Dump anyone who uses the #IDumpedTaylorSwiftBecause hashtag

By Fusion Staff | June 3, 2016 | 2:47pm

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Taylor Swift is (maybe) having a terrible week. She and her boyfriend of a little over a year, hot DJ Calvin Harris, have apparently broken up. Rumors of their breakup first swirled on Wednesday, after unnamed sources spoke to People, then Calvin Harris (real name Adam Richard Wiles) tweeted—and Swift retweeted—this message last night:

https://twitter.com/CalvinHarris/status/738499678296121344?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

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The pair seems to be handling their split with enviable maturity. As for the internet? Not so much.

Oooh boy, it has been two days since this news broke, but people have already found a way to make what is probably a hard time in this very talented human’s life even worse. #IDumpedTaylorSwiftBecause is now trending on Twitter, thanks to haters (gonna hate, hate, hate, hate hate) listing the reasons why they would have dumped a woman who is almost certainly hundreds of miles out of their league.

To paraphrase Taylor herself, all these are is mean. In all honesty, these tweets could be a lot worse. The internet is a terrible place to be a woman of prominence. But that’s exactly the problem here: If a woman’s relationship fails, she is blamed for it no matter what.

To be clear, this is a silly little breakup. This is not the end of the world. And this hashtag shouldn’t be that big of a deal—except that there are never trending topics about why people break up with men. The assumption here is that Taylor Swift deserved to be broken up with, which, sure, maybe. We have no idea. It’s hard to be in a relationship, and it’s even harder to be in one that’s under public scrutiny 24/7.

We could argue that the reason that everyone is focused on Taylor Swift in this breakup is because Calvin Harris is only marginally famous. He has a few popular songs, but isn’t nearly as firmly on the public radar as Taylor Swift.

But what about Johnny Depp? No one is tweeting #IBrokeUpWithJohnnyDeppBecause in a week where his soon-to-be ex-wife Amber Heard has accused him not only of being a bad husband, but of physical assault and blackmail. We didn’t see a #DumpJay hashtag trending after Beyoncé’s Lemonade implied he had cheated on her. No one made fun of Chris Martin for the term “conscious uncoupling” even though the letter that used that phrase was signed not just by Gwyneth Paltrow, but by him, too. The blame for the public dissolution of a (heterosexual) relationship is almost always placed on the female partner.

Of course, none of these tweets really matter. They are dumb jokes. But the heart behind them is marinated in bitterness and misogyny.

Kelsey McKinney is a culture staff writer for Fusion.