Coming up on To the Contrary, Taylor Swift, E. Rhodes and Leona B Carpenter Foundation, the idol of millions of Americans, mainly girls the Park Foundation and women who call themselves Swifties, is now being targeted by the right wing.
Smart move?
Then how does the reproductive health debate change when men start taking birth control?
(Music) Hello, I'm Bonnie Erbe.
Welcome to To the contrary, a discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives.
Up first, Taylor Swift and unmarried women.
A new and very unlikely figure is emerging as a target of conservatives.
Taylor Swift.
Her recent Instagram post urging her 272 million followers to register to vote drew more than 35,000 registrations on the website.
She directed her Swifties to visit.
This surge represented a 23% increase from the previous year, especially among 18 year olds.
Her recent advocacy comes during her ERA's tour.
Up to now, she's been largely apolitical, although she did endorse Joe Biden for president in 2020.
Many conservative commentators attack Swift for her music, even her love life.
The 33 year old singer remains unmarried and is famous for her.
Many breakup songs.
Some on the left see the criticism against Swift as part of a broader, quote, war on unmarried women, end quote.
Joining us today are former U.S. House Democrat Donna Edwards conservative commentator Carrie Sheffield.
Sam Bennett from the New York Amsterdam News.
And Kyra Davis, host of the podcast, Just listen to yourself.
So, Carrie, I don't get it.
How could conservatives possibly, you know, make advances, gain more followers by attacking a woman who is almost more popular than the Beatles?
I don't think it's productive.
I also think she's urging people to register to vote.
She's not even coming out and saying who to vote for.
Although I actually did write an op ed about her when she came out against Marsha Blackburn a few years ago.
I was disappointed by that.
And that was it.
In a case where she was being very specific about who not to vote for.
The comments she made about Marsha Blackburn, I thought were just really, really un researched and lacking in substance.
And I really miss the headline on the piece that was for CNN op ed was if you're going to talk about politics, Taylor Swift, dig deeper.
So I would urge anybody to dig deeper, including a lot of these young registrants who do register to vote.
Unfortunately There was a study that they make from Ramaswamy pointed out he didn't do the study, but he pointed it out.
I think it was around 60%.
So more than half of today's teenagers said they would give up their right to vote in order to keep Tik Tok for a year.
So I think we should keep that in mind when we're thinking about the next generation that we need to teach civics at the high school level.
And I think that might be why some conservatives are upset about this, about making it sort of like a game.
But I do support voter registration drives.
I think we should encourage everybody to register to vote.
But I also think voting is a responsibility.
It is also a right.
But you shouldn't treat it like a game, Like it's like less meaningful than tick tock.
Donna, your thoughts about whether this is a smart public relations move?
I spent a lot of time doing civic participation and trying to encourage voters.
And I think that in order to reach young people, you've got to be smart and creative.
And I love that Taylor Swift uses her platform and her voice and her millions of followers in order to encourage people to vote.
And I think that the celebrities there are very few of them who have the ability and the kind of platform to do that.
And I look at the criticism on Taylor Swift and it's like criticism of the music.
Well, you know what country, Western blues, R&B, rock doesn't write about breakups?
I mean, that is the history of music.
And so it's kind of an unfair criticism that that's the best they got.
They got to take a better shot than that at Taylor Swift.
This is ridic.
I find the whole thing to be ridiculous.
I actually did a podcast with a conservative friend of mine, and I want to point out there's a difference, right, between the conservative pundit class and then just conservative.
So there are I'm not going to name any names, but there are some people out there who Right who their whole brand thrives on rage.
And that that's probably I could point to many people forget about in politics, just in entertainment generally.
It's just a clickbait game for them.
Conservatives.
You shouldn't be proud to have exited the culture.
You shouldn't be proud to say, Well, I'm not engaging in any of this.
All of its trash to me, because as you pointed out, Bonnie, this is hugely influential for good or bad, right or wrong.
People get a lot of inspiration and a lot of information from celebrities and from entertainment culture.
And you may not agree with those celebrities or you may not agree with the direction of the culture.
And that's fine and that's great.
Get in there then.
Don't withdraw.
Don't be like, well, I'm not even going to pay any attention to Taylor Swift or all I have is negative things to say about her because I don't like this cultural battle.
No.
Get in the cultural space and and get involved.
It's not as ignorance is not a thing to be proud of.
And I'll say this for Taylor Swift, the woman is an amazing businesswoman.
She's an amazing artist.
I'm not a swifty.
I don't really care for her, her stuff.
I'm not downloading her stuff.
But holy cow, guys.
What?
