Jessica Vieira | Editor-In-Chief
This football season, while Taylor Swift was supporting her boyfriend at Chiefs football games, she was on screen for five minutes. On average, she appeared on screen for 25 seconds per Chiefs game, and at the Super Bowl, she was featured for 54 seconds, making up 0.36% of the entire broadcast. Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool, every straight man’s crush, was shown for 2 minutes in the teaser trailer for the new Deadpool movie, almost double Swift’s screen time.
Showing fans and players’ guests on screen during these games is a tradition taken on by almost every professional sport. The cameras are not controlled by celebrities and family members. Taylor Swift has made $4.1 billion on the Eras Tour alone, and does not need cheap publicity from the camera-people working for the NFL. What is so upsetting to football fans about Taylor Swift?
A recent study (among other similar studies) showed that men perceive that if a group of people in a room contains 17% women, they will think that the room has an even split between men and women. If that number increases to 33% women, men will think that the room is being overtaken by women. There is also an aversion that men have towards anything that a teenage girl might like. If a man is caught thinking “hey it doesn’t really matter to me that Taylor Swift is at a football game and the NFL is capitalizing off of her success,” he might run the risk of coming across as soft or gay to his friends.
This fact, and the inflammatory incitation of anger and outrage by far-right news organizations and influencers that has made it impossible for their audience to engage in critical thinking skills, makes for the outrage that has come about Taylor Swift, and proves her many feminist songs correct.