Is Our Obsession with Taylor Swift’s Love Life Sexist?

A Chinese marketplace website has been in trouble this week as some of its vendors were found offering customers insurance against a possible Taylor Swift/Tom Hiddleston split. The popular site called Taobao was forced to shut down when ringleaders were found to be violating the country’s gambling laws.

According to sources, over 543 transactions were made regarding the future of the couple’s relationship before the plug was pulled, which really makes us wonder: just why do people care so much about Miss Swift’s love life?

Swift is no stranger to her love life being in the news. Her previous break ups with flames such as John Mayer, Harry Styles, and Calvin Harris have been widely publicised, so what is it that makes people so fascinated by her escapades!?

Many people make comment that most of her songs seem to be about her past relationships, and gossip sites do their best to draw links between each of her beaus and her songs (like, oh my god, didn’t you hear that I Knew You Were Trouble was totally written about Harry Styles!?).

The emphasis placed on Tay Tay’s love life seems kind of weird when you consider that there are so many men in the music industry writing about breakups with girls who don’t get the same amount of attention.

For example, let’s think about someone like Kanye West – Heartless is about a woman being…heartless, with lyrics like “somewhere far along this road he lost his soul/ to a woman so heartless”, and “you wait a couple months then you gon’ see/you’ll never find nobody better than me”. Now, that seems pretty bitter, and yet there weren’t a million articles circulating about Ye’s break up or jokes about the fact that he just dates people for album fodder. His tracks Heartless and Runaway are largely rumoured to be about his former partner Amber Rose.

Similarly, think of literally ANY emo/pop punk/post-hardcore band. Fall Out Boy’s ‘Take This To Your Grave’ and ‘From Under The Cork Tree’ are 80 per cent about break ups and how much girls suck. Many of the lyrics from FUCT are strongly rumoured to be about Pete Wentz’ on-again-off-again flame, Jeanae White. Yet, fans and critics alike gave this info nowhere near the amount of attention as they’ve given to poor Tay Tay after every heartbreak.

Fall Out Boy aren’t the only band within that scene that have a bunch of songs about heartbreak and relationships. Pretty much every song by Pierce The Veil is about spite from relationships ending, such as in Caraphernelia: “What if I can’t forget you?/I’ll burn your name into my throat/I’ll be the fire that’ll catch you”. Again, similarly to Fall Out Boy there has been very little press on WHO these lyrics are about.

Metalcore band Asking Alexandria also have some, er… Music written about feeling hurt. One of the most notable would be their song Not The American Average, with lyrics including : “you stupid f*cking whore”, which has developed its own social commentary, with the broken hearted sending gifs of the lyrics to their much-resented exes. Yet, who is this written about? Some random groupie, or an ex-partner… We don’t know.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking…it’s a completely different genre to pop, there’s not as much media attention surrounding it. Okay, okay, maybe you’re right. So, what about artists like Drake or Justin Bieber?

Drake’s Hotline Bling was HUGE, and yet who was the girl who no longer called him on his cellphone? If you spend enough time Googling, most results seem to point to it being about the artist’s often referenced ex gf Zineb Samir, or “Nebby” as she’s often called. Again though, this is heavy speculation. The media didn’t really chase it up and were more than happy to focus on the song itself, rather than an obsession with the context behind its creation.

J Biebs’ banger Sorry is another song written about heartbreak which has swept through the charts lately. With a chorus full of angsty longing lyrics, “Is it too late now to say sorry?/’Cause I’m missing more than just your body”, the song is rumoured to be about Bieber’s public split with singer Selena Gomez.

Though, in what was a pretty public high-profile split, the amount of attention given to discussing who the song was about was minuscule in comparison to the amount of praise given to Bieber for the track. Many critics cited the song as a much-welcome departure from the Canadian singer’s pretty-boy-popstar ways, and complimented him on his more mature themes and sound.

All things considered, could it be that there’s still a fair amount of sexism in the music industry? Are people just quicker to jump on the idea of a woman writing about her previous relationships than a man?

In a world where many believe there’s equality between the sexes, it seems like a bit of a double standard that a woman writing about her breakup is headline news, while a man writing the same isn’t a big deal. We love you Tay Tay, you keep doing you!