How is she even doing all this?
First of all, she's on a two year world tour.
She's got a new boyfriend.
She goes all his football games.
She goes to a wedding.
She was at Jack Antonoff wedding in the Hamptons this summer.
She's going out and socializing.
She's inserted herself into the Jonas Brothers drama by marching his ex-wife around in support of her.
And I'm like.
Also, she's on tour.
How is she doing on this?
At the very least, I have a deep respect for her business acumen and her artistry.
And no, it's absolutely unproductive.
I don't want to digress too much from the topic of Taylor Swift, but boy, did you hit it on the head when you said about anger.
I feel like.
I mean, look at look at Donald Trump.
Whether you like him or don't like him, he's the most angry politician, national politician I think I've ever seen.
I know I feel that way about a lot of Democrat politicians, too.
Right.
So, Sam, your thoughts?
That criticism is very politically driven.
Turns out single women like Taylor Swift and the women that she support are the single largest driver, that the single most reliable voters in Democratic politics are catching up to African-Americans right now.
So I think a lot of this is politically fomented.
The thing that I find super interesting is when when when people are criticizing Taylor Swift or criticizing the participation of single women in politics as Democrats, they say, it's because they want a free ride.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
All laws and legislation are fairly or unfairly skewed to benefit married women.
So unmarried women are actually voting against their own interests when sometimes when they're voting the way they do.
The other thing I found super interesting in research was that unmarried women are far more likely to think of the fate of other women than are married women.
Interesting.
Why?
My suspicion is, is because there is this sense of we have to have each other's back.
Nobody else has our back.
So we got to have each other's back.
And nothing struck me so strongly when I had the privilege of taking nine of my granddaughters best friends to go see Taylor Swift ERAs tour movie this past weekend.
The Taylor Swift goes out of her way to talk about being a woman.
The difficulties of being a woman, fighting the patriarchy, the difficulties women will face in the world that men don't.
And I was thrilled that all these young women, unlike me, I took all my friends to go see the Beatles when I was growing up.
They all went to go see another woman, so I was thrilled by that.
That is a huge generational change.
I agree, by the way, I grew up, you know, having crushes on only male rock stars.
That's about all there were back then, except, you know, Diana Ross and the Supremes and Tina Turner.
Yeah, Tina Turner.
And also.
And, you know, Linda Ronstadt, Grace Slick, etc..
But it was mainly boy groups.
There were very few women.
And it's amazing to me now, quite frankly, that young women are falling in love with having sort of crushes on a female idol the way that we did on on male, you know, male artists.
And anybody have any thoughts about that?
Well, I mean, don't forget, you know, you've got Beyonce has her beehive.
Taylor Swift hasn't Swifties.
And I think that one of the things that is attractive about these about these women is that they have their own agency.
They have decided that they are going to take control of their own careers, their own branding, their own promotion.
And I think that for young women, there's something very attractive about that in a world in which you could otherwise be dominated.
And they see these women and they identify with them because they control their own lives and destiny.
So I think I think part of the concern with Taylor Swift is her evolution, like, at least for some conservatives that I've heard from, because she came up out of country music, she came up out of that Nashville scene.
She came up, which tends to be more conservative.
And then in some respects, I think her music, it became a little darker.
Like, I was looking at my iTunes.
I don't have anything on my iTunes from her since like 2014.
And I think in some respects, when she made that crossover more into pop culture, like some of her themes, I think it was almost like she wasn't being authentic to her roots.
So I think a lot of people felt like she had kind of, you know, lost touch with.
That's part of why I wrote the Marsha Blackburn op ed, because I'm like, okay, you're coming up out of Nashville and you're writing your publicly insulting a female senator from Tennessee.
Well, guess what?
Marsha Blackburn won overwhelmingly.
So people rejected Taylor Swift's command to vote against her.
So I think there was some of that.
I think also, too, just in general, like I'm I'm generally skeptical of idolizing or worshiping any pop star because look at their lives.
I mean, I'm not talking about Beyoncé or Taylor Swift necessarily, but like you're talking about like massive drug culture, lots of cheating, not necessary people that we should run our lives after.
And for women to like, I'd rather have like the next, you know, STEM star.
Like science, technology, engineering, math as opposed to just being a dancer or a singer.
Again, I'm not opposed to singing or dancing.
I play violin.
I play music.
I'm nowhere near their levels.
But like, I think it would be great to have role models that aren't just, you know, dancing around on stage and maybe lift up some other women as as entrepreneurs and give little girls a sense that you don't have to just do that in order to get cultural approval.
And one last thing about the Conservatives against Taylor Swift.
