“Taylor Swift and the Silencing of Nicki Minaj”
“You can debate whether the “Anaconda” video is brilliant or bad, but you can’t argue with Minaj that it was one of the most iconic pop-culture products of the past year, nor with the idea that a lot of people had a knee-jerk negative response to its glorification of big black butts. Her speaking up about those things doesn’t mean she’s dissing the other nominees. Yes, the video she’d most likely been referring to when talking about “slim bodies” was “Bad Blood,” a montage featuring a lot of supermodels and skinny actresses in superhero getups. But she didn’t question its merit; she even implied that it was commercially and culturally significant.
When Swift chimed in, it changed the conversation from woman versus institution to woman versus woman. Ironically, this is exactly the complaint Swift leveled against Minaj: “It’s unlike you to pit women against each other.” This fits with Swift’s recent campaign against the Mean Girls stereotype of women as catty infighters; her 1989 shows have featured clips videos of her famous buddies telling the largely tweenage girl audience about how great same-sex friendship can be. The cause is righteous, but Swift’s tweet to Minaj shows the limits of it. When female solidarity shuts down someone’s honest expression of frustration at society, inequality, and racial and body-type bias, that’s hardly progressive.”
The adorable confusion card.
Update: She apologized. And it was actually a good apology where she named what she did wrong and indicated that she had been listening. In my real-life experience of situations like these, the other person “apologizes” by letting you know that they are a good person and never wanted to be offensive and didn’t know about that and are we done now so that I can talk to you about the thing I wanted to talk about?
I’m sort of developing this idea that if you want to be friends with a person with a marginalized identity that you don’t share, you have to be ready to confront your prejudices, possibly because you have been called out, and work on addressing them — or else you kinda just have an accessory-acquaintance who is never really safe around you.
