I was puzzled by younger women’s reaction to Barbie. It turned out Gen Z men held the answer | Gaby Hinsliff

Where I saw colour and fun, they saw the reflection of something darker: a new generation of men who fear feminism

Taylor Swift is many things. But she did not, at least until recently, look like the battleground on which an election could be fought.

Though on reflection, maybe it makes a weird kind of sense. Like Donald Trump, whose allies are said to be threatening a remarkably silly-sounding holy war" against the singer, Swift is an unstoppable cultural phenomenon with a deep hold over the American psyche. She epitomises what many young women want to be - powerful but joyful, financially independent, patently not in need of a man but having zero trouble getting one - while he stands for all those threatened by this subversion of the patriarchal order.