The MTV VMA nominations were revealed on July 21, and long before anyone started any foam-finger-waving, microphone-stealing business, the show was already causing a stir. Taylor Swift and Nicki Minaj got into it over Twitter about the nominations and reminded us just how completely ridiculous fights on the Internet can be. Here’s what went down in what might be the weirdest Twitter feud to ever exist.
After learning of the nominations, Minaj expressed frustrated sentiments on Twitter about the fact that her "Anaconda" video was not nominated for Best Choreography or Video of the Year. She has a lot of support for this case, too. There's plenty of evidence that the video was notably impactful on pop culture over the last 11 months — it was featured in an "Ellen" skit, in a Vogue video of models during fashion week and broke the VEVO record for most views in 24 hours. (That record had previously been held by Miley Cyrus's controversial “Wrecking Ball” video that also happened to win Video of the Year.) "Anaconda" was provocative, bold and important for the way it unapologetically featured curvaceous black women and spoofed pop culture. And Minaj was pissed when it wasn’t nominated for Video of the Year at the VMAs. She took to Twitter to express her discontent with the fact that she felt snubbed:
While Minaj's mention of "celebrating women with very slim bodies" was vague, it's not hard to presume that her tweets might have been about Swift, who received a total of nine VMA nods this year, including one for her “Bad Blood” video, which features more than 20 of her girlfriends, many of whom are white supermodels. Swift immediately assumed that the tweets were about her, and responded to Minaj right away:
And then Nicki got confused…
See, Minaj wasn’t originally taking a jab at Swift or her video, but was instead speaking out about a culture that admires thin white women while portraying black women as angry and crazy. She was acknowledging a difference between the way the media treats black women and white women, which undoubtedly affects pop culture. We may all be women together, but Minaj knows that women are unfortunately still divided by racial and cultural lines, and not all women receive the same treatment across the board.
Since retreating from the media’s portrayal of her as a boy-crazy serial dater, Swift has responded by surrounding herself with a large group of female friends and spoken much about her position as a self-declared feminist and supporter of fellow women. In short, she insists that she’s a true feminist because she believes in supporting other women. If you look a little closer, it’s really just Swift’s way of using the notion of feminism and its significance culturally at this moment in time for her own benefit. She has a whole bunch of beautiful friends and even invited fans at her concerts to consider themselves her “friends.”
At the end of the day, Swift should have *silently* realized that her image and her video were playing into stereotypes our society has created. That’s OK, and can even be considered a consciously smart move on her part to exploit those things for her own benefit —that doesn’t make it right, but that’s another issue.
But Swift's tweet was a misstep; her defense completely missed the mark and didn’t even relate to the subject of Minaj’s original complaints. But it sure did put her under fire. Not only did it sort of blow the cover off of Swift’s feminist disguise, it also made her look insensitive and unaware that not everything is about her. Basically, she picked a fight with Minaj for no apparent reason.
It’s not either woman's fault that our culture is structured in a way that values the kind of women in Swift's video over the ones in Minaj's, but Swift should have been aware of this. If anything, it should be a lesson for Swift to stay humble and self-aware, since Minaj wasn’t even talking about her specifically in the first place.
OH, and then on July 22, Katy Perry chimed in, offering her two cents on the fact that Swift’s much-nominated “Bad Blood” music video is widely believed to be about a disagreement with Perry.
Eventually, after much negative reaction to her misstep, Swift took to Twitter again on the morning of July 23 to apologize to Minaj for her misunderstanding:
