Gender Norms in Contemporary Pop Music

For my Gender and Society course taught by Dr. Sechrist, I had to complete a research project analyzing movies or music. I chose to analyze contemporary pop music, using artists such as Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, Bruno Mars, and Harry Styles. My objective was to explore how female and male pop artists use their lyrics to construct and challenge traditional gender norms.

When starting my research, for each artist, I selected one song that fit feminine themes, and one that fit masculine themes: Taylor Swift’s “The Man” and “You Belong with Me”, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Feather” and “Nobody’s Son”, Bruno Mars “24K Magic” and “When I Was Your Man”, and Harry Styles’ “Woman” and “Treat People With Kindness”. I listened to each of the songs multiple times and analyzed each line, completing a coding sheet for each song. When coding lyrics, I created a concept list of themes to look for. Examples include vulnerability, empowerment, and self-sexualization. In every line of every song, I wrote down the themes that I noticed. After doing that, I cited three main topics that compiled into the overall topic of gender norms. The recurring themes were Sexual Double Standard, Reversal of Gender Norms, Romantic Stereotypes.

For the presentation I gave specific examples of each song for each theme, but I will share only one example here. Starting with Sexual Double Standard, in Taylor’s “The Man”, she describes that there is a double standard and that societies perception is different for men and women, because if she were to behave how men stereotypically do (date around, be the alpha type, flash lots of money), she would be judged harshly. But men are celebrated and viewed as cool and suave for that behavior. This can be seen in many lyrics such as, “I would be complex, I would be cool. They’d say I played the field before I found someone to commit to. And that would be okay for me to do.”

Next with the Reversal of Gender Norms, In Bruno’s “When I Was Your Man,” he sings about being heartbroken and lists the things he should have done when they were together, and how he could have been a better man to her. The line “My pride, my ego, my needs, and my selfish ways. Caused a good strong woman like you to walk out my life” shows him being emotional and devastated, which are normally emotions deemed as feminine.

The last recurring theme is Romantic Stereotypes. In Swift’s “You Belong With Me,” she is vulnerable and describes her longing and infatuation for a boy that does not seem to notice her. She compares herself to his girlfriend with, “she wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts” and “she wears high heels, I wear sneakers.” This reinforces the “Good Girl vs. Bad Girl” stereotype, and the “girl-next-door” trope, where the modest, sweet, overlooked girl deserves the boy.

At the end of my study, I concluded that contemporary pop music actively reflects, reproduces, and challenges cultural expectations about gender. The patterns I found throughout the songs show how pop music both mirrors and critiques societal beliefs about masculinity and femininity. Ultimately, I found that the songs reveal that gender is not fixed. There is no answer to how male or female artists specifically construct or challenge gender norms overall, because music artists regularly question, resist, or reinforce gender norms in complex and meaningful ways.