In an Op-Ed appearing in The Sep 20 issue of USAToday, contributor Haley Victory Smith writes, as Swift sees it, a man might be seen as “strategic” for doing something, while a woman is seen as “calculating” for the same thing. In the song she sings, “I’m so sick of running as fast as I can, wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man.”
Smith notes this isn’t the first time Swift has addressed this issue. Two of the songs from her album “1989” — “Shake It Off” and “Blank Space” — played on this very theme.
In “The Man,” Swift lists several ways the public's perception of her would be different if only she were male:
- "They’d say I hustled, put in the work,” she sings with indignance. But in a September 2017 article for Forbes, Joe Harpaz wrote Swift deserved to be “on the list of modern-day disruptive business geniuses.”
- "What I was wearing, if I was rude, could all be separated from my good ideas and power moves.” In an article last month for Vogue, Michelle Ruiz applauded Swift’s decision to defy Big Machine Records and rerecord her old songs, calling it “the ultimate power move.”
- "I’d be a fearless leader.” In 2015, Swift ended up No. 6 on Fortune’s list of the world’s greatest leaders.
She asks, "What’s to be gained from positioning oneself as a victim and dwelling in the muck of one’s outrageous fortune?
"This type of feminism isn’t empowerment. Grasping at a fake victimhood and complaining about it to the world is not empowerment.
"But in far too many places across the globe, women are victims of honor killings, female genital mutilation, acid attacks and child marriage. In the face of all that, megamillionaire and pop sensation Taylor Swift’s sweeping anger over “perception issues” just seems silly."
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