If I were to pick two topics that fell well outside my wheelhouse, they would have to be feminist theory and contemporary pop music.
Indeed, having stopped following the latest musical trends years ago and resigned myself to cycling through my pre-2010 collection of “classic rock” and “oldies,” I was surprised to learn recently that MTV was still around. The channel, once the standard-bearer in youth culture, has waned considerably in influence, even announcing last year that it would stop playing music videos altogether.
Nonetheless, oblivious though I may be to current pop culture, I have a God-given gift for “mansplaining,” and if there is one thing my English-major mind can detect, it’s a good allegory.
So here we go, talking about Sunday’s MTV Video Music Awards, in hopes of examining the sociopolitical dynamics that unfolded at an event I find otherwise entirely irrelevant.
Well, almost irrelevant.
There was one viral performance at the show that left me, like many others, utterly transfixed, and gave me a glimmer of hope for the state of modern music — and masculinity in general — in the midst of its slow, sad, and potentially CIA-backed decline.
Forecast called for a STORM and GENER8ION & Yung Lean delivered at the #VMAs! ⛈️⛈️ pic.twitter.com/iebSZaQpxX
— Video Music Awards (@vmas) September 28, 2026
We’ll get to Gener8ion’s “Storm II” in due time, but first we must address the feminist face-off between the old guard and the new: Taylor Swift vs. Madonna.
PASSING THE TORCH
I won’t attempt to recap (or pretend to care) about what the two feminist icons did at the VMAs — which I did not actually watch — other than the fact that many said Madonna appeared to be sporting a fully-loaded adult diaper.
Always remember to change your fully loaded diaper before heading onstage, Madonna is the latest victim of forgetting: pic.twitter.com/eARBNAXsaZ
— AlphaFox (@alphafox) September 29, 2026
Perhaps the invitation was intended to be a sort of dignified sendoff for the 68-year-old “Material Girl,” in hopes that she’ll soon retire and start wearing clothes more befitting her grande dame status, to put it nicely.
Between her and Swift, the two women swept most of the categories, which was likely part of the negotiation that MTV used to get them there.
Madonna herself drunkenly acknowledged (after pulling some sort of foreign object from her posterior) that even she didn’t know what, exactly, she was getting an award for.
Madonna is a 68 year old retard.
— Retard Finder (@IfindRetards) September 28, 2026
Sunday night at the VMAs she pretended to pull something out of her ass, the crowd awkwardly laughs then she admits to not knowing what the award is even for. pic.twitter.com/SMvCxHwqIl
More important, however, was her symbolic presence there (touted as the only person present to have performed at the VMAs’ inaugural 1984 ceremony) in order to pass the torch to her successors, just as she did 23 years ago with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.
Throwback: Madonna kisses Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera during their performance at the 2003 MTV #VMAs. pic.twitter.com/8yg2ovWkKd
— All Cadence 💫 (@allcadence) September 25, 2026
The success of the entire production rested on Madonna, the leading lady of the geriatric generation, getting the requisite photo op with Swift, queen of the cat ladies.
MADONNA E TAYLOR SWIFT!! #VMAs pic.twitter.com/BXuOYrnBU0
— Madonna Access (@madonnaccess) September 28, 2026
A SWIFT TRANSFORMATION
As a former music writer, I once covered 17-year-old Taylor Swift performing on a barge in the middle of the Potomac River. Sadly, the evidence of that encounter during Sea Ray’s 2007 Aquapalooza event has been all but wiped from the internet.
Nonetheless, my interest in Swift’s music has been limited, at best, since she made the crossover from country to pop, and even less so since she decided to buck the Dolly Parton model by going full-fledged political.
As RedState’s Brandon Morse noted recently, the newlywed Swift seems now to be entering into another new phase of her career evolution.
“Swift used to point the finger at society for the plight of modern women; now she points the finger at other women who are angry that they can’t have what Swift now does,” he wrote. “She was their Captain in the trenches, and now she’s living it up with the enemy.”
For the sake of argument, though, let’s assume that Swift still serves as a stand-in for the new generation of feminists, who have put their careers first while blaming men for much of their perceived unhappiness, because that’s what Swift and other cultural touchstones have conditioned them to do.
By contrast, Madonna represents the earlier generation of feminists who leaned, first and foremost, into sexual liberation, still ascribing to men a sort of social value, albeit not the customary role as breadwinner/hunter-gatherers that they had long performed dutifully.
FEMINISM GETS HIJACKED
It’s safe to say that the women’s-lib movement birthed by the late Gloria Steinem to break free from domestic roles has changed society, in some ways for the better, but left neither of the two sexes better off overall.
A shining example of where young women presently stand was the Lindsay Clancy mistrial, which effectively undermined all previous arguments that the two genders were equal with its attempt to remove any culpability — or accountability — due to Clancy’s irrational mindset at the time she strangled her three children.
At Human Events, editor Libby Emmons likewise made the case that recent backlash against an ad featuring a nude Sydney Sweeney signified not only a shameless double standard, but a blow to some of feminism’s central tenets.
