When it comes to strong women, most people, even other women, will always try to take a woman down with details irrelevant to her career or talents. This is no different for VP nominee Kamala Harris, and award winning pop star Taylor Swift. The following article discusses how women are forced to prove themselves, time and time again, no matter how worthy they are of their accolades.

Listen to my interview about the inspiration for the article with Katrina Froelich, host of The Flique podcast.

No One Likes A Mad Woman, Or Her Political Stance

My Bachelor’s degree says I am a student of political science, while my Spotify algorithms and iTunes purchase history would claim I am an astute scholar of Taylor Swift.

I can spin Taylor Swift songs to be about a specific person in my life better than Fox can reframe information to make Trump look good. Until recent years, Swift and politics would’ve never been mentioned in the same sentence. But now that she’s given us more than enough to work with over the past few years -- especially during quarantine and leading up to this week’s election, I find myself bored at home in an intersection of the two things I’ve studied most closely in my life.

image+(2).png — Original article artwork created by Flique Editorial

“Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince”, track seven on Swift’s 2019 album, Lover, is an epic tale of lost American glory with undeniable political undercurrents. The anthem is like a cry for help from a failing American system, veiled in a high school metaphor, which feels like a darker, more apocalyptic version of the infamous “You Belong With Me” music video -- cheerleader chants and all. The Miss Americana era was a clear split from the Fearless singer’s past life as a teen entertainer who begrudgingly stayed out of politics for the sake of her career and already polarizing reputation.

Even if you are new on the Swift Scene, you probably know Netflix released her documentary, Miss Americana, in 2019. The doc follows some of Taylor’s early days in the music industry, as well as the pivot towards the reclusive-cat-mom-with-outspoken-political-opinions period of her career. As showcased in the film, she finally decided to ditch her apolitical-cheerleader-on-the-sidelines stance and went poms deep into a more personal campaign against Republican Representative Marsha Blackburn, who ran for U.S. Senate in Tennessee and was then elected in 2018.

Taylor countered the current Senator’s campaign largely because Blackburn, or “Trump in a wig,” according to Swift, is far from aligned with Swift’s values of social equality for women and the LGBTQIA+ community. She instead publicly endorsed Democratic candidate Phil Bredesen and leveraged her social media in October of 2018 to encourage voter registration. According to Kamari Guthrie, Director of Communications for Vote.org, the organization’s website saw their second busiest day of the year in terms of site traffic, and over 65,000 people registered to vote within a day of Swift’s social media post.

Preceding this age of a politically opinionated Swift, her career had been on an uncharted upward trajectory comparable to that of the housing market pre-2007. Then one man caused her to crash -- if only for a moment. Insisting he was going to “let her finish” (which women know better than to believe), Kanye West jumped onstage at the 2009 VMAs and literally stole the mic out of the hands of the newly minted Best Female Video award-winner.

Mike Pence, on the other hand, showed us at this October’s Vice Presidential Debate that he doesn’t come from the camp of letting a woman finish -- which tells me he didn’t hear a word of Senator Kamala Harris’s savage roast of ACB - or, her opening statement at Amy Coney Barrett’s Confirmation Hearing. Conveniently, while being interviewed from his October 12th rally in Columbus, Ohio, Pence actually told Fox News reporter and former White House Press Secretary, Dana Perino, that he didn’t know how Supreme Court Nominee Amy Coney-Barrett would vote on certain issues. And if you were at all wondering, he constantly interrupted Perino throughout the interview.

There's a couple problems that I have here. A) Shouldn’t you act like you have some clue about her policy stances since you co-led the push for this nomination societal regression to 1972 (pre-Roe)? And B) You do know where she stands, Mike - she’s a self-proclaimed originalist with seven kids. Up until she was confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice, I was holding out hope for some rift between the Executive Branch and the Supreme Court solely because I saw a meme claiming Pence once ratted out his fraternity brothers for hosting a kegger. I mean, are he and Justice Brett Kavanaugh even in the same party? Would Brett even want to invite Mike to his parties? What is going on over there??

I have to wonder how a lemming like Pence ends up next in line to run the world’s most powerful democracy. How does a man who uses hairspray to trap his next meal end up with the audacity to repeatedly cut off Senator Harris so many times, Betches has to immediately release a mug about it?

A sad, broken, white male-dominated system of gender hierarchy, that’s how. The same crooked social fabric that made Taylor Swift feel the need to write a global banger in the tune of self-mockery just to take back her own power.

For a long time, people talked about Taylor everywhere, all the time, but almost always for the wrong reasons. If you were one of the real fans, you probably tried to avoid the negative talk about her that didn’t have a thing to do with her musical genius she was famous for in the first place.

