Flawed or Forgotten?: How female artists are sensationalised rather than celebrated

I never have to look up what’s going on in the lives of female pop stars. I just know. It’s everywhere: on my feed, in the headlines, buried in algorithms disguised as ‘related content’. I knew that Tate McRae was dating The Kid Laroi. I know that Britney Spears lit a cigarette on a private jet. But, if you asked me to name Tate McRae’s latest single, I couldn’t, and that says it all.

Sensationalism — the media’s practice of emphasising scandal, spectacle, or lurid personal detail over substance — has long shaped the way female artists are perceived. Rather than celebrating their work, the media fixates on their flaws, dramas, and supposed downfalls. Their lives become public property, while their art is reduced to background noise.

Take Lola Young, a fast-rising British artist. Her TikTok comment sections are flooded with critiques of her weight, her accent, and her supposed industry connections. She’s been branded an “industry plant” due to her distant relation to children’s author Julia Donaldson — though no such accusations plague Elijah Hewson, son of U2’s Bono, who fronts the band Inhaler. Despite Young writing boldly about casual sex and emotional complexity in tracks like ‘One Thing’, most online discourse centres on her appearance rather than her sound. Keyboard warriors questioned whether she was “attractive enough” to be singing about desire at all. Her confidence is seen as a provocation. “Do I not look like I should be confident?”, she has wondered publicly. The scrutiny isn’t just cruel. It’s a distraction from her music, which becomes secondary to her body and behaviour.

This media circus—presenting her hedonism, drug use, and rebellious spirit as signs of deep inner torment, served a strategic purpose

But this isn’t just a TikTok phenomenon. Janis Joplin faced the same kind of reductive framing half a century earlier. A pioneer in rock music, her raw, raspy voice and fiercely independent spirit made her a revolutionary presence in a male-dominated space. Yet coverage of Joplin often focused not on her vocal brilliance, but on her chaotic lifestyle and substance use. A 1969 Rolling Stone cover labelled her as “The Judy Garland of Rock”, linking her to another talented female star whose life was defined by addiction and emotional collapse. The comparison may have seemed flattering on the surface, but it was a backhanded way of stripping Joplin of control over her own narrative, suggesting her brilliance was inseparable from her fragility.

This media circus — presenting her hedonism, drug use, and rebellious spirit as signs of deep inner torment – served a strategic purpose. As academic articles argue, it neutralised “the threat of transgressive womanhood” that Joplin encapsulated in straying from society’s image of femininity. She was loud, sexual, and unfiltered. By sensationalising her as sad and broken, the media contained that power. A woman who is merely tragic is less threatening than one who is in control. Such stories of Joplin didn’t just overshadow her music, they reframed her legacy, making her vulnerability louder than her voice.

This tactic of containment carried directly into the treatment of artists like Amy Winehouse. Despite being one of the most unique and talented vocalists of a generation, Winehouse was largely known to the public through paparazzi shots of her intoxicated, stumbling, or bruised. Tabloid headlines focused obsessively on her addictions, her toxic relationships, and her weight fluctuations, often with gleeful cruelty. Her music — haunting, jazz-infused reflections on pain and vulnerability — was used as ‘proof’ of her inner chaos, rather than recognised as crafted art.

Their work becomes a whisper beneath the noise of spectacle

Of course, the media did the same to Britney Spears. Her recent appearance in headlines for lighting a cigarette on a private jet is just the latest example of how irrelevant behaviour becomes breaking news when it involves a woman in pop. Her decades-long public life has been one of extreme media exposure, from her 2007 breakdown to the 13-year conservatorship that treated her as legally incapable of autonomy. Every ‘wild’ act she performed was covered not as rebellion or expression, but as proof of her instability. Like Joplin, Spears’ deviations from prescribed femininity were sensationalised to frame her as dangerous, then pitied once she was perceived to be powerless.

Roland Barthes’ theory of the ‘Death of the Author’ argues that we should separate art from the artist’s biography – that meaning lies in the work, not the creator. But for women in music, this separation is rarely allowed. Instead, their lives are read as the key to their art, or worse: as a scandal that overshadows it.

This matters. When female artists are reduced to their weight, their relationships, or their breakdowns, we lose something vital: the music. Their work becomes a whisper beneath the noise of spectacle. We don’t need more stories about who they’re dating or how they dress. We need to listen — to what they write, what they sing, and what they’re really saying.