Student's feminist Twitter take on Taylor Swift goes viral

By Jonathan Short/Invision/AP

A college student is currently making more Taylor Swift news than Taylor Swift.

Clara Beyer, a rising senior at Brown University, launched FeministTaylorSwift (@feministtswift) last week. It has already amassed more than 90,000 followers.

The Twitterverse is abuzz over Beyer's parody account for its content: a steady stream of tweets re-imagining the lyrics of a certain A-list singing sensation. Specifically, the Twitter bursts put a progressive, female empowerment spin on the more traditional hooks and choruses Swift's fans know by heart.

One example of Beyer's work is a send-up of Swift's smash single "Love Story." At one point during the pop ballad, Swift sings, "'Cause you were Romeo / I was a scarlet letter / And my daddy said stay away from Juliet / But you were everything to me / I was begging you please don't go."

By comparison, on FeministTaylorSwift, the lyrics now go something like this: "You were Romeo / I was a scarlet letter / Because I've had, like, 6 boyfriends / Which isn't even that many / Slut shaming is a real problem."

One more example, this one from the Swift hit Today Was a Fairytale. A portion of the original song: "Today was a fairytale / I wore a dress / You wore a dark gray T-shirt / You told me I was pretty when I looked like a mess."

Beyer's revamp: "Today was a fairytale / I wore a dress / You respected me anyway / Because my femininity has nothing to do with how seriously you take me."

As Beyer explained to BuzzFeed, "I consider myself a feminist, and I blog about that kind of thing all the time, but I also LOVE Taylor Swift. Being a feminist Taylor Swift fan isn't always easy."

According to The Washington Post, Beyer is among "those who find some unsettling themes in Swift’s songs and question whether she’s such a great role model after all -- whether she’s someone who perpetuates the belief that there’s only one way to be a 'good girl': to be passive and 'pure,' to wait patiently in the tower for a prince instead of being her own hero."

Beyer is the latest hero in a Twitterverse that often rewards quality parodies. As former Paste BN Collegiate Correspondent Matthew Kenwright wrote last June, there are "hundreds of accounts that parody and role-play as public figures, celebrities and characters. The phenomenon entertains countless Twitter users."

The irony embedded within the current phenomenon: A college student is making more Taylor Swift news than Taylor Swift herself.

While not seeking personal Internet fame, Beyer does hope all the hoopla draws attention to her larger point -- and maybe even impacts the singer she's spoofing.

"I wish Taylor Swift would just have a big feminist enlightenment moment in her life," she said. "I could listen to her songs and feel so much more secure about what I was endorsing. [She] could be a poster child for feminism, if she wanted to. She could take everything she's doing and say: 'I'm a woman who is in charge of her life. I don't let men in my life push me around.'"

What do you think? Is Beyer's own push a worthy one within the larger feminist movement? And should Swift herself become a @feministTSwift follower, a convert to its core message or at least a fan of its inherent humor?

As Beyer told the Post, “I can take a joke. Can Taylor? I don’t know. We’ll see."

Dan Reimold, Ph.D., is a college journalism scholar who has written and presented about the student press throughout the U.S. and in Southeast Asia. He is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Tampa, where he also advises The Minaret student newspaper. He is the author of Journalism of Ideas (Routledge, 2013) and maintains the student journalism industry blog College Media Matters. A complete list of Campus Beat articles is here.

This story originally appeared on the Paste BN College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.