Taylor Swift Is Too Big to Have Real Rivals. Why’s She Still So Hung Up on Them?

Personally, I think whether or not there’s a real rift between these two women is irrelevant. What’s more interesting is that “Almost Romantic” follows an already well-trodden path for Swift—one that tells us more about her than it does about any other artist who may have inspired it. Sure, she might have a hard time letting things go (Brat was released more than a year ago), but it seems to me that her fixation is not so much on individual women as it is on internalized misogyny as a whole. It’s a consistent theme.

Take her alleged, almost decade-long feud with Kim Kardashian, whom Swift appeared to reference in The Tortured Poets Department bonus track, “thanK you aIMee”—see what she did there?—after having already dedicated several songs on her 2017 revenge album Reputation to the rift. Then, also on TTPD, there was “Clara Bow,” which many insist is about Olivia Rodrigo, who some believe is also the subject of new song “Father Figure.” Before that, there was “Bad Blood,” which is widely believed to be about Katy Perry.

It would be easy to dismiss all of this as headline fodder; fans famously spend an inordinate amount of time unpacking the minutiae of Swift’s lyrics. Who she is—and is not—firing shots at has become part of the fun. But the subject of female rivalries exists in her music even without alleged celebrity ciphers. Take “You Belong With Me” from 2008’s Fearless, in which she compares herself—the humble geek who never gets the guy—with his male-gaze-coded girlfriend: “’Cause she wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts / She’s cheer captain, and I’m on the bleachers.”

Swift’s 2010 record Speak Now gave us “Better Than Revenge,” a song so snipey about another woman that the star—by now more astute on the subject of slut-shaming—changed the lyrics when she re-recorded the album in 2023. “She’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress” became “He was a moth to the flame, she was holding the matches.”