The Old Grammar — Part II: Two Delivery Mechanisms

Contemporary misogynistic content in popular music runs through two distinct mechanisms, and the difference matters — because one is visible enough to reject, and the other is specifically designed not to be.

The first is vertical control: male artists directing power downward at women. This is the legible kind. When the Rolling Stones' "Under My Thumb" presents a man's satisfaction at having brought a woman to heel as romance, the power direction is clear. When Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" collapses consent into desire and frames ownership as flattery, the mechanism is identifiable. When Kanye West's "Gold Digger" reduces women to economic motive and installs suspicion as the default emotional setting, you can point at what it's doing. When Eminem and Rihanna's "Love the Way You Lie" romanticizes the abuse cycle — with Rihanna's own voice singing it, which is its own complexity — the argument can be named and challenged.

The second mechanism is horizontal competition: women aimed sideways at other women. This is the insidious kind. It arrives in women's voices. It sounds like confession rather than attack. And it gets absorbed not as ideology but as reality — as simply how women are.

Dolly Parton's "Jolene" is the purest version in the pop canon: a woman begging another woman not to take her man. The man himself is barely present — a passive object being negotiated over. His desire, his responsibility, his agency: absent. The emotional energy of the song — the desperation, the extraordinary beauty — flows entirely between the two women. "Jolene" is a masterpiece. It is also a near-perfect delivery system for the idea that women are each other's primary threat. Taylor Swift's "Better Than Revenge" goes further, deploying slut-shaming as a weapon against the other woman while the man who created the situation walks away clean. Meghan Trainor's "All About That Bass" is the most sophisticated version of the trap — it arrives packaged as body positivity and female self-acceptance, but the entire frame is still anchored to what boys supposedly want. Female worth, even in the ostensibly liberating version, is still measured against male preference.

Horizontal competition is the more dangerous mechanism because it doesn't feel like an attack. It feels like a fact. The conditioning is delivered by women, in women's voices, to girls who absorb it and assume this is simply the shape of female psychology — that jealousy and rivalry are intrinsic, biological, inevitable.

The honest version of my claim here is more careful than a flat denial. There may well be some evolved substrate to mate-guarding and jealousy; evolutionary psychology has argued that case at length, and I'm not going to wave it away. But the specific form these songs install — that other women are your primary threat, that your worth is set by male preference, that the rivalry runs sideways while the man stands outside it untouched — is not a biological given. That shape is cultural. It is rehearsed and amplified until it feels like instinct. And the installation is most effective precisely when you cannot see the machinery.

The Trajectories

The most instructive thing I can do with these mechanisms is not identify them in individual songs, but trace them across careers — because the direction of travel is where the real argument lives.

Dolly Parton in 1973 is the starting point. The year "Jolene" was released is also the year of Roe v. Wade. Second-wave feminism was still assembling its vocabulary. What a mainstream audience would receive, what a label would release, what radio would play, was genuinely different from what is available now. "Jolene" is not evidence of Parton's failure. It is evidence of the moment she was working inside.

What makes Parton remarkable is everything underneath the surface. She built the blonde-bombshell persona consciously — as armor and as business strategy — in an industry that expected to use her as decoration. She retained ownership of her publishing when most artists were signing it away. She has described the persona explicitly as a construction: it costs a lot of money to look this cheap. And around the same time she wrote "Jolene," she wrote "I Will Always Love You" — a woman leaving a man on her own terms, wishing him well, choosing her own life. Same artist, same era, radically different posture. Parton is the object who became the architect. The persona looked conventional; the infrastructure underneath was entirely hers.

Kanye West is the opposing arc, and the contrast is the argument.

The College Dropout in 2004 is not what his later catalog would lead you to expect. "All Falls Down" is a precise structural analysis of how women internalize inadequacy — it names consumption as compensation for diminishment, gives the woman in the song genuine interiority, and places her pain in the context of systemic racism. That is sophisticated work: a young artist who can see the system clearly and describe what it does to people.

Then watch what happens. By Yeezus in 2013, the women in his music are objects to be possessed or discarded. By the Saint Pablo era, the control of Kim Kardashian's image, body, and public identity has become a central narrative of the work. The man who at twenty-six could name the system had, by forty, become one of its most visible enforcers. Neither trajectory was inevitable — that is the point. The same cultural raw material, the same industry, the same inherited history, and one artist builds outward toward complexity while another collapses inward toward dominance. The direction is a choice, even when it doesn't look like one.

Taylor Swift is the most documented case of a public reckoning with earlier work. She wrote "Better Than Revenge" as a very young woman — the album that carried it arrived when she was twenty — and she later named the problem with it directly, calling the slut-shaming what it was and saying she wouldn't write it that way now. When she re-recorded the album in 2023, she changed the offending lyric outright. The arc from that song to "The Man" — in which she inhabits a male persona to describe what structural advantage feels like from the inside — is one of the most deliberate artistic evolutions in contemporary pop. She didn't simply stop making certain kinds of songs. She named what she had done and articulated why it was wrong. That is a different act from moving on.