The author discusses the recent booing of Taylor Swift at the Super Bowl, placing it in the context of the rise in misogyny and the struggle for dominance between two factions of American culture. The author argues that Trump and his supporters are reclaiming American culture through toxic masculinity, exemplified by the crowd's reaction to Swift.
Since Donald Trump took office, there have been several times I felt chilled by the rapid increase in misogyny seeping in our culture. But watching Taylor Swift at Super Bowl LIX booed by a crowd of thousands on Sunday night was a new low. It was just a football game, people might say. Or Swift— who is famously dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce—got heckled by some rowdy Eagles fans excited to be at the biggest sporting event of the year. So? Don’t take it so seriously.
But I was there at the game. When Swift’s face appeared on the Jumbotron, an almost instant—and distinctly male—dissent erupted from around me. Swift, of course, was there to support her boyfriend, and was far from the only celebrity in attendance. In fact, the screen showed a new famous person—from Paul McCartney to Anne Hathaway and Lady Gaga—nearly every time there was a break in the play with virtually no response from the crowd. Swift was different. As soon as she appeared on screen, the crowd seemed to delight in jeering and heckling her, and the mood shift was palpable. I watched in real time as Swift, alongside her friend Ice Spice, took in the response, her brow furrowing in confusion and then apparent discomfort. Looking at the camera, she distinctly said, “What is going on?” And girl, same, because we were all wondering what the hell was happening. Perhaps the moment would have felt less visceral if not for the fact that less than an hour earlier the crowd had exploded—this time with applause—to see Trump on that same screen. As an image of the president, stonefaced and standing in a salute, was shown to the crowd during Jon Batiste’s national anthem performance, the roar of approval and cheers was deafening (of course, there were those in the crowd who booed the president and cheered for Swift as well, but from my vantage point, it was clear what the overall sentiment was). To me, the disparate reactions felt like a message. That the Super Bowl, one of the biggest cultural events in the country, has been reclaimed by Trump and the type of toxic masculinity he appears to be the beacon of. And he and his supporters seem to be living for it. Just look at the president’s response shortly after he left the game. Not only did he acknowledge that Swift was booed by the crowd, he delighted in it. As he had many, many times before (including saying he “hated” Swift after she endorsed his 2024 rival Kamala Harris) the president weaponized his massive following against her. “The only one that had a tougher night than the Kansas City Chiefs was Taylor Swift,' Trump the president wrote on Truth Social. 'She got BOOED out of the Stadium. MAGA is very unforgiving!' By calling her out, Trump looked to play by the now-standard internet misogyny playbook. It wasn’t enough that Swift was publicly mocked, now he needed to troll her about it, attempting to humiliate her even further. We all got normalized to this sort of conduct in 2016, when the president mocking his apparent enemies on Twitter became a near daily occurrence (surely he has something better to do, right?). But it's still worth calling out how gross—and frankly ridiculous—this sort of conduct is. And when the Twitter rant becomes real life, in the form of a stadium full of thousands and thousands of people, it's chilling. The online bullies of 2016 are now, in 2025, very real. It’s important to place these two moments in the context in which they exist. Though there are nuances to both, Trump and Swift exemplify two factions of American culture currently struggling for dominance. Ever since Swift started dating Kelce in 2023 and started coming to his NFL games, our cultural conversation around the sport has shifted radically. Suddenly, football—especially the Chiefs—was for the girls. Women’s interest in the sport skyrocketed, and a spokesperson for the NFL told me the league grew its following among women by 21% from 2023 to 2024. Women began to watch the game, follow the players and WAGs (sports content by women creators has grown 40% year on year, according to YouTube) and buy merch (you couldn’t walk through the street this weekend in New Orleans without being enticed to buy a “go Taylor’s boyfriend” or “in my Chiefs era” T-shirt). According to Market Watch, Swift is estimated to have brought nearly $1 billion in brand value to the league since she started dating Kelce, and has elevated other women in the NFL in the process. As I wrote last year, interest in the wives and girlfriends of NFL players has also become a huge part of the sport (one which the league, by the way, enthusiastically embraces), and several WAGs like Chanen Johnson and Chariah Gordon have become bonafide internet stars
Taylor Swift Super Bowl Trump Misogyny Toxic Masculinity American Culture
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