Woman vs. Woman:The Patriarchy’s Favorite Story

It feels like an unbreakable loop: a new album drops and before the music can even settle in people’s headphones, social media has already found a feud. Right now, it’s Taylor Swift vs. Charli xcx, an alleged rivalry that fans, gossip accounts, and clickbait culture are more than eager to inflate. Team Taylor. Team Charli. Fan edits. TikTok conspiracies. Threads full of cryptic accusations. You’re expected to choose. To have a side. To give an opinion on who’s “right,” who’s “real,” who’s “fake.” Loving women equally? Supporting them all? That’s not an option in the marketplace of female competition.

Even when artists directly say that there are no diss tracks on their albums, listeners still go digging. Context is invented. Lyrics get twisted. Every mysterious line must be about another woman, another rivalry, another imagined “catfight.” The narrative is already written, all that’s left is to cast the women who get stuck in it.

This isn’t new. We’ve seen it over and over:
Nicki Minaj vs. Cardi B,
Britney Spears vs. Christina Aguilera,
Olivia Rodrigo vs. Sabrina Carpenter,
Lorde vs. Charli xcx,
and now,
Taylor Swift vs. Charli xcx. 

Take the recent theories around Taylor’s Actually Romantic and whether it’s a response to Charli’s Everything Is Romantic. The internet rushed to build drama out of it. Because drama is easy. Drama sells. And we’ve been taught to find it entertaining when women take each other down.

But here’s the thing most people ignore: even if there are real tensions sometimes, they don’t come from nowhere. Women don’t exist outside the system, they absorb its pressures. Every interview they give, every outfit they wear, every success they have becomes a point of comparison, a ranking, a competition. They’re told there’s not enough space for all of them at the top. That scarcity breeds hostility. Then hostility becomes the story.

Pop Culture Wants Women to Compete, So the System Can Win

A successful woman can never just be successful. There must always be a rival. A threat. A woman she supposedly hates. The headlines need a fight. The fans need a war. Misogyny, rebranded as entertainment.

When two women reach success in the same space, the industry rarely allows them to simply coexist. Instead, they’re pushed into a narrative of competition: one must be “the real artist,” the other “the manufactured one”; “the sweetheart” vs. “the bad girl”, “the pop princess” vs. “the vocal powerhouse”. Rivalries don’t have to exist for them to be treated as fact, tension is often invented first, and only then do misunderstandings, passive-aggressive interviews, and online fan wars begin to follow. What starts as a media storyline quickly becomes internalized by audiences and sometimes even by the artists themselves. The message is clear: women cannot share power. One of them always has to be better.

These women are often labeled feminist icons, yet their feminism is constantly tested by a culture that hungers for proof that women don’t actually support each other. Because the truth is dangerous, when women team up instead of tearing down, they become more powerful. And power threatens the patriarchy.

So we get the same recycled plot:

Women don’t like each other.
Women copy each other.
Women are jealous.
Women can’t coexist.

Sound familiar? It should. It’s the oldest story patriarchy ever wrote.

Breaking the Cycle

If we accept that female rivalry isn’t natural but constructed, fueled by industry pressure, media framing, and scarcity politics, then it also becomes clear it can be dismantled.

With “Girl, so confusing”, by Charli xcx featuring Lorde, the artists attempted to do exactly that. Instead of playing into the expected narrative of competition, they interrogate it. The song doesn’t deny those complicated, uneasy feelings that women are taught to have toward each other, it brings them into the light, it exposes them. Instead of pretending rivalry doesn’t exist, the song cracks it open:

“Yeah, I don't know if you like me
Sometimes I think you might hate me
Sometimes I think I might hate you
Maybe you just wanna be me.”

It’s raw. But it’s also a mirror. These aren’t personal attacks, they’re symptoms of how women are positioned against each other. And the collaboration itself is the antidote: two women refusing to let the industry script their story. As Lorde sings on the track, “Let’s work it out on the remix,” they take tension and transform it into solidarity.

The Real Rivalry Isn’t Between Women At All

Sometimes there are real disagreements, private conflicts, even hurt feelings between artists, they’re human. But the obsession with finding female rivalries isn’t a coincidence. It’s a cultural addiction. It keeps women small. Distracted. Divided. This fascination with girl fights is so normalized that many of us don’t even recognize it as part of a system built to limit women. But it is. And until we refuse to click, repost, or obsess over drama that only exists to entertain patriarchy, the cycle continues. Because women aren’t each other’s enemies, the system that profits from their division is.

by Luisa Gabriel