Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl Is So Polarizing, Swifties Are Reevaluating Their Fandom

Then there’s the song “Honey,” in which Swift sings about how, until she started dating her partner, she had negative associations with pet names. In one instance, she recounts an incident in which “the b*tch was tellin’ me to back off / ‘Cause her man had looked at me wrong.”

Paige says she was struck by Swift casually calling a female stranger a “b*tch” throughout the track, given the musician’s thorny history with the word. The singer’s well-publicized feud with Kanye West largely stemmed from him writing the lyric “I made that b*tch famous” about her on his 2016 song “Famous.” Although Swift didn’t consent to West using the lyric, his then-wife Kim Kardashian posted an edited clip in which Swift seemingly agreed to it, sparking a massive backlash against Swift that partially inspired her to make Reputation.

“It was shocking to me that a word that had such a detriment to her personally, and to the trajectory of her career, is now being thrown loosely into conversations about other women,” Paige says.

In contrast to her casually misogynistic lyrics on “Honey,” Bonnie points to a scene in Miss Americana in which Swift talks about working to “deprogram the misogyny in my own brain.”

“There’s no such thing as a sl*t, there’s no such thing as a b*tch,” Swift said in the documentary. “Toss it out, reject it, and resist it.”

Outside of these moments, some fans also argued that the actual content of The Life of a Showgirl didn’t match the album they’d been sold. Swift has reflected on the glittery blood, sweat, and tears that go into entertaining millions before, in songs like Red’s “The Lucky One” and Tortured Poets’ “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart.” Yet outside of the title track, some Swifties found that the album didn’t say much about being a showgirl at all. Curiously, other major 2025 pop songs have already waxed poetic about themes of fame and on-and-offstage affirmation, such as Lady Gaga’s “Perfect Celebrity” and Addison Rae’s “Fame Is A Gun.”