The superstar cites ‘the media and stan culture’ for pitting hers and Bey’s tours against one another over the summer.

According to the Law of Diva Physics (Newton’s fourth law of motion), two female pop icons cannot occupy the same space at the same time unless, of course, that space is a stage for an awards show, Vh1 special, or tribute to another diva.

But Taylor Swift and Beyoncé built careers out of defying norms, expectations, and occasionally gravity.

And Swift, recently unveiled as Time’s choice for Person of the Year, was disappointed that her Eras Tour and Bey’s Renaissance World Tour were often compared to one another.

“There were so many stadium tours this summer, but the only ones that were compared were me and Beyoncé,” Swift told Time. “Clearly it’s very lucrative for the media and stan culture to pit two women against each other, even when those two artists in question refuse to participate in that discussion.”

Well, in all fairness, there were a lot of stadium tours this summer — remember Covid? No? Fair. — but the ones inviting the most discourse were by the two biggest stars in music…who are not Drake. But Drake is also in a holding pattern, creatively, while Swift has really seemed to have found her stride, personally and professionally, and Eras was a celebration of her career. Then there was last year’s Renaissance, a high mark in a lengthy career of high marks for Beyoncé, whose subsequent tour was also something of a victory lap.

Further fueling comparisons, Swift and Bey both had concert films this year distributed through AMC Theaters. Yet, to underscore their support of one another, Bey attended the Los Angeles premiere of Eras and Swift returned the favor at the London premiere of Renaissance.

Beyonce Knowles-Carter and Taylor Swift attend the “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” Concert Movie World Premiere at AMC The Grove 14 on October 11, 2023 in Los Angeles, California.
Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. JOHN SHEARER/GETTY IMAGES
“”I’m so glad. I’ll never know what my life would’ve been like without Beyoncé’s influence,” Swift wrote on Instagram after the Eras premiere. “Her generosity of spirit. Her resilience and versatility. She’s been a guiding light throughout my career and the fact that she showed up tonight was like an actual fairy tale.”

The instinct to pit two powerful women together is as old as the idea of a powerful woman, but it’s the power of Beyoncé and Taylor Swift — whose tours legitimately helped boost the global economy and also took Ticketmaster down a few pegs — is what people most responded to.

Though Swift and Bey are completely different artists at completely different stages of their careers, they seem to have more of a cultural influence than, say, Aubrey Drake Graham and his extensive collection of fan-tossed bras.

Swift acknowledges this cultural sway, referring to the Eras Tour, the Renaissance Tour, and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie as “a three-part summer of feminine extravaganza.”

Of Barbie, she gushed, “To make a fun, entertaining blast of a movie, with that commentary. I cannot imagine how hard that was, and Greta made it look so easy.”

And of Bey, Swift also didn’t hold back. “She’s the most precious gem of a person—warm and open and funny. And she’s such a great disrupter of music-industry norms. She taught every artist how to flip the table and challenge archaic business practices.”

Swift sees the blockbuster success of all three feminine extravaganzas as “extremely heartening” since “feminine ideas becoming lucrative means that more female art will get made.”

And in that case, everyone wins.