From Mother to Woman(’d)

On Interpersonal & Intra-Gender Conflict

Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan

We’re not even halfway through it yet, but 2024 has proven to be a superb year of pop music. Pop giants like Dua Lipa, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, and Billie Eilish released well-received, original work. Olivia Rodrigo added some memorable bonus tracks to her 2023 album GUTS. Charli xcx released BRAT, which I and many others believe to be her best album to date. Tinashe is receiving overdue acclaim for her single “Nasty.” And Sabrina Carpenter is headed for household name status with songs like “Espresso” and “Please Please Please” blowing up ahead of her August album release. But in my eyes - and in the eyes of 21 million Spotify users and 40,000 Gov Ball attendees - there is no pop artist more exciting at the moment than Chappell Roan.

Propelled by her technicolor style, tongue-in-cheek songwriting, outstanding vocal ability, and internet personability, Chappell is the kind of jaw-dropping, in-your-face talent that our generation has been subconsciously yearning for. In a nostalgia-drunk, hyper-referential culture rife with fast-rotating aesthetic trends, Gen Z has been needing a purely original artistic mascot to rally around and Chappell is beginning to look like that. Comparisons have been drawn between her and Lady Gaga, and whether you love or hate Chappell’s music, it’s not hard to see how someone would get there, particularly with her sexually candid lyrics, eccentric wardrobe, and outspokenness about belonging to the queer community. 

Over the past couple of years, Chappell has seen a steady incline in monthly Spotify listeners. But over the past couple of months, that incline has steepened drastically, driven by a notable NPR Tiny Desk Concert and an incredible Coachella set that highlights her latest and most popular song “Good Luck Babe.” The success has many members of Chappell’s fan base excited for what’s to come. Others are worried about what will happen if Chappell gains too much commercial success too quickly, as is the case with many supporters of niche artists who have experienced heightened mainstream growth via online pathways. Twitter users have been expressing their fears of her becoming a sell-out, and of her collaborating with producers who will dampen her sound (Jack Antonoff being one many point to with fear). Chappell has even expressed similar fears herself. At a recent concert in Raleigh, North Carolina, she tearfully paused her set to tell the audience that she was “feeling off” because her “career is going really fast and it’s hard to keep up.”

On paper, it’s quite funny to think about an artist feeling scared about gaining commercial success in their field, particularly in a culture where making a livable wage solely off art-making is a rarity. However, the matter becomes less funny when one looks at the women who have achieved monetary success in mainstream commercial art spaces. There are numerous cases of financial and sexual exploitation - Taylor Swift losing her masters and Dr. Luke’s abuse towards Kesha come to mind as high-profile examples. Many successful, young artists become the objects of affection for rumor mills. They often turn to - or are handed - substances to cope with the stress of being constantly perceived and analyzed. Or - if they’re women - they become the subjects of a kind of widespread distaste that has little to no rhyme or reason. In other words, they get “woman’d.”

In July 2022, Rayne Fisher-Quann published a now-canonical (and since archived) essay on what it means to get “woman’d.” The expression refers to the phenomenon of the general public turning on a well-known and regarded woman all at once because her adoration cycle has run its course. Like clockwork, Rayne writes how women rise in the public consciousness by singing hit songs or landing starring roles, become overexposed in popular media, and then are promptly discarded by the public almost as quickly as they rose in interest. The woman’s fall from grace may be spurred by an unsavory public comment, a genuine mistake, not serving hard enough on a red carpet, or nothing more than an arbitrary vibe shift. “I’ve never really liked her” tweets will begin circulating and compounding under algorithmic dissemination. This “vibes based hatred,” as Twitter user @matildae22 puts it, is not the same as genuine critique, which aims to separate the subject’s actions and humanity. Getting woman’d is about receiving hatred for no easily discernible cause - other than perhaps being too successful, too conventionally attractive or unattractive, or simply too visible.

Rayne cites Anne Hathaway, Britney Spears, and Millie Bobby Brown as victims of the woman’d phenomenon. More recently, I would add The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes actress Rachel Zegler to the list, who routinely receives backlash for actions as innocuous as making direct eye contact with interviewers. Many on my Twitter timeline are joking that Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan are next up to be woman’d. The two artists are undoubtedly at career high points at the moment, having charting singles and having just finished touring with pop royalty. I’ve also seen unfounded accusations of Chappell being an “industry plant,” or having risen in popularity from nepotism rather than talent. Based on their respective successes, I can already see the “Something’s always been off with her” tweets coming from a mile away.

Rayne discusses the woman’d phenomenon as it relates to celebrities. However, I’d argue that it doesn’t just affect the rich and famous, but women everywhere who are placed atop too high a pedestal - which is just about every woman. I’ve witnessed many versions of “woman-ing” in conversations with women acquaintances. A mutual girl friend will do something unsavory - anything from a minor social blunder to a genuine wrongdoing. Perhaps the girl bails on plans because the day has mentally drained her, or she speaks with the wrong kind of tone when addressing her feelings on a sensitive subject. Perhaps she drunkenly spoke out of turn, or simply doesn’t possess “girl’s girl” energy when she’s among other women. In her absence, the circle of acquaintances will descend on the girl with verbal ferocity (“I don’t mean to be a bitch but…”), exchanging stories about the mutual friend that corroborate their ill characterization. This illustration of the girl will often be built upon among the group members during future hang-outs, either leading to her inevitable excommunication or individual feelings of alienation.

It’s always challenging to predict how discussions of intra-gender conflict among women will be received. Too much leniency typically makes the discussion sound like a lukewarm Socratic seminar, and too much sternness can often be perceived as sexist. The reality is that we’re all implicated in this. I often find myself in conversations centered on flagrant gossip about mutual parties - often other women - and it’s challenging to not join in on the dogpiling. Sourcing and hoisting yourself above a common enemy with a group of like-minded women is addicting, it’s an adrenaline rush. 

Some might even argue that gossip was the glue that long held alienated groups of women together for many years. Barred from participation in the public sphere for the majority of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, all that was on the table for many Western women to discuss was within the “private” sector, related to matters at home. Friends, family, and neighbors. Who was marrying who? Who was having kids? Who is feeling dissatisfied with their place in all this? “Gossip” - exchanging tidbits of interpersonal info - was one of the few things women themselves could own, and in turn, was ironically the bedrock for certain forms of resistance.

Our intuition - about people, about ideas - can often be correct. It can often keep us safe. And, like any automatic opinion, our intuition is colored with our biases, those developed from personal experience and absorbed from an overarching, women-adverse culture. These biases paired with algorithms that shave our opinions down to sharp but shallow hot takes are a recipe for quickly turning on a person or idea like a dime. Rayne argues that the only way to mitigate our fantasies of perfect women is to remove them from their respective pedestals and view them as whole humans. Complexity is, once again, the best-seeming antidote for internet conflict, though it’s undeniably incompatible with short-form internet content.

It’s disappointing to fall victim to such thought traps, and yet, we’re only human. Seeing people joke about the inevitability of Chappell or Sabrina’s fall from grace is promising, as it shows some awareness of our collective tendency to punish a woman who has our attention for too long. With so many fresh women artists simultaneously at the top of pop consciousness, I’m hopeful that, perhaps, this time might be different. But I can’t be so sure.

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For more thoughts on pop stardom, check out my article “What Makes a Good Pop Star?”