Zayn Malik recently retweeted this tweet.
Many fans debate about the depth of the tweet with some fans taking it as a slam to Malik’s ex, Perrie Edwards of Little Mix, while others claim “it ain’t that deep” and that Malik was simply showing his preference of song.
Either way the retweet is taken, a deeper meaning is important to understand.
Despite whatever has gone down that we haven’t seen between Zayn Malik and Perrie Edwards, it’s important to acknowledge when wrongs are done especially when it is detrimental to women being validated.
The problem isn’t just that the tweet was retweeted by Zayn. The bigger problem is that women are constantly pitted against eachother and that Zayn retweeting that tweet just encourages fans to pit women against eachother too.
Little Mix and Fifth Harmony are both successful, vocally gifted, inspirational, and beautiful groups of women.
The media constantly pits women against eachother instead of keeping this catty behavior out of matters and simply acknowledging and celebrating the accomplishments of female artists. Constantly showing women as catty gives the stereotype that women don’t get a long or can’t work together and takes away success of women to sell a cheap drama filled narrative of “cat fighting”. Women only being seen as catty also discourages “Girl Power” which is strong females working together; we at CelebMix highly encourage and look out for Girl Power.
This behavior of media (and stars that encourage it) is unacceptable and only makes the problem more real and even worsens it.
Many fans of Zayn Malik began debating and defending his retweet immediately on Twitter.
I appreciate some fans who pointed out the double standards of a man and women’s actions in the face of a very public break up
https://twitter.com/njh20s/status/632780894529568768?s=09
This isn’t the first time we see such double standards, usually in the form of slut shaming (for example, a male being praised for a nude photo where a women is only shamed for the same thing). This is another huge issue of inequality of the sexes through society and shoes how social media harassment and judgement can be worse for females.
In no way is Zayn the first to encourage pitting women against eachother and he won’t be the last but this event is merely another reason to get this topic recognized and realize the problems of media and society and how female artists are viewed.