Taylor Swift Goes on Diatribe Against 'Toxic Male Privilege,' Never Seems To Get Applause She Wanted
Taylor Swift is Billboard’s “Woman of the Decade,” which is understandable enough. Swift has transformed herself from a country-pop sensation into, well, a pop sensation.
I suppose in the whole scheme of things, this doesn’t seem so impressive, but in 2010 she was still best known for being interrupted by Kanye West onstage at the VMAs. In 2019, she got an album on the “Best of the 2010s” list courtesy of the decidedly non-populist suzerains of musical credibility over at Pitchfork — not to mention the fact she’s arguably the most famous musician in the world. It’s been a good decade to be in the Tay Tay business.
Swift’s victory lap of sorts came at the 14th edition of the Women in Music Awards on Thursday. Her acceptance speech was a pointed excoriation of “toxic male privilege” in music.
If you have 15 minutes to listen to a diatribe, I urge you to watch it. The reaction — or lack thereof when she paused for certain applause lines — is fascinating for a number of reasons.
A bit of context to this all: Swift is currently in a battle with music executive Scooter Braun over the rights to her back catalog. This informed a significant portion of her speech in which she called out Braun for that mephitic masculine privilege.
“The definition of the ‘toxic male privilege’ in our industry is people saying, ‘but he’s always been nice to me,’ when I’m raising valid concerns about artists owning their rights to own their music,” Swift said.
“Of course he’s nice to you. If you’re in this room, he has something that he needs.”
As for the sale of her music, Swift said it “happened to me without my approval, consultation or consent.”
“After I was denied the chance to purchase my music outright, my entire catalog was sold to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings in a deal that I’m told was funded by the Soros family, 23 Capital and that Carlyle Group,” she said.
“Yet, to this day, none of these investors have bothered to contact me or my team directly, to perform their due diligence on their investment,” she said. “On their investment in me. To ask how I might feel about the new owner of my art, the music I wrote, the videos I created, photos of me, my handwriting, my album designs.”
(Braun himself recently posted a statement saying that he’s offered to sit down with Swift and her people but has been rebuffed. He said he wants no part in “toxic division,” adding, “Many have told me that a meeting will never happen as this is not about truth or resolution but instead a narrative for you. I am hopeful this is not the case.” Don’t hope too hard.)
There was quite a bit more about male toxicity, however.
“As a female in this industry, some people will always have slight reservations about you,” Swift said. “Whether you deserve to be there. Whether your male producer or male co-writer is the reason for your success. Or whether it was a savvy record label. It wasn’t.
“I saw that people love to explain away a woman’s success in the music industry, and I saw something in me change due to this realization.”
And there was a call-out to the haters, presumably male or patriarchal in mindset: “This was the decade where I became a mirror for my detractors,” she said. “Whatever they decided I couldn’t do is exactly what I did.”
Now, it’s not so much about what’s in those lines as the reaction — or sometimes the lack thereof.
Watching that speech and the beats she clearly scripted for the applause, you’re brought back to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush on the 2016 GOP presidential primary campaign trail: “Please clap.”
TMZ, that tireless chronicler of human dumpster fires, noted charitably that the reaction in the room on Thursday was “mixed.”
“The night was supposed to be about inspiration, but it turned into another, ‘poor little Taylor Swift,'” a female executive said. “It’s hard to watch someone who’s had such incredible privilege … to complain about their own personal issues.”
Then again, the entertainment industry — not exactly a hive of retrograde conservatism — has seen plenty of legitimate toxic male privilege exposed over the past few years. If this speech wasn’t being given about the music industry, those beats for applause couldn’t have been long enough. If she’d have talked about the toxic male privilege in the Republican Party, she’d have been carried off the stage like a winning coach at the end of the Super Bowl.
Talk about toxic male privilege in one of the corners of the entertainment world and the room is suddenly cricket-friendly.
Well, at least there was one very prominent fan of Swift’s “toxic male privilege” speech: Hillary Clinton.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B6BMgGopf0F/?utm_source=ig_embed
Congrats from another icon for whom “doing whatever the hell I want” includes protecting a husband who lied under oath about having an affair with 20-something intern and smearing his opponents as members of “the vast right-wing conspiracy.” #gutsywomen
So yes, back to the original question: Why wasn’t there thunderous applause Thursday night?
Was it because the room realized this was nothing more than claptrap from one of the most privileged individuals on earth, an individual trying to cover her own business scuffles under the cloak of sexism?
Was it because they didn’t like being called out by Swift?
Was it because the big-money names in the room weren’t quite as worried about “the unregulated world of private equity coming in and buying up our music as if it’s real estate,” as she said in the speech?
A, B and C?
Whatever the case, this diatribe was better received in the media than it was in the room. The winner for most obsequious headline: Parade’s “Taylor Swift Enters Her 30s With Empowering Speech Slamming ‘Toxic Male Privilege.'”
It’s funny, however, that people at the event — ostensibly about empowerment — weren’t quite as excited about it.
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