What happened to male players for a few hours these past two Sundays is what female athletes have had to deal with for decades.
This article originally appeared in Liz Plank’s substack Airplane Mode, which you can subscribe to here.
“Taylor Swift is the Beatles, Travis Kelce is Yoko.” –The Boston Globe
Last Sunday, women took over the most impenetrable mojo dojo casa house: The National Football League.
For 24 hours, the NFL (one of the most masculine institutions in the world) was under siege and under the supreme authority of our Lord Savior Taylor Swift (a leading global female institution). It happened again this Sunday. And now, this is my Roman Empire.
The pop star has now been to two of Travis Kelce’s (her rumored boyfriend) games, and football will never be the same. The NFL’s TikTok bio was changed to “Taylor was here” and the Twitter hero pic was no longer the players, it was Swift cheering for them. Even the sportscasters began to use Swift’s lyrics to describe the players’ moves. The camera people couldn’t stop focusing on a smitten Kelce starring at the girl who came to his silly little match, and reporters pressed coaches and teammates alike to spill the beans on their new emperor, Taylor Swift. The NFL’s social media accounts are now populated with swiftie explainers about the basics of the game for beginners. Swift has entered the chat, and the NFL can’t contain her excitement.
But the NFL’s Taylor Swift era isn’t just fun — it’s also radical
For starters, we saw questions that are usually reserved for female athletes, like questions about one’s dating life, directed at men for a change. Watching Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes being pressed about how his teammate’s love life impacted his game, was quite something. Remember when Eugenie Bouchard became the first Canadian woman in a generation to advance to Australia’s Grand Slam semi-finals, and her post-game interview included being asked to twirl and questions about her celebrity crush? What happened to male players for a few hours these past two Sundays is what female athletes have had to deal with for decades. There’s an entire campaign dedicated to drawing attention to this glaring inequality in the way reporters address athletes.
Female athletes are also used to having their performance diminished, and men getting the credit for their work. One of the most glaring examples happened when Hungarian swimmer Katinka Hosszú broke the women’s world record for 400m at the Olympics, and that an NBC commentator credited her husband instead of her. “There’s the guy responsible for turning Katinka Hosszú, his wife, into a whole different swimmer,” Dan Hicks said. He later apologized for the sexist comment, but this disregard for female athletes is so common that I devoted an entire series to it during my time at Vox.
Swift’s occupation of the NFL was a social experiment revealing what happens when men are treated like women for once.
For a moment, Kelce wasn’t defined by his career accomplishments, he was defined by his relationship. Women are used to being known because of the men they’re with, but men, not so much. That kind of supportive or secondary role is one that women are very familiar with, and it goes far beyond the world of sports. And the fact that we watched this role reversal happen to a prototypical alpha male, in a testosterone-charged football field where the spotlight is only on women when they’re cheerleaders, is significant. The women at NFL games are usually cheering for the men, but on Sunday, the men were cheering for them.
And women watching at home across the nation took this social experiment one step further, and started pranking their own husbands and boyfriends by filming their reaction to being told that “Taylor Swift helped put Travis Kelce on the map.” It led to a slew of exasperated responses from men rage-listing Kelce’s record-breaking stats. “I think Taylor Swift could really help his career,” women said as their stunned husbands started to visibly shake or flat-out leave the room.
What’s funny about the prank is that we get to see men getting emotional (something women have been historically mocked for) at having to do what women are expected to do all the time: defend another woman’s experience and worth. It’s fascinating to see them being put in the position of needing to defend a man’s accomplishments, in the way that women have had to do for other women since the beginning of time. Women throughout history have had to defend the inherent talent and value of legendary women only to have it be questioned, often by men. Whether it’s having to defend Simone Biles as a serious athlete despite pulling out of a competition or Katie Ledecky for being incessantly compared to Michael Phelps, despite breaking his own records, women are constantly forced to justify other women’s places in the world. And even when we do, our favorite female athletes still get paid less and treated differently.
The men who are being pranked are confused because the ranking and the preferences of our culture have typically been dictated by them. That’s why men’s sports are taken seriously, but women’s fashion isn’t. Or that movies about toys that boys play with are praised, while movies about toys that girls play with are deemed “superficial.” Male athletes are revered in our society, so for women to be questioning their righteous place in society, by suggesting that a woman is responsible for their fame, seems disorienting.
And don’t get me wrong, the anger these men are feeling during the prank is valid! I get it. It’s infuriating to have to explain the merits of a person to someone who is devoted to not seeing them. But the difference is that the disrespect of one male athlete in these pranks is fabricated and that it is momentary. And that for women, it’s neither. The diminishment of our heroes is consistent and it’s real, and it’s a daily occurrence.
The prank flips the patriarchal order. The anger in the men’s eyes is the same emotion I’ve seen in the eyes of women’s when men suggest Swift is not a respected musician. And the difference is that for women, that strange reality doesn’t end when our phone stops recording. We live inside a prank called the patriarchy every single day.
And while the NFL’s Swift era might not last forever, let’s hope its lessons about gender dynamics do. If the summer of Barbie was about men delving into women’s spaces and interests, maybe the fall could be all about women revealing to men what their spaces have been like all along.
