“You know how to ball, I know Aristotle” – but, what do you believe?
Intimacy contradicts everything the modern feminist demands. The commitment isn’t about insincerity–the politics is genuine–but it is about the geography of feminism and the spaces it has never been able to examine. The dynamic isn’t unfamiliar, it presides in the relationship of the woman who can dismantle patriarchal structures in every debate she partakes in, and still return home to a man who wouldn’t survive ten minutes of the same analytical rigour she applies everywhere else. When the same women who critique systems of oppression choose partners whose private politics sit in unmediated contradiction to their public ones, the question becomes imperative: did their politics fail? Or were they never quite as independent of the men in the room as they appeared?
No one performed this more publicly than Taylor Swift, a woman who has never been the passive subject of public discourse. But before she was political, she was a punchline, all credit given to Kanye West for interrupting her VMA speech in 2009. He inaugurated a decade of public ownership over her narrative where any reclamation had to be done loudly to be believed. The more clarifying question was why he felt entitled to do it. She was nineteen years old. And for years, the disparagement arrived from opposing directions simultaneously; while her music was said to be ‘too feminine’ or ‘too preoccupied with the romantic narrative’ to have a backbone to begin with, her silence on politics sat complicitly with the structures her generation wanted to dismantle. When it happened again in 2016, her word against his, she didn’t just lose the news cycle but the presumption of credibility that men in the same industry never had to earn. The aftermath–the political awakening–remained the only coherent response left to a woman who understood what had made this possible.
She called out Marsha Blackburn and endorsed Kamala Harris, signing her name to the Equality Act (2019). The starting point of when the most influential woman in the world declared what side she was on. What followed–her donating $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project and an Instagram post endorsing Kamala Harris minutes after the presidential debate ended, that drove over 400,000 people to voter registration resources within twenty four hours (September 2024)–cemented it into an unmistakable stand.
Joe Alwyn arrived in that context, in the aftermath of her public cancellation. A British actor who occupies space in the world of liberal politics, whose sympathetic support for Palestine was visibly distant from the hippodrome of celebrity nationalism. Since their relationship coincided with the moment she became the most politically vocal she had ever been, the feminist identity associated with her name through activism and endorsements began to be read through him. While six years is a long time to keep a relationship from a public that consumes your every movement, she managed it with a precision she had never applied to anything else. And the privacy only intensified the projection. But here was the truth: Alwyn didn’t give her those convictions. He just happened to share them.
Then came Travis Kelce, arriving with a specific world attached to him, one where he openly said that performing for Trump was an honour. The same President who already made his position on Swift clear, remarking that she had become less attractive since she began opposing him, reducing her political stance to a verdict on her appearance. Yet, the man who publicly humiliated your partner gets your reverence anyway, because he is powerful, and she is, at the end of it, just a partner. But here’s the catch: Swift herself appeared in photographs alongside the Trump-aligned figures who orbited that same world–Will Compton and Taylor Lewan, hosts of Bussin’ With The Boys, conservative podcasters with documented ties to Donald Trump. Men whose politics she could not have misread, whose allegiances she could not have missed. You do not show up in that photograph out of ignorance. You show up because, on some level, you have decided you are okay with it. The caption came from the podcast’s own account, and it substantiated what the photograph already suggested: ‘Confirmed: Taylor Swift is FOR THE BOYS’.
Maybe that’s her personal life, but she chose to write it into a song and hand it to the world. The moment she did that, the personal life defense was gone. Swift’s third track in her latest album, ‘Opalite’, renders the imagery of an ‘onyx night’ to metaphorise Kelce’s past. Including his relationship with Kayla Nicole, a black woman. Swift’s own arrival is cast in ‘opalite’: pale, iridescent, and luminous. While she offered the birthstone explanation, the critics knew what else the comparison communicates. The question became unavoidable: when your ideas penetrate your art and contradict the womanhood you represent, are you still what you implied you were?
Swift has long been accused of a feminism that was never truly intersectional, one that extended solidarity outward only as far as it remained personally convenient. Opalite did not introduce that accusation. It confirmed it, in her own language, set to music.
This was also the Eras Tour, the biggest cultural moment of her career, the period in which she became the most powerful woman in the music industry. The relationship and the peak happened simultaneously, which makes the cultural reflex that followed more telling, not less. Because the instinct was still to read all of it through Kelce, his politics bleeding into hers. The same grammar the culture had used for Alwyn, now running in reverse. She was private, he was liberal, therefore he explained her. She is public, he is MAGA-adjacent, therefore he explains her retreat.
Both readings arrive at the same place, a woman whose convictions are always explained by the man she is standing next to, never by herself.
Which is exactly the system she spent a decade saying she wanted to dismantle.
“I have great genes’’ – but, did we ask?
There is another version of this calculation, one that doesn’t centre love but lets leverage take the lead.
Even when news of violence against women remains a daily headline, a recurring wound that refuses to close, Sydney Sweeney made it clear she wouldn’t be needing feminism anymore. After extracting what she needed from it. Proving that the feminism she deployed was never the kind that threatened anything, it was the kind the industry already knew how to sell.
Sweeney entered the industry with a specific request: do not reduce me to my body. It was a reasonable ask from an industry that is well-known to award autonomy over calibre and potential, especially for women. Her prestige–highly secured through Euphoria and White Lotus–was engineered precisely on defying the equation: women who looked the way she did could command roles that demanded substance and bona fide craft. She wanted to prove that the two were not mutually exclusive. She almost did, too.
