‘Let’s Work It Out on the Remix’: What Celebrity Feuds Say About Feminism in the 2020s
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The media’s favourite girlboss era has collapsed under its own corporate slogans as politics grow more divisive, cultural moods swing backward, and women are once again cast as competitors. Pop music hasn’t escaped this turnaround. The industry that used to celebrate feminist solidarity now thrives on female rivalry.
Take the biggest name in pop right now: Taylor Swift. Once a self-proclaimed feminist, Swift spent much of the 2010s fighting sexism in the music industry, learning to “deprogram the misogyny in (her) own brain.” Yet, the Taylor we see today feels different. Her new track Actually Romantic feeds into the very narrative feminism once sought to undermine, the very narrative Taylor herself used to reject: that women can’t coexist without competition. The song has been widely interpreted as a response to Charli XCX’s Sympathy is a knife, which explored Charli’s envy of Taylor. Still, for a person who used to pride herself on “trying to be as educated as possible on how to respect people”, there’s nothing particularly respectful about how Taylor calls Charli out for substance abuse in her lyrics.
Unlike Swift, who has reigned over pop for more than a decade, Charli XCX spent years as a ‘one-hit-wonder’. Envy makes for great inspiration when success doesn’t. After all, even though Brat finally propelled her into full-blown stardom, she’s still nowhere near Taylor Swift. Charli described Sympathy is a knife as “about me and my feelings and my anxiety”, but while all feelings are valid, all behaviours are not. Wishing for Taylor and her ex-situationship Matty Healy “to break up soon” was mean and unnecessary. There’s a difference between not feeling good enough and dragging someone else down to make yourself feel better.
If Sympathy is a knife had been released in 2016, Charli likely would’ve been criticised for “bringing another woman down,” particularly one who had helped her career. So, how come the audience applauded Brat? What changed? There has been a shift in the tone of pop culture; the current climate no longer demands that women perform relentless solidarity to prove they’re “good feminists.” The public seem more willing to accept emotional complexity, to admit that women can feel conflicted, even envious.
Girl, so confusing is another of Charli’s songs targeting a fellow artist, Lorde, who had long been a peer Charli was compared to; since both women create similar, introspective pop. Unexpectedly, instead of letting the tension fester, Charli reached out to Lorde with a voice memo, letting her know the song was about to be released. Rather than ignoring the hostility, the two re-recorded the track and quite literally “worked it out on the remix.” The result was widely celebrated in the media, recalling the good old days of pop feminism, when ‘women supporting women’ still meant something and female artists were praised for sticking together instead of tearing each other down.
In 2025, that version of feminism is almost extinct, which is why Girl, so confusing felt revolutionary. The remix serves as a reminder that women can still acknowledge rivalry without turning it into hostility. Charli and Taylor, on the other hand, embody the opposite: the erosion of that girls’ girl solidarity that used to define pop feminism. While Taylor’s diss track was a petty move, Charli did undermine the supposed spirit of sisterhood by not reaching out to her in the first place. Both Taylor and Lorde had no idea they even had “beef” with Charli, which makes it all the more telling that she only confronted one of them. It seems like being a girls’ girl is conditional: it’s easy when you’re equals, impossible when you’re not. Why face the giant when you can spar with someone your own size? Taylor isn’t just another pop girl; she is the industry. And that kind of power clearly doesn’t invite sisterhood - it demands survival.