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Our post-civil-rights society is rapidly sliding backwards. For an artist to make a claim to any progressive ideology, they require some intersectional legs. Taylor Swift’s newest album, The Life of a Showgirl, disappoints by proudly touting an intentionally ignorant perspective of feminism-as-hero-worship. It is no longer enough for young women to see Swift’s success and imagine it for themselves. While that access is unattainable for most people, the artists who position themselves as thoughtful contributors to public consciousness through their art must be held accountable to their positionality.

After the release of Midnights (2022), Alex Petridis wrote an excellent article for The Guardian, where he said of the album, “There’s an appealing confidence about this approach, a sense that Swift no longer feels she has to compete on the same terms as her peers.” The Life of a Showgirl dismantles this approach. At the top of the show business world, it feels like Taylor is punching down and rewriting feminism away from a critical lens into a cheap personal narrative.