“The Long Tail of the Moment” is a bi-weekly column that examines the cultural zeitgeist—what drives the sudden, violent popularity and massive scale of viral blips/outliers on the erratic graph of popular culture.
Pop culture has a type. She’s devastatingly pretty, she might steal your man, and she’s been haunting our playlists for fifty years. For our parents, her name was Jolene. For us, she’s Gabriela. The story of the other woman never really dies—it just gets a new beat. And the reason we keep singing about her—begging her, cursing her, obsessing over her—says less about her than it does about us.
What’s fascinating isn’t that KATSEYE’s “Gabriela” and Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” echo each other across fifty years—it’s that they still feel so familiar. Female rivalry is one of those cultural tropes that just won’t die. We’ve had at least four waves of feminism and innumerable girlboss hashtags on TikTok. Yet, on the charts, the most potent female archetype is still The Other Woman—the villain we love to fear. The real kicker, though, is that ‘the fella’ never really matters. The boyfriend in both songs is basically a coat rack. He doesn’t get lines, he doesn’t get agency; of course, he doesn’t get any blame (he doesn’t even get a name). Instead, the dramatic showdown is staged between women. If this feels outdated, that’s because it is. Yet somehow, these songs endure across decades, precisely because they externalize insecurity into a single glamorous villain. These songs were never really about men at all. They’re about women looking at other women and seeing power, beauty, and competition.
Nothing preserves the patriarchal framework quite like keeping women preoccupied with each other. Historically, female rivalry has functioned as a survival of the fittest, but it’s really a brilliantly effective diversion. If you’re too busy worrying about how pretty Gabriela looks under flashing cameras, you’re not asking why the boyfriend is apparently unable to keep his eyes (or hands) to himself. If you’re sobbing over Jolene’s auburn hair, you’re not questioning why your happiness hinges on a man’s fidelity in the first place. Rivalry is a distraction—a smoke bomb keeping women from turning their gaze upward, toward the systems profiting from this manufactured insecurity.
Reality television also relies almost entirely on female rivalry for entertainment. The Bachelor is basically one long Jolene stretched out over 12 episodes, and we already know producers script catfights because rivalries have tested better in drawing audiences. Women, ironically, like to watch other women tear each other down. After all, jealousy looks so much better when it’s two gorgeous women fighting on an island in Fiji. Social media follows the same formula: apps make money from comparison—from influencers carefully curating images that make their followers feel inadequate. Advertisers know that women comparing themselves to other women is the most reliable way to sell everything from lip gloss to gym memberships to silicone breast implants. Rivalry is profitable. This is one problem feminism has never fully solved. We’ve gotten better at naming the issue—internalized misogyny, toxic beauty standards, the male gaze. We’ve created campaigns about “empowering each other” and slapped “community over competition” on Instagram graphics. We’ve even isolated the women who are diagnosed as part of the problem as ‘pick-me-girls’. But naming the problem doesn’t erase it. Women aren’t born jealous; our culture is engineered to keep us that way. It’s structural—this low-grade hum of comparison that runs through modern life.
Dolly’s resignation and KATSEYE’s defensiveness echo the same insecurity: there is only so much love, so much attention, so much space, and too many women who want it all. For women, land, labor, capital and entrepreneurship aren’t the only scarce resources. There’s nothing left to do but squabble over every single scrap of acceptance; maybe through subtle competitiveness in workplaces, maybe through backhanded compliments, even through songs about Gabriela. Feminism has advanced rights, opportunities, visibility—but it hasn’t dismantled the scarcity model. We are still fighting over limited seats in boardrooms, limited voices in parliament, and limited perspectives in the media. As long as the space women are allowed to take up remains artificially narrow, rivalries will keep blooming. It’s not that women inherently want to compete with each other; it’s that we’ve been conditioned to believe there’s not enough to go around.
The question, then, must become: what does the continued virality of songs like “Jolene” and “Gabriela” say about us? We loop these songs because they reflect a truth we recognize. We know what it feels like to measure worth against a person as a metric. Yes, the lyrics are cathartic, but they also reinforce the cycle. They remind us that no matter how many times we “fix each other’s crowns,” the image of women clawing at each other is more compelling to the culture at large. Until we crack the hardest part of the puzzle (making women’s connection as marketable as their competition), Jolene and Gabriela and the next Other Woman waiting to take center-stage down the line will always have a place in pop culture. Fifty years from now, another pop star will be begging another rival to back off, and we’ll still be pressing play.
