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In this reported op-ed, writer Abby Monteil explores a shift in the artistry of Taylor Swift, catalyzed by her polarizing 12th studio album The Life of a Showgirl, and speaks with Swifties who are grappling with their disillusionment with their favorite pop star, largely due to Swift’s problematic lyric choices and musical depictions of femininity on the new album.
Taylor Swift is acutely aware of the fact that she’s been doing this long enough that many fans who first saw her on tour as tweens are now passing on their Swiftie fandom to the next generation. During the prologue of The Life of a Showgirl, the singer-songwriter imagines one such woman attending a stop on the Eras Tour with her child.
“Remember her? She’s got a mortgage now,” she writes. “Straight teeth where there’d been metal brackets. Standing with her 8-year-old daughter. You mouth, ‘I know you.’”
Since the musician first burst onto the scene as a precocious teenager, her diaristic, evocative songwriting has earned her a loyal fanbase who see their own raw emotions validated and reflected back through her work. Yet as her new album The Life of a Showgirl faces mixed reactions, some Swifties are reevaluating their relationships with Swift and the construct of (largely white) girlhood on which so much of her career is based.
“My friend said the other day, ‘In many ways, to be a woman is to have a complicated relationship with Taylor Swift,’” 26-year-old Annabelle, who lives in Boston, tells Teen Vogue.
Over the years, many fans’ connection to Swift has become as storied and layered as the universe she’s created across her 12 studio albums. Now, that story is becoming even more… well, complicated. Even loyal, die-hard fans are questioning The Life of a Showgirl’s lyrics: their juvenile slant, the way Swift addresses other women, the way she speaks in phrases that originate in AAVE, and the way that she, at certain points in the album, feels like a person they simply can’t connect with anymore.
It can be an uncomfortable thing, questioning an artist who is so intrinsic to who you are and what you’ve loved since your most formative years. But some Swifties are reckoning with what it means to identify with her so closely in the first place — and whether they still want to.
“I’ve never known a day without her music,” says 27-year-old Paige, who lives in New York City. “She offered a lot of young girls and young women the chance to be outspoken and to not be afraid of feeling your feelings. It was monumental in a lot of people’s development, and certainly my own.”
Swift’s celebrity has arguably never been bigger than it is right now, but for millions of fans — the majority of whom are women — the girl-next-door version of her that they first encountered as children has remained a constant figure in their lives. 27-year-old Bonnie, who lives in Boston, remembers calling her mom on the school office phone in elementary school begging to go to the Fearless tour; last week, her childhood best friend visited her so they could listen to Swift’s latest album together.
“There is just something about [Taylor] being such a constant in my life since I was so young that unlocks pure childhood emotion,” Bonnie says. “She’s one of the longest-standing relationships I’ve ever had.”
Swift has always had a knack for creating cultural moments, and the Eras Tour — in which she relived all of her past musical “eras” over the course of a behemoth three-and-a-half-hour stadium show — was no exception. The tour’s impact feels inextricable from summer 2023, a time when pop culture felt defined by the idea of “girlhood.” Barbie pink was everywhere, Swifties donned their glitter and sequins each weekend, and online trends like “girl walks” and “girl dinner” were all over the internet. Alongside Margot Robbie’s titular Barbie, Swift became one of the faces of this phenomenon. It’s hard to discuss Swift at this current juncture in time without eventually circling around to that loaded word: girlhood.
As The New York Times Magazine writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner put it in October 2023, one could understand the Eras Tour phenomenon through “the idea that Taylor Swift frees women to celebrate their girlhood, to understand… that we shouldn’t disavow the earlier versions of ourselves.”
To fans like Annabelle, the Eras Tour coincided with, and even encouraged, a period in which many twentysomethings reconnected with their childhood obsessions.
“Since the pandemic, a lot of people in our generation have gotten more in touch with the things they used to love when they were growing up,” she says. “Taylor Swift provides a really interesting perspective, because she’s the same artist I used to listen to in the car on the way home from school when I was seven. There aren’t a lot of artists that you can track the evolution [of] in that way.”