“The quibble with Sweeney is, of course, that she’s a pretty, attractive young woman who is taking charge of her career and using her assets to the best of her ability,” Emmons wrote.
“This is what the feminists told us they wanted us to do,” she continued. “But they don’t like when someone who is beautiful actually does it. Or when someone who doesn’t shout about abortion rights does it. Or when the woman who poses nearly nude on her own terms and to the benefit of her own bottom line doesn’t use her platform to exalt leftist ideas.”
Appropriately, an analysis by the Media Research Center’s NewsBusters showed that Clancy received more favorable and sympathetic mainstream media coverage than Sweeney.
"Sweeney drew more negative coverage on the broadcast networks than Lindsay Clancy, who admitted to strangling her own three children. After her trial ended in a mistrial, the broadcast network coverage was 65% positive." https://t.co/mN4HcDz0pc
— MRC NewsBusters (@newsbusters) September 26, 2026
Feminists’ conflation of their own principles with the Left’s broader socialist agenda has led to an intersectional mishmash of beliefs so confounding that many now think mentally deranged men cosplaying as women, a type of modern-day minstrelsy, should be celebrated more than a successful female role model with whom they disagree on a few basic points.
No woman walks like that.
— Ghidorah (@Ghidorah7exa) September 27, 2026
He's cosplaying what HE thinks a woman should walk like.
Just like Dylan Mulvaney.
This is just a 21st century Minstrel Show. pic.twitter.com/xUptKMD2gn
THE DUDES AREN’T ALRIGHT
Meanwhile, article after article has indicated that young men are dealing with a crisis of their own, an existential loss of purpose related to the attacks they face in media and the culture at large.
“While the gender parity achieved in recent decades was a positive trend, we’ve now swung well past equilibrium,” wrote The Stanford Review in 2024. “…Young men across the United States are falling behind, and the fallout is extreme.”
In addition to marked declines in academic benchmarks like grades and college enrollment, it has manifested in other ways, including upticks in suicide, incarceration, and violent crime.
“Violence, addiction, and self-harm all represent a desperate cry for help from a generation of struggling young men,” it wrote.
Even so, commie constructs like the idea of “toxic masculinity” continue to attack inherently male attributes in order to frame men as the patriarchal oppressors needed to juxtapose against their “girl power” narrative.
“In our efforts to empower young women over the past few decades, we have neglected the unique challenges facing boys,” said The Stanford Review.
THE BOYS ARE BACK
The mess has gotten so bad that even the leftists who have long been milking this culture clash may recognize the trouble looming, with U.S. birth rates in a two-decade downward spiral.
That takes us back to the VMA awards and their need to lightly nudge the prevailing Zeitgeist back to the point of equilibrium.
As much as we all would like to memory-hole Madonna, the flagging entertainment industry, and the overall women’s movement, needs more people like her.
“Madonna is the true feminist,” wrote famed libertarian cultural critic Camille Paglia in a 1990 op-ed for the New York Times.
“She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode,” Paglia continued. “Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising total control over their lives. She shows girls how to be attractive, sensual, energetic, ambitious, aggressive and funny — all at the same time.”
As for the guys, it may be time to channel all that pent-up, aggressive energy into ... dance.
The video for “Storm II,” a project from French-based artistic collective Gener8ion (is it pronounced Gener-huit-ion?) featuring Swedish “sadboi” rapper Yung Lean, was nominated four times, losing twice to Madonna and twice to Swift. But it emerged decidedly as one of the night’s biggest winners due to the stunning synchronized choreography by Belgian Damien Jalet.
The longer version of the video, clocking in at over seven minutes, tells a story of a boys’ prep school devoid of any adult influence, which seems to be a “Lord of the Flies”-esque microcosm for society’s abandonment of manhood, or male leadership, as a social virtue and aspirational quality.
Some toxic parent won't let their son dance "because that's gay" and he's gonna miss out hitting the boom boom cat of this choreo during #GENER8ION's & Yung Lean's Storm II song.
— Sunglasses x Sneakers 🍹🕶️👟👟 (@SceneByAshlix) September 29, 2026
I hate that for him. For us. Let the kids dance.https://t.co/jnMGQOqzgA https://t.co/8gFDYhfalm pic.twitter.com/rFlRAHeZoZ
Alpha male it isn’t. But those who have gotten this far reading about Madonna and Taylor Swift will surely appreciate the group’s broader intent in conveying power and poignancy through its undulating movement — or at least think it’s pretty cool to watch. Plus, it has a catchy melody and rhythm that sure beat listening to Jelly Roll whine about his problems.
It matters very little that they failed to walk away with one of MTV’s moon-man statuettes (Yung Lean actually smashed one of them onstage in a symbolic show of disdain).
And, true, it may not solve all of society’s problems in the push to bring gender identity back from the brink. Still, the video’s viral success is a small but significant indicator that the tide is turning, the pendulum swinging back toward an era that welcomes manhood to have a seat at the table of civilized society.
Get ready, fellas. Tomorrow, we dance.
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