Swift Backlash: Taylor Swift Vs. the NFL

Between now and the summer we are going to be showcasing the best of our original research by students in the School of Humanities at the University of Westminster. If you are a Humanities student at Westminster and would like to publish your research on our blog, please do get in touch! Hannah, the author of our third post, is a third year BA English Literature student. She spent last year studying Literature in America whilst on academic exchange program and is now back at Westminster for her final year. In her free time, she enjoys exploring London, reading and drinking matcha.

“I have no awareness of if I’m being shown too much and pissing off a few dads, Brads, and Chads […] Football is awesome, it turns out” – Taylor Swift, interview for TIME’s 2023 Person of the Year

Taylor Swift’s attendance of the NFL games of her boyfriend Travis Kelce, who plays for the Kansa City Chiefs, has provoked a huge and unjustifiably aggressive backlash against her, including Giants fans booing at a Swift commercial and TikTok users insisting that Swift is less well known than the America’s National Football League (Swift has 276M Instagram followers, while the NFL has 28.7M). At first sight, it seems strange that her attendance of a major sporting event, which has always promoted the presence of celebrities, should prove to be so contentious. When viewed through the perspective of the Second Wave feminism of the mid-twentieth century, however, it is possible to see how the presence of an unmarried, childless, financially independent, publicly outspoken, and globally successful woman within this traditional male sphere is felt as a threat to the established patriarchal national order, exposing a broader backlash against the progressive gains of the last century, and confirming how “social attitudes towards women exist as the overt expression of centuries of female oppression” (Hildebrand et al., 1971).

Whilst women’s rights today have moved on from those of Victorian women, expectations of women are still partially informed by an ideal of domesticity inherited from the traditional family structure, most notably the heteronormative structure of ‘the nuclear family,’ where a husband is the patriarch and breadwinner, married to a stay-at-home mother who takes on the domestic role of cooking, cleaning and looking after their children and are discouraged from having career or personal aspirations outside the home. In the mid-twentieth century, Second Wave Feminism “engaged millions of constituents in a dialogue about heretofore unconventional topics, including the relationship between the nuclear family and the industrial economy, …the politics of sexuality, and the meaning of gender” (Zeitz 2008, p.676). The idealization of “The Happy Housewife Heroine” (Friedan 1963, p.1) in magazines, fiction and politics was challenged by feminists such as Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique: “It is more than a strange paradox that as all professions are finally open to women in America, “career woman” has become a dirty word […] Why, with the removal of all the legal, political, economic, and educational barriers that once kept women from being man’s equal, a person in her own right, an individual free to develop her own potential, should she accept this new image which insists she is not a person but a “woman”” (Friedan 1963, p.17).

As Swift is portrayed by the media as a somewhat rebellious woman who has not settled down with a husband and a family at 34 years old, she is continually demonised by society because her existence goes against the status quo by rejecting the traditional female spheres, which can accommodate WAGS (wives and girlfriends) so long as their status doesn’t threaten that of their male partner. If the Chiefs suddenly started to lose there is no doubt that the commentary would develop into placing blame on Swift’s attendance as a ‘distraction’. This is demonstrated with the commentary of comedian Jo Koy at the recent Golden Globes where he joked: “The big difference between the Golden Globes and the NFL? At the Golden Globes, we have fewer camera shots of Taylor Swift”. Even in an environment where the singer-songwriter is surrounded by peers in the arts industry, away from the realm of football, her presence is still ridiculed. This reaction ultimately demonstrates how sexism is still deeply rooted within day-to-day life, going so unnoticed that people are questioning their actions towards one individual who is simply gaining attention for entering the traditionally male sporting environment.

Bibliography

Fava, S.F. and Friedan, B. (1963). The Feminine Mystique. American Sociological Review, [online] 28(6), p.1053.

Hildebrand, C., Lafferty, J., Murray, G., Williams, M., Zilber, B., O’Donnell, E., Salk, H.R., Shelley, M. and Hayward, S. (1971). The Second Wave: Second Wave, The. JSTOR, [online] 1(1)

Zeitz, J. (2008). Rejecting the Center: Radical Grassroots Politics in the 1970s — Second-Wave Feminism as a Case Study. Journal of Contemporary History, [online] 43(4), pp.673–688.