Will they pick up any supporters.
Going after someone because they looked at her message?
She wasn't she wasn't being partizan.
She was a single registered to vote.
I think that that's dumb for conservatives to oppose that.
Are conservatives, as some liberals believe, going after unmarried women like you should be married and making babies and going to church.
And that's how you should be living your life.
Conservatives as a group are again, I'm not going to name any names, but if there is a certain male out there who is rage clicking, you know, for all the click bait.
Is that who you mean?
Or do you mean like just as a group, as a voting bloc?
I mean as commentators, the ones who are out there trying to influence just average conservatives.
Living in now?
No, I don't think so.
I think the idea of like going after single women is so aggressive, I don't think anybody is going after single women.
I think people are responding to things that are happening in the culture and of course, singlehood is on the rise.
You know, marriage is on the decline.
So when they see these things happening around them and they comment on them, and there's a difference between commenting on things and actually going out there and being like, we've got to rid the world of single women.
I don't think that.
At Independent Women's Forum, we pride ourselves on being a very big tent organization.
We work with single women, we work with married women.
So many of our staff are working mothers, but I'm single, I'm unmarried, I don't have kids.
There are other women on stuff like me, so we have the whole range.
We don't touch the issue of abortion.
We have some women who are pro-choice, some who are pro-life within the movement, and we are growing and and we do we do polling, we do focus groups.
So we are very much dedicated to reaching women wherever they are, in whatever stage of their life are.
And I think, yes, we have a lot of room to grow.
But I mean, just as a case study in Florida and, you know, Ron DeSantis, he outright won women, and just the margin that he grew in four years was incredible.
And we're seeing that in other districts in other states also.
All right, Donna, your thoughts before we go on to the next topic about Are single women being targeted by conservatives?
The research shows that unmarried women live in similar areas.
They share economic status.
They share a lot of commonalities that actually go against the conservative tide.
And so to the extent that there's a targeting of unmarried women, I can see why when they register to vote, when they turn out to vote, they tend to vote more progressively than married women do.
They do tend to think about their broader community and not just about themselves or their individual households.
And so there's a reason that there might be some targeting of them, but I just don't think it really works.
I mean, people come together because they share common features and unmarried women are in that category.
And I'll tell you, I think Democrats are going after unmarried women for their vote and with good reason.
All right.
From unmarried women to male birth control.
Historically, women have borne most of the responsibility for birth control.
But what if men had more options?
Research into male forms of birth control has been slow due to insufficient funding.
There have been fewer than 30 clinical trials for male contraception in the U.S. since 2005 versus more than 500 studies of erectile dysfunction rates for the only permanent method for men, vasectomies have risen by 26% between 2014 and 2021, with a reported vasectomy boom of 900%.
Following the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v Wade.
And now one company is working on what they call Plan A It's a non-hormonal long lasting and reversible male contraceptive.
Its formal name is Vasalgel.
It blocks the flow of sperm for up to ten years to prevent pregnancy.
This advancement represents a potential breakthrough for male contraception.
If men have more options, will that help the country move beyond the Dobbs decision, which, of course gave no federal protection for birth control for women?
Absolutely.
I mean, the unfortunate decision of the Supreme Court, the lack of vision in that decision, of course, is a great national tragedy.
However, I'm deeply encouraged by this increase in male response.
The thing I want to point to is if you look at the ages of men that are talking about in research, it's a young it's a young male demographic that is stepping forward and saying we want to be part of the contraceptive effort.
The other thing I found very, very interesting was Fortune just had a business magazine, right?
They had a recent article saying, hey, everybody, this is a massive market opportunity.
Well, somebody's jump on this one.
They actually cited in in Fortune the unfortunate consequences of the reversal of Roe versus Wade.
And they said, hey, dudes, if someone would just put some IPO money into this, this is a massive market.
Tons of men are going to sign up for male contraception.
Why all the focus just on Viagra?
So I was encouraged that Fortune jumped on the bandwagon.
And my hope would be that the business industry, the IPO, venture capital industry jumps on this one and we see some investment happening in these male contraceptives.
Well, as long as there's more demand for erectile dysfunction drugs that the path of the capital won't change.
But if if there is a change and it certainly looks like there may be one, given the 900% jump in vasectomies we just talked about, then the capital will follow.
Kira, your thoughts on how will women feel about men saying, I'm I'm using birth control, you can't get pregnant.
Guys have been lying to get into girls pants for thousands of years, and that's all going to change.
So, ladies, I wouldn't be leaving it up to dudes because they'll say anything.
