In elementary school it was cool to hate pink. Now it’s even cooler to hate feminine pop stars. In the halls, it’s not rare to hear pretentiousness exude in a boy’s voice who feels superior to an Olivia Rodrigo fan because his favorite Nirvana song isn’t mainstream, and he’s never once heard a Taylor Swift song that wasn’t overplayed. Still, the hatred of these artists isn’t as male-dominated as people like to think. There are large sums of women who carry the same negative biases as many men.
According to Oxford University Press philosopher Kate Manne, sexism is the rules and expectations put in place to uphold a patriarchal system, a system built around the superiority of men. In contrast, misogyny was conceptualized as the “law enforcement branch” of sexism, or the actions taken to ensure that the” rules and expectations” dictated through sexism are being followed, hence the culture of shame surrounding interests popular amongst women. Women are not outrightly oppressing one another, but due to societal pressures and a need to succeed in a patriarchal system, it is easy for them to reinforce negative stereotypes surrounding femininity as a result.
When I hear a girl loudly declare her hatred for pop stars like Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, or Gracie Abrams to a group of guys, I’m reminded of fourth grade, when girls fought with one another about who hated the color pink the most, and who can keep up with the boys on the playground. From a young age, so many women have held the weight of misconceptions surrounding feminine words and topics, so much so that we’ve learned to adapt and hate these stereotypes. Senior, Gia Chaffins, recalls the “Not Like Other Girls” complex she developed as a child (which she has long outgrown) and how it stemmed from a feeling of inferiority to boys her age.
“Around the time I entered 3rd grade, I made it a point not to be seen as girly, so I was kind of like a tomboy. I was getting a little older, and despite previously refusing to wear anything that wasn’t pink and girly, I began to associate femininity with sexualization and weakness,” Chaffins said. “I wanted the same level of respect as my male peers and felt the only way of achieving that was to present myself the same way they did, which also meant passing judgment onto girls who preferred more feminine clothes and had ‘feminine’ interests.”
For Chaffins, this phase passed as she matured. For some, it never truly goes away; it simply adapts to fit their current age. This is why for some women, it is easy to find themselves looking down on others who wear a lot of makeup, dress “basic” (aka following fashion trends), or listen to girly music. According to Cultural Bridges to Justice, internalized misogyny leads to the doubt or mistrust of other women, so when teenage girls flock to a specific artist, it is easy for girls struggling with internalized misogyny to assume the artist is “unworthy” of said support and spread hate regarding the artist and their fans. Further, enjoying “masculine” interests is associated with “intelligence” and “strength” by societal norms, which is why some women value them over “feminine” interests. This does not mean it is ok for them to project this rejection of femininity onto others, by doing this they are redistributing the shame they feel towards femininity to other women and creating a cycle of hatred. Saying you are unlike “other women” due to your intelligence, interest in culture, and favorable traits, implies that most women are incapable of sharing those traits and that all other women are duplicates of one another- girly, pink, mindless, sexualized, and naive.
Girly music has also been labeled as “basic,” a word commonly used to put unique and invaluable women into a small box that describes nothing more than her style or a single interest that’s popular amongst other women. A label so many women fight tooth and nail to avoid because it feels discrediting of all the things aside from it that make her an individual. It is a stereotype that girly pop music is mindless alongside its listeners, which is a common theme amongst most things targeted towards girls. Once I overheard a relatively “girly” girl mention that she was often overlooked and her ideas, although effective, tended to be dismissed in her engineering class. She felt that this was primarily because she was the only girl in her group, which, in the minds of her group members, automatically put her beneath them intellectually. Women should be able to indulge in girly behavior and be women in male-dominated spaces without it discrediting their intelligence, as no evidence proves the two are associated with one another. For example, Taylor Swift, who seems to garner the most hate during these discussions, was the top artist for students with high GPAs (3.5-4.0 range) according to a College Rover study about college students’ study habits.
If we as women can’t stand up and learn to encourage, accept and understand one another despite our differences we will never achieve the societal equality we’ve craved for centuries. How can we expect men to see past biases and stereotypes if we ourselves can’t? The women who help perpetuate these harmful and discrediting stereotypes, like most, want to be valued for their entire multifaceted identity, not judged and condensed by the type of music they listen to. It’s time to remove ourselves from the playground, tie our pink shoelaces into bows and run towards a more tolerable future where women empower one another rather than pick each other apart, the first step could be accepting music tastes unlike our own.
