Comment: If you’ve read the news lately, you might have heard: Taylor Swift is getting married. Coverage of the impending wedding is updated daily, coming not just from gossip sites but from mainstream journalists, too. From wedding venues to plus-ones to inviting exes to The Dress, the topics of speculation seem endless.
It’s not limited to CNN, New York Times, and Fox News, either. Mainstream media from India to Aotearoa is covering this regularly, including the New Zealand Herald and Stuff. Should we care about where Taylor Swift’s wedding will take place, what her “bridal manicure” will be, or whether Blake Lively got an invite? Absolutely not. And I say that as a long-time fan. Should we care that serious media outlets think this is important or in any way newsworthy, and have been covering it for 10 months? Yes, we should.
It’s the latest example of coverage of Taylor Swift revealing the rivers of regressive sexism flowing through our wider cultural landscapes. The spotlight on The Wedding takes the conversation from Swift’s impact on the world as an artist and worker, to her pending role as a wife and potential mother. This distorts the positive impacts of Swift’s own artistic body of work for her many female fans and her public quest to keep creative control of her work – her songs, videos, and brand. Focusing on the wedding also plays into current far-right tradwife ideology, which links femininity with inferiority, motherhood, and unpaid domestic labour.
Swift has long been linked to femininity, but over two decades in the industry she has connected that femininity more and more to her status as a working woman, which for her is inseparable from being an artist.
I recently published the first comprehensive study of how Swift has used songwriting and music videos to present gender, sexuality, sexism, and misogyny over the last 20 years. I found that since 2014, contrary to the common claim that Swift has rarely included political material in her songs, Swift increasingly used her songwriting, music videos and documentaries to critique examples of sexism, especially in the workplace.
Since her debut Swift has consistently foregrounded images of femaleness and femininity that are positive or neutral, but which have triggered some women’s internalised sexism. Throughout her discography, she has written five songs that include a slur against women, but the vast majority of her discography (250+ songs) presents women as intelligent, whole people: complex, nuanced, capable of doing harm as well as good, agents, creators, and communicators.
Although Swift has been critiqued for not being a feminist, research has shown that her representations of womanhood have had powerful positive impacts on her female fans. Lizzy Pope and Kelsey Rose, health researchers at the University of Vermont, examined fan responses to Swift’s two brief references to her own experiences being a woman in an industry that encouraged her disordered eating. They found that Swift sharing her situation and critique of sexist body standards positively impacted tens of thousands of fans with eating disorders.
Her songs about facing sexist double standards at work have also resonated widely. While Swift is often criticised in the Global North for centring her experience as a white woman, several academic studies of Swift’s 2019 song The Man conducted in Asia, see it as relevant for women fighting inequality at work around the globe. Indeed, one of Swift’s defining features as a woman in the public sphere has been her commitment to her career, which she articulates consistently in songs, music videos, interviews, documentaries, and social media posts.
For Swift, femininity and a successful career are not mutually exclusive. The Eras Tour that ran from the beginning of 2023 to the end of 2024 was built on images of girlhood. It raised enough money for Swift to buy back the masters of her first six albums, taking total control of her artistic output since 2006.
Her body of work shows so-called feminine traits, like expressing emotions, being vulnerable, and loving glitter, sequins, and makeup, sitting side-by-side with intelligence, business acumen, artistry, and control of a multi-billion-dollar business. Swift’s laser-like focus on controlling her artistic output and her commercial ventures – her career – make the sheer weight of the obsession with her impending wedding day particularly ironic.
I suspect that much of the mainstream coverage about it reflects commercial motivations (Swift means clicks!) rather than a conscious goal to reduce a working woman to her wedding. However, the massive volume of the pre-wedding articles unfortunately plays into the hands of those who do consciously think women are made to be wives and mothers.
I’m talking about tradwife culture, a growing, retrograde movement from the US popularised on YouTube and social media. Tradwives claim to submit to their husbands and serve as homemakers (and mothers) while their husbands have paid employment. While the women are baking in the kitchen, the movement bakes in female dependency on male earners, making the women and children involved especially vulnerable to abuse.
The model depends on the men and women involved believing in women’s essential difference from and their inferiority to men, leading women to be more “suitable” for unpaid, domestic labour. In her book Pink-Pilled: Women and the Far Right, the London-based bi activist, journalist and writer Lois Shearing showed how the tradwife movement intersects with white supremacy and specific strains of misogynist Christianity.
A recent peer-reviewed study led by University of Auckland alumna and New School (New York City) Associate Professor of Psychology Pani Farvid highlights how tradwife influencers and their husbands evangelically spread their sexist, ethno-nationalist messages through social media platforms. They publicly perform their gendered commitment to domestic life. But what does this have to do with Swift?
Shortly after Swift got engaged in August 2025, she released her new album, The Life of a Showgirl, which features a song that romanticises coupled, suburban bliss (“Wi$hlist”). The alt-right promptly “claimed” Swift as a tradwife, but feminist bloggers agreed. The claims – catalogued here – included that she would leave her job after marrying Kelce.
Commentators in conservative and feminist outlets treated Swift’s engagement as a sign she was becoming a hard-right conservative about gender roles. My study showed that Showgirl does include two songs that use the term “bitch” (and I also find that problematic), but that otherwise the album continues Swift’s existing practice of critiquing sexism and presenting complex female characters. The very theme of the Showgirl means that Swift publicly portrays herself as a working girl – the antithesis of a tradwife. The “Taylor-tradwife” theory was debunked by Swift herself who called out how “offensive” it was to assume a woman would leave her job when she got married.
However, in the months since, mainstream outlets have still implicitly presented getting married as the pinnacle of this working woman’s life through their continual coverage. The subliminal message is that even in the middle of her most productive artistic period, highest album sales, and industry recognition for two decades of songwriting, what matters most about Swift is that she has “finally” found a man to marry.
So yes, we should care about how the media has approached Taylor Swift’s wedding. Female artists deserve better than the world obsessing about them being a bride. Female readers deserve actual news.
This article reflects the opinion of the author and not necessarily the views of Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland.
