist she says she is, she must acknowledge her own position of privilege and use her platform to create real change.