By Lauren Leese ’23 and Shloka Gidwani ’22
On July 24, 2020, Taylor Swift unexpectedly released her eighth studio album, “Folklore.” As Taylor Swift fans, we were beside ourselves with excitement that one of our favorite artists had blessed us with a beautiful quarantine album. However, “Folklore” is the latest installment in the career of a woman who wants to be a voice for change, but whose privilege causes her to center herself in situations where she should leave a blank space for the voices of marginalized people.
Undoubtedly, Swift has made valuable contributions in the fight for gender equity, vocally branding herself as a feminist on- and offstage. She risked her career to speak out about LGBTQ+ rights, as documented in her 2019 film “Miss Americana.”
Swift’s attempts to extend her activism into her music have been more mixed in terms of success. Her 2019 album, “Lover,” is her first work to contain songs with an explicitly activist bend. This is where Swift’s range as a privileged white woman starts to show its cracks.
In the fourth single on “Lover,” “The Man,” Swift sings about how if she was a man, she would be respected for the things people attack her for. Double standards in the media are still a problem, but the message of “The Man” feels oversimplified when it comes from one of the most privileged white women in the world. The accompanying music video shows Swift dressed as a man, performing an exaggerated gender presentation. Among other things, she ogles a bunch of bikini-clad women and pees on a subway wall, which feels so over-the-top it’s almost meaningless. When sexism in the U.S. often presents itself in insidious microaggressions, a video of a single successful man being a jerk becomes almost a mockery of what modern-day feminism is trying to achieve. Furthermore, Swift’s message with this video completely ignores the intersection of gender with class, race and sexuality.
The most controversial song on “Lover” suffers from the same oversimplified presentation of an important social issue. “You Need to Calm Down,” a song which includes the reductionist lyric, “Shade never made anybody less gay,” went from questionable to problematic thanks to its music video. The video portrays Swift and several of her LGBTQ+ friends lounging around while a crowd of Westboro Baptist Church-esque anti-gay protesters scream at them. Some members of the LGBTQ+ community at Mount Holyoke found that this piece presented the LGBTQ+ movement in an oversimplified light.
“My issue with the video was that it felt very tokenizing,” Isabel McIntyre ’22 said. “It also bothered me how she likened homophobia to her feud with Katy Perry. It felt like it trivialized the issue.”
“The music video looks like a commercial for a collection of tacky pride clothing at Target,” Sara Bartol ’22 said. “All it did was make some surface-level points like, ‘you should not be mean to gay people,’ and feature some of the LGBTQ+ celebrities that straight people are already familiar and mostly comfortable with.”
It must be noted that it’s not always easy to critique seemingly allo, cisgender, heterosexual artists’ explorations of LGBTQ+ issues. On Aug. 31, Becky Albertalli, bestselling author of the popular gay young adult romance “Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda,” came out as bisexual in a Medium post. She wrote that online bullying accusing her of being a “straight woman writing s----- queer books for the straights” had pressured her into revealing her sexuality before she was ready. Assuming Swift’s sexuality to be straight pushes a harmful heteronormative agenda, so critiques should not simply be that Swift is a straight woman singing about LGBTQ+ rights. However, regardless of the artist’s identity, it’s important to ensure the art itself is not misrepresenting an issue or perpetuating stereotypes about marginalized groups.
Even in “Folklore,” which is a relatively apolitical album, we see glimpses of Swift trying to critique social issues that she isn’t really affected by. Most notably, in the song "The Last Great American Dynasty," Swift compares herself to “middle-class divorcee” Rebekah West Harkness, who was hated by her community for being a less-privileged woman who married rich in the 1950s. Swift says that both she and Rebekah “had a marvelous time ruining everything,” despite the fact that Swift is a wealthy white woman in the 21st century, making her one of the most beloved demographics in the modern day.
Swift has contributed a lot of good to the world, both in terms of her political activism and her philanthropic efforts. However, in many cases, her privilege means that she is unable to explore the nuances of a social issue. We would very much like Swift to exclude herself from a narrative that belongs to marginalized people and instead use her platform to boost the voices of those who need to be heard.