What Beyoncé and Taylor Swift can teach us about female mythology
"She's writing her testament." Why women's mythology matters in a time of bro rage.
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This week I have been thinking about how much we are surrounded by men’s voices and men’s stories, and how we really don’t talk about it that much.
And I have been thinking about how the dominance of women’s voices like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift have been a small but significant corrective to that.
Case in point: the Grammy’s last week reminded us that the headlines are all broligarchy all the time right now, but the voices in our headphones are women. And for the last few years, and last decade really, women have dominated pop.
Taylor Swift is everywhere—you can’t escape her if you try (I’m not trying). She has even invaded that bastion of male monopoly: the Super Bowl (I am trying to miss that). Since the Eras tour began, she dropped three more albums, was named TIME's Person of the Year, sold an astronomical total of over $2.078 billion in tickets. She is so culturally influential that she has her own economic indicator called “The Taylor Swift Effect.”
Beyoncé is just a goddess of pop at this point, an icon. GOAT. Her cinching the Album of the Year for Cowboy Carter makes her the fourth Black woman to win album of the year as a lead artist (following luminaries Natalie Cole, Whitney Houston and Lauryn Hill). But Bey was already a legend: she holds the title of the most-awarded artist in Grammys history, with 35 awards. She’s been a cultural force for 25 years, changing conversations around genre, race, gender, history and queerness, and she’s made so many different kinds of hit albums that there’s seemingly nothing she can’t do. As Ky Stewart put it: “There is no culture without Beyoncé.”
And the bench is deep! The whole night at the Grammy’s was about the girls—Gaga, Billie Eilish, Charli XCX, Sabrina Carpenter, and my personal favorite Chappell Roan ran the show. Doechii won for rap album (the third woman do so after Lauryn Hill and Cardi B.) and told little Black girls that “anything is possible.” It was girl joy all around.
All this might sound like a mere silver lining amidst the male grievance tantrum that we’re all enduring right now at a national level. But I think it’s especially important right now.
The fact that women’s voices and women’s stories are being pumped into every club and pub and sporting event, and every department store and pharmacy, not to mention our headphones and family playlists, is material. It matters.
Because here’s the thing: We were all raised on men’s voices, and stories about men, for men.
I don’t think we realize how much our space is filled up with men’s words and men’s stories—we just take it for granted. I don’t think most men notice this, certainly, but women too—including myself.
So a certain ubiquitous insistence on women’s voices in our public and private spaces is meaningful. It’s historic, even.
Once in a while, something will make this snap into place for me, and re-awaken me to the fact that I have been shovel-fed stories by and about men since I was aware of language.
For example, last April when Taylor Swift dropped TTPD, my sister, who is my friend in Taylor Swift discourse, texted me first thing: “Happy Taylor Swift Day! Did you hear she dropped more songs at 2 am? There are 31 songs!”
“I hope it’s not too much?!” she wrote with an edge of nervousness.
I knew what she meant. Since Swift’s year of total world domination, there had been a sense that she might be getting too big, taking up so much space that it would invite backlash.
Later that morning I had a meeting with one of my university students, who is doing a research project on Lilith, the female figure from Jewish mythology. She said that she was hoping that studying Lilith would help her square her identity as a feminist with her lifelong Torah study. With dismay, she counted off the handful of women she had learned about in her religious studies.
“I guess what I’m asking in my project is: can I find a way to see myself in these texts as a feminist, or just as a woman…given the lack of women in them?” she asked searchingly.
And, girl.
There’s a question.
I felt a familiar tug in my heart.
Like my student, I didn’t just hear these stories, I was meant to study them, memorize them, live by them somehow even though my female-shaped life didn’t fit into their narratives.
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Once I started looking into it, even I was a bit shocked. Did you know that in the Bible women’s voices make up just 1.1 percent of the text, for example? One percent!
The erasure of women in the Bible is pretty remarkable really, given that it is very, very, long—covers a lot of history, and leaves out the experience of half the human population. (In fact, it leaves out the half that furthered the human population.)
In the Book of Mormon, which I grew up with, there are only six women in the whole 500-page book. And only two of them have speaking parts. That’s two women’s voices in 500 pages!
Like my student, I was raised carrying around 4 pounds of stories about men, for men. And I wasn’t just meant to know men’s stories; I was mean to memorize them and internalize their lessons.
And this is of course is just scratching the surface.
This isn’t counting the books, movies, music, and art that we learn in school and in pop culture that are overwhelmingly written by men, and about men (and overwhelmingly white).
The history that we learn is dominated by male historical figures and male stories. The majority of books assigned in schools, the “Western canon” are still overwhelmingly written by “dead white guys.”
The rise of these female voices is still a drop in the bucket towards equality—as I wrote about last week, men still dominate in every sector of society (even though there is a male grievance outcry right now that they have somehow been “left behind.”)
And that’s why, given how many stories we hear about men, for men, Beyoncé and Swift’s insistence on telling their own stories as much as they want, unapologetically, for themselves and anyone who wants to hear them, feels so significant.
We are in the era of Taylor Swift and Beyoncé domination and I love to see it, not least because they just keep cranking out music, and stories, and images, and movies, for themselves and about themselves.
