Creativity Quote by Siobhan Fahey

Calling it “tragic” does a sneaky amount of work here. Siobhan Fahey isn’t staging an academic defense of feminist theory; she’s naming a cultural loss, the way a word meant to describe basic political equality got recast as a social hazard sign. “Dirty” is the giveaway: it implies contamination, something you’d rather not touch, a stigma that spreads if you get too close. The line isn’t really about feminism’s definition so much as the emotional policing around it.

Fahey’s intent lands like a weary pushback from someone who’s lived through pop culture’s long habit of rewarding women for being palatable, “not like that,” grateful, game. In music especially, feminism has often been treated as a career risk: say it and you’re “difficult,” “angry,” humorless, or using politics to compensate for talent. So she frames the problem as perception, not principle. The tragedy isn’t that feminism exists; it’s that people have been taught to flinch at the label even when they agree with the substance.

The subtext is also a quiet indictment of how language gets weaponized. If you can make the word feel embarrassing, you don’t have to argue against the ideas. You just let shame do the persuading. Coming from a musician, the line carries the weight of lived media narratives: women in pop are constantly asked to soften their edges, to insist they’re “not feminist, but...” Fahey refuses that dance, and in doing so, exposes how absurd it is that equality needs rebranding to be speakable.