Taylor Swift is notorious for her love and breakup songs, but in her song The Man, she identifies some key struggles that women deal with on a daily basis. Many of these struggles include not being respected or held to the same standards as men in workplaces. As her lyrics claim that if she was a man then, “they’d say I hustled/ Put in the work/ They wouldn’t shake their heads and question how much of this I deserve/ What I was wearing/ If I was rude/ Could all be separated from my good ideas and power moves?” Swift’s main point she is making is that women’s work and personalities/looks are not separated. They’re often criticized for their ideas based on their outward appearances and their ‘moods’. This reminds me of Peggy Mclntosh’s work “White Privilege and Male Privilege” because men have an advantage over women in the workforce whether they are aware of it or not. Similar to Jean Kilbourne’s Ted Talk on Killing us Softly where she goes into the sexualization of women and stereotypical thin women. Women are judged and criticized from a very young age and are treated differently if they don’t fit that stereotypical body. 

Although she does claim, “if I was a man/I’d be the man”(4), which is slightly construed since the idea is not to compare or wish women were men it’s to fix the gap and inequalities that stand between us. These lyrics can be viewed a few ways though because she is trying to show how if she was a man she would be treated differently than she is as a woman. This song perfectly explains how women have to work harder to be in the same place as a man.