Swift had long been labeled a serial dater, a stereotypical boy-obsessed girl who stays up all night writing songs about her latest crush or probably some weird stuff like painting red lipstick on her voodoo dolls. So, she wrote “Blank Space'' to publicly embrace the backlash she received for dating a bunch of other attractive, famous people (as is par for the industry, hi Leo), instead of falling victim to it like the media wanted.

When it comes to strong women, most people, even other women, will always try to take a woman down with details irrelevant to her career or talents. Think Adele's dramatic weight loss, Hilary’s pantsuits, Pelosi’s age, Kamala’s debate faces, AOC and The Squad’s heritage -- just a few examples picked from generations of countless others.

In songs both predating and following Swift’s satirical address of her own reputation, she has written dozens of masterpieces about concealing feelings for the sake of maintaining a cool, sane facade to men and avoid scaring them off. This frustrating theme of gender standards and stereotypes, the long game women have to play to eventually get their way, unfortunately never really disappears. Swift constantly makes lyrical references to gender imbalances that run throughout our relationships and careers like an invisible string.

In a recent feud with her long time producer and friend, Scooter Braun, Taylor’s voice and hard-earned success was again threatened after Braun swindled her out of the ownership rights to her own work, essentially trying to steal her voice. But this day in age, she refuses to stay quiet. Her frustration with wide discrepancies between how women and men are expected to behave, both in business and in pleasure, came to a head in another song on Lover, entitled “The Man”. Accompanied by Swift’s self-directed music video, the song serves as a commentary on the double-standards assigned to women on a daily basis who have to sprint just to keep up, never being fully able to get ahead of their male counterparts.

All this is to say, Veep hopeful Kamala Harris is kind of like the Taylor Swift of politics right now. A lot of people gaslight her for very subjective reasons unrelated to her political career, which get as ridiculous as She made too many faces during the VP debate (not too unlike how Taylor gets backlash for her “surprised to win another award” face).

Or, people dislike her because she confidently, and without seeking male approval, speaks her mind and articulates her vision for our country’s future. Election outcome aside, it’s an incredible feat in itself that a woman, and a woman of her cultural background, has climbed high enough in American politics to be able to share these visions with her contemporaries and the public at large. Unlike some others at her stature, she’s at the top because she actually knows from decades of first-hand political experience what she’s talking about.

Women know better than anyone that it’s not easy to please everyone, but we damn well try. A toxic trait, for sure. But we do so because it’s been instilled in us that we have to work twice as hard for any audience attention and support at all than men, who can sit back and receive blind support without having put forth nearly as many (if any) unifying or appeasing efforts.

Despite extreme offenses on the other side of the aisle, Senator Harris is perceived as disingenuous for merely trying to appeal to a broader audience for the public benefit of uniting a country under sane leadership, something we are literally having to beg for.

On the one hand, Harris has been criticized for making plays to appeal to a variety of groups - men, women, minorities, leftists, centrists, and finally, voters who are begrudgingly choosing Harris and her running mate over what they consider the greater of two evils, the incumbent president.

On the other hand, if she were instead targeting too narrow of a demographic, like minority women (a group she identifies with), she would be attacked for that too. It’s set up to be a lose-lose. Throughout her political career, if she had focused more on playing up the fact that she was a woman of mixed heritage instead of just playing along with the end game in mind, she would probably have never made it this far. America is clearly still not ready for it.

Comparably, Swift had to play into the media’s boy-crazed, immature persona of her, because if she tried to hide the crazy they said was inevitably there, she’d get criticized for that too. Another lose-lose. Her poppy radio singles that try to bridge gaps in her demographics get raked over the coals by the same trolling critics who blatantly overlook the sheer genius of her songwriting talents us Swifties know all too well.

As common as assaults on character, background, and ideologies are in the public sphere, like politics and entertainment, it does not take situations of grand scale or positions of power for these twisted patriarchal biases to come crashing down people of non-cisgender male identities. For the rest of us, even seemingly routine or mundane situations can often feel like they’re set up for us to lose. And yet, we’re more determined than ever to win. Even if for now it has to be from the comfort of our own home.

I have a lot of faith in female masterminds like Taylor and Kamala, experts in their field who know what plays in radio and politics. Watching women with a firm grasp on their power and abilities resiliently walk through the hellfire that is patriarchal society is awe-inspiring.

While we’ve made big strides, and our wildest dreams of putting women in power in America finally seem like a tangible reality, our society is unfortunately not yet to a point where we can always outwardly acknowledge female power. Sometimes we just have to sit on it like we’re hatching one of Taylor’s famous Easter eggs.

We can all take a page from watching these two powerhouses take on excessively spray tanned reality stars (lookin at you, Kimmy). And, at the very least, we can take comfort in knowing neither of them voted for Kanye.