I knew a boy who had terminal cancer and still was pressuring his girlfriend to have sex because he didn't want to die a virgin like even.
And by the way, he didn't die.
He he survived.
But even in the face of death, that urge to just say anything was still there.
And so I it's a fun idea, I guess.
And sure, if men want to take it and it's available, I don't care.
Go for it.
I just I don't know.
I think.
Bonnie, you just said it.
There's the market's not there.
I don't.
I'm not a man.
So I don't understand how men think.
Men think on this issue.
I'm.
I'm hitting middle age here, and I have asked, you know, my husband about what we want to do about birth control so we don't end up with some menopause babies.
And his response is that he's very uncomfortable with the idea of him being responsible for birth control.
So right now, I think he's just waiting me out.
He's waiting out the biology of all this.
But I just I agree.
I think the the reason why we don't have this is the market is not there.
I think you have to ask men why the market is not there.
But as far as ladies hooking up with guys who are saying, yeah, I'm I'm on birth control, you're all right.
I mean, we wouldn't even give that advice to guys for women, right?
Don't I tell them I have a son?
I'm like, son, don't.
Don't just be believe in anybody who's like, I'm on birth control.
It's fine, You know?
So we shouldn't be taking each other's word for it.
For that very reason.
And because there are women who get pregnant on purpose, because they want to maybe get attached to the guy long term, or they think that'll work.
Not that it does much anymore, or because they want to use them like a sperm bank.
What would be so bad about both people using birth control?
You would think that, but I don't.
I'm just saying I don't think guys think that way.
I don't understand.
Why not.
You would think that.
I would think a guy, particularly a guy who was paying child support until the child is 18 years old or has a friend or a relative in that situation was told by a woman that she was on the pill and boom, there's there she becomes pregnant with his child would think about that.
And that doesn't seem to stop a lot of men.
I mean, we have a lot of single moms out there who and they're the father of their children is a man who has multiple children.
I mean, that's very, very common.
So it I agree with you.
I just don't think that I don't know why men don't.
But I they just simply don't.
And I don't think , I wouldn't trust a man.
Look, I do think that the demise of Roe v Wade has prompted this conversation about men and women having their own own control of their reproductive lives.
And I think that's a good thing.
Now, I think the questions are different for men and women, and I would not, as curious as I wouldn't advise a woman to rely on a man for birth control, but I would say to my son, don't rely on a woman for birth control, but they want options.
And I think this is particularly true for young people.
They want options.
And if the only option that's available now is a vasectomy, which is only marginally reversable, well, in some limited cases, that's not a real option for a lifetime.
So and demand always spurs research dollars.
And so if there is an increased demand, those research dollars are going to follow.
Well, these are all really interesting questions.
And I think I agree with the consensus says on this panel that women should not rely on men for birth control or believe that per se.
And but I do think it's it is good that you reported that there is an increase in men who are getting that vasectomies which to me signals men are being more responsible players when it comes to, you know, fatherhood.
And we did some pulling in an organization I used to work for with Scott Rasmussen and he found this was specifically looking at paternal responsibility.
78% of Americans in this polling said that if a man gets a woman pregnant, a father is financially responsible for an unborn grandchild immediately at conception.
And when asked when a man gets a woman pregnant, is he already a father with responsibilities to to both mother and child?
71% of Americans agree We need to really focus on not only getting child support for the children who are born, but in my view and I'm going to speak here personally because Independent Women's Forum does not take a position on abortion.
I believe fathers who get a woman pregnant, their father, as far as I'm concerned, and that's where I think we would have far fewer abortions.
And in fact, mothers themselves, pregnant women say this themselves, that they feel like the number one reason the Guttmacher Institute reported that 73% of aborted mothers so they could not financially support a child at the time of the abortion.
So I believe this gets to a much deeper cultural issue that we as a society need to have parental responsibility.
When there are popular and affordable ways for men to prevent conception.
Well, the Supreme Court outlaw it essentially the way it has with birth control for women and abortions.
From my reading of the Constitution, no, I don't believe so, because termination versus prevention, in my view, are night and day.
And the Supreme Court didn't outlaw anything.
They just released the issue.
I do want to mention, by the way, I'm very glad everybody here was incredibly honest about her feelings on this issue.
But I also want to say that there are men out there, I believe, who would be very responsible about about using birth control, telling the women they're with and and being honest and accurate about it.
So let's give credit to the plenty of guys out there who are honest.
I don't know what the percentages, but there are at least there are at least a lot of them.
That's it for this edition of To the Contrary.
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(MUSIC) Funding for to the Contrary provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation the Park Foundation and the Charles A. Frueauff foundation.