Back in the good old days when Taylor Swift used to speak out for human rights, she truly gave superhero vibes to me.

I felt like she was a superhero. I felt like she was one of the strongest, boldest, most fearless women in the music industry to look up to.

She was all about women’s rights, supporting the LGBTQ community, and she donated to causes supporting the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.

She used to share social media post all the time urging her fans to vote for democratic politicians.

She spoke out against police brutality, and she was a huge advocate for a quality across the board.

Some of the biggest songs she’s released were huge pieces of evidence that she wanted the world to know what side of history she was on.

I’ll start with You Need to Calm Down. She dropped that song with a music video full of members of the LGBTQ community.

She depicted conservative, close minded people in her music video as hillbillies and rednecks and made it known that she believes the LGBTQ community is full of beautiful people who deserve to live their life freely without being controlled or hated.

Her song The Man from her album Lover dives into topics of male privilege, sexism, and the unequal standards placed upon women in society.

When she released that song, I truly believed she was passionate about feminism.

The song can be classified as a feminist anthem because there are undoubtedly unequal standards placed on women in society that no one seems to care about dismantling.

People who don’t want to be faced with the reality that sexism is still a very real problem will try to sweep it under the rug and avoid conversations about it.

But here’s the truth.

The gender pay gap still exist. Whether you want to acknowledge it or not, women are often offered less money than men to do the same exact jobs.

Women also face workplace discrimination and biases against them if they get pregnant or decide, they want to start a family. It’s far less common to find women in leadership, roles and positions, and one of the big reasons for that is sexism.

And women are disproportionately more likely to experience sexual violence compared to men.

When Taylor released The Man, it was her way of acknowledging some of the unfortunate struggles women are still dealing with.

But it feels like the version of Taylor that was comfortable releasing. That type of music is long gone.

Taylor also released a song called Only the Young in 2020 that addresses gun violence. It’s a topic.

No one wants to talk about. It’s a painful and uncomfortable topic. The fact that our country has so many mass shootings is problematic.

But once upon a time, Taylor was willing to release a song that actually called attention to that topic.

The release of Taylor’s most recent album came across as a bit tone deaf in light of everything going on.

One argument I have for the positive side of her album is that it served as a great distraction from everything negative going on in the world.

So if that’s what she was aiming to do, then she definitely succeeded at that.

Although there are a lot of people who heavily criticized her album, it has still done incredibly well, in terms of streams and sales, so those numbers prove that Taylor’s album is still successful, despite some negative commentary we might’ve seen circulating on social media.

Regardless, I wish it was still the good old days when Taylor used her platform to speak up for crucial causes.