Growing up a girl, you don’t realize when you start looking at the women on your television screen more as guidelines rather than characters. You notice how they’re dressed, how they speak, how they are spoken to, how they react. You start seeing it in real life through an interview with your favorite character at the Kids Choice Awards, then red carpet events. You see negative posts about your favorite artists plastered over social media, news outlets, YouTube—erasing the woman you looked up to and replacing her with a villain, a crybaby, a drama queen. In one way or another, most girls experience a handful of these events growing up, but we don’t realize the impact the presentation of successful women in the media has on us.
At age 10, Taylor Swift was my idol. I adored her in every sense, her music, her presence—I wanted to be her. At age 13, I hated her. I stopped listening to her music, poked fun at those who worshiped her the way I had years prior, viewing her as a grown woman who could only write music about her many boyfriends. The Times had dubbed 2014 “The Year of Taylor Swift”, but by 2016, the general media had turned against her. Her new media-produced image was reflected in the shift of her fan base: the many young girls just like me, who had idolized her, suddenly wanted nothing to do with her. In 2016, The Vulture described this period of Taylor Swift's adoration to have “vanished”, clearly showing this sudden (but thorough) erasure of the love many had previously held for her. Many media outlets painted her as anti-feminist, shallow, and “fake”, pulling evidence from song lyrics written by a fifteen-year-old girl, “feuds” elicited by grown men, and media-trained answers to targeted questions from reporters. We were conditioned to hate her through news stations and teen magazine articles. I held this hate until 2020, as a sophomore in high school, and I have my younger sister to thank for it; one of the—still many—“Swifties” who had not abandoned ship. I share this story to encapsulate the fact that, even as a self-identifying feminist for as long as I can remember, I was successfully brainwashed into hating Taylor Swift simply because, at the end of the day, she was a woman, she was successful, she was not sorry and would not stop.
I recognized my passion for this unfortunate occurrence around the same time. Sitting through my first thorough listen of the “Lover” album, I came across the song “The Man”. To this day, the impact this song has on me is immeasurable. At age sixteen, I sat in the car with my mother and sister in tears after listening to an eye-opening pop song; every reason I had found to hate Taylor Swift was finally disassembled after three minutes and ten seconds. Taylor Swift’s “The Man’ captures the exact dilemma presented to successful women in the media: “I'm so sick of running as fast as I can, wondering if I'd get there quicker if I was a man, and I'm so sick of them coming at me again, 'cause if I was a man, then I'd be the man.” Regardless of how many awards a woman wins or records she breaks, she needs to do double the work, have double the impact, to even stand a chance of being placed on the pedestal beside her male counterparts.
This theme is carried across into the realm of the most classic Hollywood tradition: the red carpet. Events where celebrities of the highest caliber are mixed with up-and-comers, all dressed to the nines, and there to discuss their look and their work. While women and men working in entertainment face similar challenges in the sense of scheduling and work-life balance, the differing questions asked to male and female celebrities at these events paints a different narrative. Jennifer Garner presented this issue in her acceptance speech at ELLE’s 2014 Women in Hollywood event, where she described how her and her husband were on the same red carpet, but the questions asked to them were drastically different. She explains that, while she received questions about how she managed her work life and her family, he received no questions of the sort. Not only had he not heard these questions on that particular night, he never had, not once. Many other female celebrities have had similar experiences, and ELLE recognizes that they are also guilty of subjecting celebrities to different questions based on their gender. This led to ELLE’s initiative to flip the script; they decided they would be targeting work-family balance, beauty routine, and diet questions towards the men present on the next red carpet event—not the women. Many men responded to these questions in a joking manner, not taking them seriously, and the ones that did answer honestly shared that they felt no pressure to look a certain way or put a lot of time and effort into their appearance for these events. While this alone shows a drastic difference between the societal pressure on men and women to appear a certain way, it is also important to address the fact that a woman would not be seen as funny for responding to questions this way. A woman would be seen as rude, ungrateful, and condescending.
Taylor Swift says it best in her interview with CBS, “There's a different vocabulary for men and women in the music industry…A man does something? 'Confident and bold.' A woman does it the same way, and she's 'smug.' A man 'stands up for himself,' [whereas] a woman 'throws a temper tantrum” (2). While working in the same entertainment industry, the spotlight shed on men and women are inherently different. This is portrayed in every aspect of the media and is a trend that can be found in every professional setting a woman enters. A woman’s success can be diminished with one article, her strategy painted as manipulation, her talent tied to the man she’s dating at the time. What society is asking of us is not the same. This is made clear to us at a young age, before we can even recognize the disparity we are signed up for at birth. I was lucky enough to be surrounded by strong women, and raised by a stronger one, who saw this discrepancy, which allowed me to see it too. As women, we should not have to accept this societal pattern on our television screens, or in our favorite magazines, and we definitely should not have to face it ourselves on a day-to-day basis.
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