All these years later, Swift is still often enshrined as the all-American “everygirl.” And at 35, the musician is still reflecting on her teenage years. (On the Life of a Showgirl track “Ruin the Friendship,” Swift reminisces about flying home to attend the funeral of a high school friend she once had a crush on.) However, nostalgia aside, the girl on the bleachers has long since grown into a woman. In her 2020 documentary Miss Americana, the star acknowledged that she still struggles to feel her age.
“There’s this thing people say about celebrities, that they’re frozen at the age they got famous, and that’s kind of what happened to me,” Swift says. “I had a lot of growing to do, just trying to catch up.”
The fact that pop culture at large still associates Swift with girlhood raises the question of who our society allows to hold onto their girlishness as they grow up. A conventionally attractive, blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman can cling to girlhood well into adulthood, but what about girls of color — specifically, Black girls — who are adultified as early as five years old? Apart from Olivia Rodrigo (who is Filipino American and white), the mainstream next-generation pop girls who have followed in Swift’s footsteps are overwhelmingly white. This also reflects Swift’s fanbase — a 2023 Morning Consult survey found that 74 percent of self-identified Swifties are white.
As a “day one” Swiftie, 29-year-old Catherine, who lives in New York City, describes listening to Swift’s past albums as a form of escapism.
“There’s not a lot of space in pop culture for Black girls to be whimsical… to want to be princesses and be okay with being bad dancers and [have] a struggle-free existence,” says Catherine, who is a social media editor at Them. and contributes to Teen Vogue. “Sometimes you just want to escape. That’s what [her music] was for me, but it’s not anymore.”
Catherine’s feelings about Swift’s music started to shift after the singer released her 2024 album The Tortured Poet’s Department and chose to focus much of the album on her short-lived relationship with The 1975 frontman Matty Healy. Among other things, Healy has faced backlash for joking about watching torture porn involving Black women and making racist comments about the rapper Ice Spice during a podcast appearance.
(Notably, Swift seemingly references these comments on TTPD’s track 11, “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can),” calling a man’s jokes “revolting and far too loud.”) While listening to The Life of a Showgirl, Catherine noticed potential dog whistles in Swift’s writing, such as a lyric from the song “Wi$h Li$t” in which the musician declares that many of her peers “want a fat ass and a baby face.”
“This doesn’t feel like it’s for me,” Catherine says. “This doesn’t feel like it’s for non-white people.”
On the fifth track, “Eldest Daughter” — a coveted Swift album spot typically reserved for her most vulnerable songwriting — the singer laments, “I’m not a bad b*tch / And this isn’t savage” before reassuring her lover that, these purported shortcomings aside, she’ll never let him down. Here, Swift frames herself in opposition to terms like “bad b*tch” and “savage,” which have well-documented roots in Black culture.
“It goes back to the question of intent versus impact,” Paige says. “Because the majority of [Swift’s fiancé] Travis Kelce’s ex-girlfriends were Black. And [the song] doesn’t sit right once it leaves her circle [and] goes out in the world.”
The song “Opalite” goes a step further, with Swift taking aim at a partner’s phone-obsessed ex (“You were in it for real / She was in her phone / And you were just a pose”). Many listeners have theorized that the lyrics could be about Kelce’s ex-girlfriend Kayla Nicole, a sports journalist and fashion influencer (a recently resurfaced clip shows Kelce pulling his then-girlfriend’s phone out of her hands during a disagreement and telling her, “Get off your phone”).
During the October 4 episode of Nicole’s podcast The Pre-Game With Kayla Nicole, which dropped a day after The Life of a Showgirl’s release, she admitted that she’s “terrified of my [social media] DMs.”
“I don’t want to be triggered,” Nicole said. “I don’t want to care. I don’t want to look.”