And soon, the commercial for a soapbar made from her bathwater dropped for $8, in collaboration with a men’s grooming brand, Dr. Squatch. Whether that was hypocritical self-commodification or simply rational participation, she was the one holding the pen.
The American Eagle campaign too, included her word-play with ‘jeans’ and ‘genes’–a pun that did not emerge out of nowhere. It landed in a cultural moment already saturated with rhetoric about genetic superiority and white femininity as aspirational, making itself available to a discourse that was already there. If there was any benefit of the doubt to extend, Trump and Ted Cruz took care of that. You are known by who celebrates you, and by who you keep standing next to after. This, combined with the voter registration as a Republican in Florida, filed months before Trump’s second term, made her leaning limpid.
However, this is what the industry incentivises, feminist language as cultural currency, deployed strategically to signal seriousness, to demand more than your body, to be taken on your own terms. It just doesn’t require the conviction itself. She had climbed the ladder built for her and from up there, she pulled it up behind her. What this suggests, more uncomfortably, is the simple truth–feminism was never about the sexualisation for Sweeney. It was about who held the power over it, who gets to profit from it. And as it turns out, she wanted to do it herself.
For those unfamiliar with the offscreen calculation, Sweeney performed it onscreen too, as Cassie Howard.
Euphoria has never shied away from disturbing, it builds on it. But among the overdoses, the violence and the grotesque detailing, Cassie’s storyline remains the most unsettling of all. Not because it’s gruesome. Because it’s recognisable. Cassie–the girl defined by her sexuality and most loudly shamed for it too–becomes a trad wife in the third season of the show. A big house, no career, completely orbiting Nate Jacobs, the most explicitly toxic masculinity portrayal of the decade. Her autonomy being traded for his provision, executing the stereotypical happy ending–the liberal woman finding her true self in being a traditional prop. The classic American love story. While the luxurious life seemed like the fair end of the deal, it was contingent on Nate’s ability to sustain it.
And then he ran out of money.
The OnlyFans, once a side venture contained safely within the walls of the mansion, a choice made from comfort, became the only economic tool she had left. The sexual autonomy she had set aside while someone was paying for her life became, the moment that payment stopped, a necessity. The language shifted–need replacing choice, survival replacing empowerment.
Sweeney and Cassie are not the same person. But they are the same argument–one industrial, one fictional–arriving at identical conclusions. The convergence isn’t a poetic coincidence. It is diagnostic of what happens when feminist branding meets the cold logic of capitalism: the identity gets worn as long as it is useful and set aside the moment it isn’t. And the tragedy was not that she let it fall, it was that the system was always going to make it the most rational thing she could do.
The scaffolding comes down when the building can stand without it. It just never tells you that’s what it was for.
“I can fix him’’ – no one asked you to
While the new season of Euphoria capitalised on the appetite it spent two seasons constructing, it managed to do something the audience never anticipated, it made Nate Jacobs agreeable. And the response wasn’t a relief but mourning. Fans who had spent years articulating what Nate represented, greeted his transformation with something that can only be described as bereavement. Apparently the coiled violence, weaponised intimacy, performance of hypermasculinity to survive his own self-hatred, was not what they wanted gone. It was what they had come back for. And that is on us. The ones who knew better. The ones who said so, loudly, in every other room.
Euphoria never asked its audience to want him. They showed him as he is–someone capable of hurting his girlfriend when no one is watching, blackmailing people because he knows he can get away with it. Everything was on display. Even though the show’s writing communicates that Nate suffers from trauma–first induced by his father whose suppressed sexuality calcified into control, forming a particular cruelty of someone who would rather perform dominance than be seen–it was never an invitation. It was just context. When one strips away the conventionally-attractive looks and cinematography, what remained was a man that the archetype of a progressive 21st-century woman would resent in every other circumstance. At the workplace. At a politician’s voting record. In an institution’s response to its misconduct.
Still, they felt the pull regardless and made edits of him anyway. When it came to someone they desired, even someone contained within the safety of fiction, even someone they would never have to encounter outside of a screen, the critique simply did not arrive. You can know exactly what Nate Jacobs is and still feel the pull. The knowing and the wanting were never in conversation with each other. The comments filled instead with a different kind of reasoning altogether–’I can fix him’, ‘he wouldn’t do that to me’, ‘he would have treated me differently’.The belief that the woman identifying the violence would somehow also be the woman untouched by it.
And perhaps that is why the reformed Nate Jacobs felt, to so many viewers, fundamentally wrong. Because once the danger was removed, the fantasy of being the exception disappeared with it.
Season 3 gave the audience exactly what the feminist critique had always asked for. By every metric the progressive politics had established, Season 3 Nate Jacobs was the correct outcome. He was not reformed into someone extraordinary, he was simply, at last, someone who was not hurting anyone. The bar could not have been lower. Still, the audience found it insufficient. ‘They gave Nate Jacobs 200mg of sertraline and a lobotomy,’ one viewer complained. Another noted with visible disappointment that the old Nate ‘wouldn’t have put up with this.’ His becoming was received not as resolution but as deprivation. It was not his goodness they had wanted. Not the abuse exactly, but the capacity for it channelled through the tension, the danger directed at everyone except them.
Which is what the Nate Jacobs phenomenon ultimately reveals about the women watching him. The protection fantasy–the ‘touch her and I kill you’ energy that feminist politics has often struggled to publicly admit. Because that wanting comes from living in a world that has never quite been safe enough to stop needing it. And no amount of political fluency has ever fully resolved that.
The most honest thing the feminism of this generation never said out loud: the rigour applied everywhere else never made it to the person they desired. Even a fictional one. Maybe it was never designed to go there. Maybe that is precisely the problem.
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