We must be living in the Upside Down right now, because why is Taylor Swift being booed at the Super Bowl while Donald Trump gets cheers?
Early into the first quarter of the 2025 Super Bowl, Swift was shown on the Jumbotron sitting next to Ice Spice, and was greeted with an immediate chorus of boos. The singer gave the camera a top tier Jim Halpert side-eye, and seemed to say to her seat-mate, “What is going on?” Frankly, I have the same question.
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Last year, when Swift and Travis Kelce’s relationship was new, certain NFL fans took bizarre umbrage with the pop star being shown on the big screen during games. Swift was just trying to support her boyfriend, but some men (and let’s be honest, it was mostly all men) took her presence as a personal affront. It got to a point where even Kelce’s brother, fellow NFL player Jason Kelce, used his own platform to support the NFL showing the singer during games. “The attention’s there because the audience wants to see it,” he said. However, by the time the Kansas City Chiefs were playing in the 2024 Super Bowl, the football-watching world seemed to have gotten a grip, and the anti-Swift attitude had died down. Cut to the 2025 game, and suddenly Taylor Swift is persona non grata? Make it make sense.
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The booing was especially striking given the Super Bowl audience’s reaction to Trump—who is by all measures a much more divisive figure in the United States right now. When the president was shown during Jon Batiste’s performance of the national anthem, the crowd seemed to cheer appreciatively. I can’t be the only one who remembers Trump’s stance on the NFL in 2017, when he reacted to players kneeling during the anthem as a protest against racism and police brutality by calling on NFL owners to drag those players off the field. Swift, in contrast, has done nothing but increase NFL viewership, if anything.
So, what exactly is the crowd’s beef with Taylor Swift at the Super Bowl? Is it just that she’s a powerful woman and football fans find that threatening? Is it because her fans largely tend to be women and the NFL’s audience often skews male? Because I’ve racked my brain and misogyny the only plausible explanation I can come up with. And if that’s the vibe, what’s the incentive for any of Swift’s legions of global fans, or people who care about misogyny in general, to keep tuning in to the NFL?
The post Taylor Swift Was Booed at the Super Bowl and I Thought We Were Over This Particular Strand of Misogyny appeared first on Glamour.