As Catherine points out, Swift’s decision to include lyrics that fans could speculatively link to Nicole is in stark difference to the time she asked her fandom to extend “kindness” and “gentleness” toward the person “you think I might have written a song about 14 billion years ago” before singing “Dear John” — a song rumored to be about John Mayer — during the Eras Tour.
“You have the ability to do this on other people’s behalf,” Catherine says, criticizing Swift for not using her platform to prevent Swifties from "being vitriolic towards" Nicole.
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Some of Showgirl’s buzziest moments involve Swift bringing up other women more directly. The diss track “Actually Romantic” centers on a frenemy whom fans have presumed to be Charli XCX. Her 2024 song “Sympathy Is A Knife” was rumored to be about the insecurity she felt running into Swift while the “Fate of Ophelia” singer was dating Healy. (Charli is married to Healy’s bandmate George Daniel.)
“I heard you call me boring Barbie when the coke’s got you brave,” Swift croons on the controversial record. “Wrote me a song saying it makes you sick to see my face.” Eventually, she cheekily comes to the conclusion that her frenemy’s apparent obsession with her is “actually romantic” at the end of the day.
Although we’ll never know what exactly went on between Swift and Charli behind the scenes, many listeners expressed confusion over Swift seemingly misreading “Sympathy Is A Knife” as a pure diss track instead of what it is: a song in which Charli grapples with the anxieties of comparing herself to another female pop star to whom she feels she’ll never measure up (as she puts it, “I couldn’t even be her if I tried”).
“I’ve compared [Swift] to more of a politician than a pop star in the past, because I feel like she treads so carefully with what she says,” Annabelle notes, pointing to Swift’s September 2024 endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris as an example. “But in other ways, I feel like she doesn’t take enough precautions. She [seems to be] so careful with what she says about other women and her feminist-presenting image, but then she’s like, ‘Oh, but I also won’t hesitate to cut a b*tch down.’ ‘Actually Romantic’ is a great example of that.”
During “Actually Romantic,” Swift alleges that her subject “high-fived my ex” and “said you’re glad he ghosted me.” In a way, it’s classic Swift: condescendingly pretending to be above conflict only to get in squabbles with the best of them (and often position herself as the victim). To Catherine, Swift’s decision to perpetuate drama with Charli because of Healy is in line with other celebrity beefs she’s had with women, many of which could be linked to men in her life.
“Even though the Scooter Braun [masters scandal] was huge, a lot of that fell on Karlie [Kloss],” she says. “A lot of the conflict over [dancer Lockhart Brownlie leaving Swift’s Red Tour to join Katy Perry’s Prismatic World Tour] fell on Katy Perry. Even the Charli XCX diss was over [her] ex-boyfriend. A lot of it is so tangentially related to men.”
Then there’s the song “Honey,” in which Swift sings about how, until she started dating her partner, she had negative associations with pet names. In one instance, she recounts an incident in which “the b*tch was tellin’ me to back off / ‘Cause her man had looked at me wrong.”
Paige says she was struck by Swift casually calling a female stranger a “b*tch” throughout the track, given the musician’s thorny history with the word. The singer’s well-publicized feud with Kanye West largely stemmed from him writing the lyric “I made that b*tch famous” about her on his 2016 song “Famous.” Although Swift didn’t consent to West using the lyric, his then-wife Kim Kardashian posted an edited clip in which Swift seemingly agreed to it, sparking a massive backlash against Swift that partially inspired her to make Reputation.
“It was shocking to me that a word that had such a detriment to her personally, and to the trajectory of her career, is now being thrown loosely into conversations about other women,” Paige says.
In contrast to her casually misogynistic lyrics on “Honey,” Bonnie points to a scene in Miss Americana in which Swift talks about working to “deprogram the misogyny in my own brain.”
“There’s no such thing as a sl*t, there’s no such thing as a b*tch,” Swift said in the documentary. “Toss it out, reject it, and resist it.”
