Sailors of old had many superstitions, but one of the most infamous and well-known among them was that bringing a woman aboard the ship brought misfortune. Supposedly, sailing with a woman ran the risk of both distracting the sailors and angering the sea, ultimately landing the whole ship in a watery grave.
Though we like to imagine the sentiment was left behind in a bygone era, the underlying misogyny of this particular superstition has persisted well into the 21st-century. We see it in school dress codes, which regulate the clothes girls can wear on their own bodies, all in the name of boys’ education. We see it in the workplace, where women have been accused of distracting men from their important work by either crying too much or falling in love with them.
And, most recently, we see it in the viral phenomenon of the “Taylor Swift Curse.”
Taylor Swift had an impressive2023. Her Eras Tour was, and still is, the topic of national conversation, she was named “Person of the Year” by TIME Magazine, and she started dating football player Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs. However, while things seem to be going well with the couple personally and professionally, their fan bases are at war.
Chiefs fans have, on multiple occasions, blamed their favorite team’s losses, and specifically Kelce’s failures, on Swift’s presence at the games.
After Kelce and his team lost against the Las Vegas Raiders in late December of 2023, football fans took to the internet to express their frustration with Kelce’s girlfriend for “distracting” him. Two other failed games this season garnered a similar reaction, and the overall downturn of the Chiefs’ scores in comparison to their previous season has made Swift the focus of multiple thinkpieces attempting to dissect her “curse.”
The “Taylor Swift Curse” isn’t the first time in sports history that a “WAG” (athlete lingo for “Wives and Girlfriends”) has been blamed for their partner’s poor performance on the field. Back in 2008, Jessica Simpson fought accusations of being bad luck for her then-boyfriend and then-Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo. In 2014, actress and model Kate Upton was subject to similar scrutiny while dating Justin Verlander—a phenomenon that tabloids deemed “The Kate Upton Effect.” And Swift wasn’t the only woman under fire in 2023 alone: former WAG Kim Kardashian’s attendance at various European soccer games has apparently been noted as a curse as well.
As a matter of fact, the situation with Chief fans isn’t even the first time Swift herself has been accused of being bad luck when it comes to games. In 2015, there were rumors of her 1989 World Tour stops being correlated with different cities’ baseball teams losing games. She wasn’t dating any baseball players at the time, but apparently just her presence in the same city as the games was bad enough luck to cause a downward turn in baseball players’ performance nationwide.
More recently, while she’s allegedly been distracting Kelce from his performance, Swift’s Eras Tour has been associated with a string of NBA failures, despite her lack of association with anyone on the teams. It seems no matter where the pop star goes or who she dates, she just cannot catch a break.
When added up, these supposedly harmless sports superstitions amount to decades of harassment over individual women’s private lives. Upton had sports tabloids trailing her over a period of years, even after she and Verlander broke up. The same sort of shadows followed Simpson and Kardashian in the wake of their WAG days.
Superstitions such as these are not the same as eating two chocolate chip cookies before every game, or wearing the same pair of socks throughout a tournament. Those are the kinds of beliefs that are harmless whether or not they hold any truth. The “bad luck” superstitions, however, are inherently harmful to the women they’re about, regardless of their veracity.
So the real question is: how has this sort of dated superstition about women followed us all the way into the internet age? And since it’s made it this far, is there any solution?
Well, according to UCLA gender research scholar Kim Elsesser, the reason it has lasted this long is because, at its core, there might be a grain of truth. In 2011, there was a study conducted by Sanne Nauts and her team at Radboud University in the Netherlands that suggested men did succumb to a certain amount of cognitive impairment while they believed they were being watched by a woman. This was in comparison to women’s performance, which remained unaffected, regardless of the gender supposedly watching them.
However, Nauts’ experiment was very narrowly focused, and can’t exactly be applied across all aspects of society. Even if it could be, it’s still no excuse to hold these women accountable for their partner’s performance at games and invade their personal lives.
The narrative being pushed here is one that sees women’s actions and presence exclusively in the terms of what it means for the men they’re associated with. As if that isn’t regressive enough, by viewing them through this lens of a distraction, these women are inherently objectified.
The ideal here would be for a woman’s attendance at a boyfriend or husband’s game to be so unremarkable that nobody feels the need to acknowledge them at all. And perhaps that has been some WAGs’ experience for a short while, until her boyfriend’s team experiences a change in score, or her husband fumbles a play.
There may be hope, though. While the “Taylor Swift Curse” has been going viral, there has been another curse associated with her that’s been spreading in almost equal measure. This one, however, involves the theory that her presence at games actually helps Kelce, and by extension the Chiefs. So in essence it’s just a reversal: when Swift misses games, the Chiefs are cursed.
An even more positive fan theory is by no means a perfect fix. It still objectifies Swift, and definitely doesn’t serve to counter or dislodge the superstitious and misogynistic logic the “curse” concept is based on.
However, Upton, Simpson, and a number of other early 2000s WAGs weren’t allotted such a positive spin and that is important to acknowledge. A more optimistic shift in public opinion provides a kinder starting point from which we might be able to counter the more harmful false narratives about these women in the future.
