Mariana Martinez | Taylor Swift and the white feminist department

Look, I’m a Swiftie. “I Knew You Were Trouble” is probably one of my favorite songs ever. But lately, I have noticed a concerning tendency in the fan base to defend and praise Taylor Swift’s every move. On X (formerly known as Twitter), it’s easy to find a pile of tweets along the lines of “Taylor can do whatever she wants, she’s Taylor Swift!” I don’t think people realize how many problematic actions we’ve let slide because of this cultish loyalty.

Let’s start with her hot new album, "The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology." Swift broke records before even releasing the album: she hit the most pre-saved album in Spotify, and on Apr. 19, Swift broke Spotify's record for most album streams in a day. This could mean one of two things: Either Swift is truly an amazing musician, or Swifties are mindlessly consuming her music pushed by the internalized idea that she is the embodiment of the music industry. I’m going to go with the latter.

Swift's music, though well-written, is very formulaic, and her songs tend to sound the same: the “Peter” piano intro sounded just like “New Years Day,” and “The Prophecy” feels very similar to “seven.” My first thought listening to the song “The Tortured Poets Department” was “wow, this sounds just like 'Suburban Legends.'” And though I am a diehard "evermore" and "folklore" fan, I am aware of how similar the soft melodies of these songs are — even I get confused between songs! Additionally, her themes are quite plain: She can’t stop writing about breakups and love.

Swift alluded to people’s annoyance with her uniform music themes in a very “feminist” speech she gave when accepting the Woman of the Decade Award, stating how it was part of the machinery of the sexist music industry. In other interviews, Swift points out that male artists are never criticized for writing about love and how criticizing her for that is “a very sexist angle.”

I’m not going to deny it. Criticizing her for writing solely about her ex-boyfriends is a sexist angle. However, my problem comes when the cusp of Swift's “feminist” activism is being able to write about her exes. That is too close to white feminism, a problematic and all-too-common ideology.

White feminism focuses on the idea that empowerment is achieved through capitalist means. The problem is that it leaves many other identities behind and ignores the fact that different women all over the world experience misogyny in different ways. However, the white feminist narrative insists that she is battling misogyny by going on the first-ever billion dollar tour, making history. While yes, it is nice to see a woman succeeding in a sexist industry, it is also crucial to acknowledge the other fights women are leading: women affected by conflict and wars, women unable to go to school, women without reproductive rights — Swift’s massive tour and “aesthetic feminism” is not going to fix that.

Now, I am not asking Swift to provide healthcare and reproductive rights to women worldwide. But maybe what she could do is stop reducing the female experience to love. That is my problem with her writing: She makes it seem as though falling in love is the pinnacle of a woman’s life, and falling out of it is, well, the end. Yes, love is a part of a woman’s life, but it is not the only problem she has, and most of the time it is not even the biggest of her problems.

We all knew "The Tortured Poets Department" was about Joe Alwyn and Matty Healy. Yet, I found the concept of “tortured poet” very problematic. At first, I was very excited: I thought the album was going to dwell on existential angst and maybe even allude to the great 19th-century poète maudit. I hoped too much. It was (just) another breakup album. This is problematic for several reasons. The album reduces poets to people who write about love; it steals poetry’s inherent strength to address some of the darkest parts of human experience. Instead, Swift dialed it down to love, and I am afraid that now this stereotypical image of the poet as a tortured lover has come to stick around, with a recent Rolling Stone article casting Swift as a poet.

The concept of “tortured poet” was clear and irresponsible in its approach to mental health. Lyrics like “I’m so depressed I act like it’s my birthday” or “you wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me” and the clear depictions of a psych ward and an electrical chair in the “Fortnight” video are explicit allusions to depression. Yet, these depictions portray mental illness mainly as “aesthetic madness” and like a fluke that will pass. All in all, her music portrays a very stereotypical view of mental health.

"The Tortured Poets Department" seems to blur the line between mental illness and breakup sadness: saying this out loud sounds foolish. How can mental illness be confused with breakup sadness? Well, right after the “Fortnight” video teaser was released, I logged into X and found a bunch of tweets stating that the album was for the “insane girlies.” Another expression in Spanish, “las del psiquiatrico” — a term for the patients in a mental health institution — has been used several times to describe the new aesthetic that many girls want to adopt after the album has been put out. Research states that the rise of social media, specifically X, has allowed mental illness to become cute and even desirable, distorting "the true nature of mental illness.”

It seems irresponsible of Swift to release something that would allow both the stigmatization and romanticization of mental illness. While it is true that mental health should be talked about, popularizing it in this way is highly dangerous. Research states that mainstream popularization of mental illness causes affected individuals to feel discouraged from speaking up. Indeed, trying to explain to someone that you are actually struggling with depression while they have been persuaded by Swift to think it’s a feminist aesthetic can’t be nice. Swift seems to carelessly throw around these depictions, oblivious to the fact that they can be very real and triggering for some.

I love Taylor Swift, I promise. But sometimes I do wish us Swifties took the time to critically evaluate her actions. It’s time we demand better of the person who seems to be the face of “the music industry.”

MARIANA MARTINEZ is a College first year studying English and classics from Bogotá, Colombia. Her email is marmari@sas.upenn.edu.