It feels like a tiny counterbalance to the man-centric myths that we are surrounded by. A lot of things are “inescapable,” but historically, women’s voices are not one of them.
We live in a world where you can be a man who is a convicted rapist and felon and be president.
We live in a world where you can be a man who is a recorded sex predator who is not literate, and still have tomes dedicated to recording your every word. (In 2004 the Mormon Church undertook a project to put every utterance from Joseph Smith between book covers—from random journal entries to boring old court testimonies. They have made TWENTY-SEVEN volumes.)1
In that context, the cultural myth-making of these two women feels much needed (and the idea that any two female recording artists could be “too much” feels like a joke.)
Ann Powers from NPR, describes Swift as “pop’s leading writer of autofiction,” and notes that this autobiographical bent isn’t just confessional, Swift is writing her own mythos: “her songs are her new testaments.” Which sounds a bit grand. But also, that’s the point.
“For Swift, the best revenge is her pen,” writes Powers. “Using autobiography as a sword of justice is a move as ancient as the women saints who smote abusive fathers and priests in the name of an early Christian Jesus; in our own time, just among women, it's been made by confessional poets like Sylvia Plath, memoirists like Maya Angelou.”
I’m not saying that Swift is writing “poetry” on par with these poets. But she sure as heck understands the power of the pen. And if her ambitions are to write herself into greatness, she’s done it.
Beyoncé, for her part, seems to be treating greatness less as an ambition and more like a duty at this point. Since the very confessional and vulnerable Lemonade visual album (which is more artistic than anything Swift has done to date—as is Cowboy Carter). It’s been satisfying to see her leaving her ingenue youth behind and get more revolutionary and innovative and weird as she goes. Most women don’t get to have a career in the spotlight for this long, and she’s making the most of it. She can do anything she wants to now, and she is.
Both women launched billion-dollar world-tours last year, and crowned them with blockbuster films of themselves, creating their own iconography in real time.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s room to critique both of these artists too. Debate the quality of their work, critique their politics, the particular brand of their feminism or lack thereof. Beyonce is being called out for her silence on some political matters. Claims about Swift’s White Feminism and relationship with the frankly icky Matty Healy remain unresolved.
But criticisms that they are “too much” and taking up too much space are tired and gendered and only speak to their dominance. People feel “fatigue” about the most successful women in the world because they are winning too much.
These two could write 500 songs each about their heartbreak and their petty enemies or their breakfast and we would still have about a bajillion entries to go before we approach anything like the number of male myths and mediocre Deep Thoughts that women and girls have been spoon fed since, apparently, the time of Christ.
A while ago my partner and I were on a walk with one of our good friends who is male, and he told us that his wife was mad at him because he had never heard of “The Bell Jar,” the beloved and iconic, semi-autobiographical novel by Sylvia Plath.
“Have you guys ever heard of it?” He asked. “Yes, of course!” I said. But my male partner had a blank look on his face. “Wait. You two don’t know what that is?” I asked incredulously. I felt my eyes start to go black.
Something in my brain started to glitch as the hundreds of thousands of pages of Hemingway and Steinbeck and Franzen that I’d been force fed over the years flashed through my mind. An image of Phillip Roth’s father shitting himself, from a book that I was obligated to read in grad school, lives rent-free in my mind.
But men don’t know women’s stories.
Do I wish they would read Sylvia Plath? Sure.
But I can live with it for now if they know I Can Do It with a Broken Heart and what “Becky with the good hair” refers to—because, if nothing else, they just can’t escape it.
An earlier version of this piece ran in May, 2024.
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Matriarchy Report is written by Lane Anderson and Allison Lichter.
Lane Anderson is a writer, journalist, and Clinical Associate Professor at one of those universities for coastal elites. She has won fellowships and many SPJ awards for her writing on inequality and family social issues. She has an MFA from Columbia University. She was raised in Utah, and lives in New York City with her partner and young daughter.
Allison Lichter is associate dean at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. She has been a writer, producer and editor at New York Public Radio and the Wall Street Journal. She was born and raised in Queens, and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
It's just always so shocking to be reminded of the actual numbers of women's voices in public sphere and in faith-based places. and how small they've been for so long. I think about the millennia of men who have shaped our understanding of the world -- and how much more work there is to do on this. I really appreciate how you're pointing out that women like Swift and Beyonce are pointing the way for more women's voices to move into the foreground of our lives!
Swift herself wrote about how all her elegies eulogized her in her lyrics for The Lakes. She is writing her own narrative and I love this.
I really appreciate your comments on the bible re: so few women. Recently I was doing some reading for a piece on women accused of witchcraft historically and ended up (don’t even ask) reading a book by Beth Alison Barr - The Making of Biblical Womanhood - in which she writes about how the various translations of the bible have seriously altered the way women are portrayed in the text. Moving us away from a time when women preached, to a time when women were barely able to be involved in church life at all. From woman to wife.
It’s more evidence of that deliberate erasure of women and it serves as a tool of the patriarchy.
Loved this piece. Loved the women-dominant Grammy’s. More of all this. xx