Outside of these moments, some fans also argued that the actual content of The Life of a Showgirl didn’t match the album they’d been sold. Swift has reflected on the glittery blood, sweat, and tears that go into entertaining millions before, in songs like Red’s “The Lucky One” and Tortured Poets’ “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart.” Yet outside of the title track, some Swifties found that the album didn’t say much about being a showgirl at all. Curiously, other major 2025 pop songs have already waxed poetic about themes of fame and on-and-offstage affirmation, such as Lady Gaga’s “Perfect Celebrity” and Addison Rae’s “Fame Is A Gun.”
“I feel like the production and the lyrics [on The Life of a Showgirl] are in such stark contrast to the visual creative direction,” Annabelle says. “I wish she was a little bit more vulnerable about her romantic relationship and her relationship to fame, and how those both intertwine.”
This isn’t the first time that Swift has surprised listeners with an album’s trajectory — while Reputation was marketed as a dark, revenge-fueled response to her 2016 “cancellation,” it was also filled with love songs. And on paper, it’s exciting whenever an artist who’s beloved for her deeply personal storytelling champions her newest project as one filled with “the best ideas” she’s “ever had.” But as Paige notes, this album release cycle has felt difficult because, for perhaps the first time, many Swifties were unable to connect to the musician through it.
“[Usually], the way she writes about stuff is just so introspective and reflective, and you feel like she’s spilling her guts,” Paige says. “The past two years are the most disconnected I’ve ever seen Swifties be from Taylor, and I think it’s thrown a lot of people off, like, ‘This person who really raised me in many ways is now someone that I can no longer see myself in.’ And I think this album is kind of an embodiment of that feeling.”
Swift might be America’s sweetheart, but she’s also an ultra-famous billionaire whose day-to-day experiences will never be relatable to the average person — especially during a time of rising fascism and rampant income inequality. In recent years, she’s faced criticism from fans over her ties to open Trump supporters, including her friendship with Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes’ wife Brittany Mahomes, whom Trump thanked for “defending” him in a 2024 Truth Social post; and a handwritten thank-you note Swift wrote to Barstool Sports creator Dave Portnoy, who three women have accused of sexual assault.
“People do not want to hear about the woes of a billionaire, and people do not want to forgive you hanging out with a lot of conservative people, because we are seeing the real, tangible consequences of Trump’s second term,” Catherine says. “I think a lot of people are over it.”
Since Swift got engaged to Travis Kelce in August, discussions about their future marriage and children have been almost as unavoidable as discourse about The Life of a Showgirl. Swift sings about her dreams for her and Kelce’s future family in “Wi$h Li$t.” Some listeners went so far as to suggest that her lyrics about just wanting a “couple kids” and a “driveway with a basketball hoop” suggest that she’s spreading trad wife sentiments. During a recent BBC Radio 2 interview, she called rumors that she’d quit music after getting married “offensive.”
However, with a wedding on the horizon, perhaps the more patriarchal “next phase” of her womanhood is on both her and listeners’ minds. Even if Swift doesn’t want to write about the regular world most of us are grounded in, she’s unfortunately still subject to the expectations it places on women.
After the wild card that is The Life of a Showgirl, who knows where Swift will go next musically? Some fans, like Bonnie, are already looking forward to discovering what kind of artist she’ll be decades down the line.
“I think so much about what Taylor Swift is going to be like when she’s Carole King’s age,” she says. “I’m excited to see how she ages musically and what styles come from that.”
Over the past few years, Swift has created her own inescapable monoculture. Yet, as she confronts mixed fan responses and attempts to appeal to as many audience members as possible — in an increasingly conservative culture — perhaps she’ll switch gears to writing about that picket fence family life she imagined in “Wi$h Li$t,” with her coming-of-age passions in the rearview mirror. Twenty years from now, Swift might finally be forced to leave girlhood behind. But post-The Life of a Showgirl, don’t expect every Swiftie to go with her.
