Olivia Wilde has earned the ere of netizens after seemingly including herself in Taylor Swift’s narrative.
Over the weekend, Wilde reshared a tweet calling out Swift’s relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end, Travis Kelce, to her Instagram Story. The post read: “I wish Taylor Swift was in love with a climate scientist.”
While the subtext of the tweet is seemingly rooted in internalised misogyny—because it’s not the duty of a pop star to ensure the climate crisis is front and centre in our lexicon and media cycle through her love life—Wilde’s apparent minimisation of Swift has been subsequently dragged on social media.
Just as quick as Wilde was to jump in to vocalise her sentiments on the #Traylor phenomena, X users have swiftly thrown Harry Styles into the proverbial sparring ring, too.
“Who is Olivia Wilde to say sh*t,” wrote one user. “I don’t remember Harry Styles restoring the ozone when they were dating,” the user continued, referencing Styles and Wilde’s two-year relationship from 2020 to 2022.
“Olivia Wilde posting this even tho she flew private with Harry is peak hypocrisy,” another alleged.
As expected, staunch Swifites have also picked apart Wilde’s history with fighting the climate crisis, (which, from a quick Google search, is sporadic at best).
Wilde’s divisive rhetoric seemingly suggests that the Grammy Award winner should be more vocal about environmental causes rather than using her downtime to attend her boyfriend’s football matches.
While our collective attention should be on mitigating the cataclysmic impacts of global boiling, it’s dangerous to cite one woman’s influence as the changing tide needed to alleviate the current issues at hand.
Only make matters worse is the fact both Wilde and Swift share an ex-boyfriend in Styles, with the calling out of her most recent boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend being interpreted by internet users as ‘bitter’.
Neither Swift or Wilde have responded to the online vitriol, but if history has taught us anything, it’s that Swift would very much like to be excluded from the discourse.