Girl So Confusing: Do Female Artists Always Have to Fight?

After the recent release of the diss track ‘Actually Romantic’ on Taylor Swift’s new album The Life of a Showgirl, rumours of a feud between her and Charli XCX flooded the media, harkening back to Charli’s previous antagonism with Lorde. The arts has a long history of female rivalries, stretching back to early 20th century literary giants, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. This begs the question, are these feuds just the result of media frenzy and a patriarchal industry, or do they create more authentic art by showing the messy, sometimes problematic nature of women’s relationships? 

The feud between Charli and Lorde points toward the latter. Due to their similar aesthetics, they were often compared. Charli’s lyrics on the 2024 track ‘girl, so confusing’ expressed the jealousies and insecurities of a woman trapped in an unforgiving industry, who can’t “see eye to eye with every single woman.” As she argued on the podcast Las Culturistas, “That’s not the nature of human beings”, Lorde and Charli publicised their reconciliation with a remix of ‘girl, so confusing’ on 21st June 2024, full of the brutal honesty that drew fans to ‘BRAT’ in the first place. Arguably, their authentic confessions about rivalry allowed them to assert their own agency as female artists in a male-dominated industry.

However, Taylor Swift’s ‘Actually Romantic’ seems different, perhaps like a step in the wrong direction. Critics and fans alike find ‘Actually Romantic’ - which Swift framed in ‘Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl’ as “a love letter to someone who hates you” - immature and even flirting with homophobic tropes. Comparing Charli to a “toy chihuahua”, it seems like a disproportionate response to ‘Sympathy is a Knife’ which, as Charli argues in one of her Tiktoks, is “really just about how it’s so complicated being […] a female artist, where you are pitted against your peers.” However, others argue that ‘Actually Romantic’ plays into patriarchal stereotypes in order to become one of the record-breaking hits the star is known for and is therefore a symptom of the rampant misogyny in our society. 

Whilst Virginia Woolf famously called fellow author Katherine Mansfield a “civet cat” in her diary, and Mansfield accused her of “intellectual snobbery,” they also wrote of their “oddly complete understanding” of each other. Mansfield inspired Woolf to reach greater heights in her writing, most significantly by arguing that she should have addressed World War One in Night and Day (1919), prompting Woolf to write her three famous war novels. When Katherine died tragically young in 1923, despite her “jealous[y]” of her writing and their tempestuous relationship, Woolf was devastated to lose “the only woman with whom I long to talk work.”

Whilst women’s public feuds can fall into the patriarchal stereotype of ‘catfights’, they also raise the point that women’s relationships have too long been simplified, and that their multi-faceted nature can create incredible art - and that maybe we should all try to “work it out on the remix” before it’s too late.