Selena Gomez and Hailey Bieber do not hate each other – and their fans can not get over it.
The pair – who’ve been pitted against one another for years simply because they dated the same guy – posed for a friendly photo together at the 2022 Academy Museum Gala this weekend.
Though Hailey has been happily married to Justin Bieber since 2018, she’s been called a “home wrecker” online plenty of times, with fans pledging their allegiance to “team Selena”.
But in one snap, the two women have shared a simple message: women are not in competition with one another.
The image was captured by celebrity photographer Tyrell Hampton, who posted it to Instagram with the caption: “Plot twist.” It’s gained more than 1.1 million likes is less than 24 hours.
“World peace has been found,” one person joked.
“The world is healing,” another added.
But where has this rhetoric come from that the pair are arch rivals in the first place? Because it’s definitely not from them.
In a recent interview on the Call Her Daddy podcast, Hailey shut down speculation that there was an overlap between the two relationships and said some of the hate she’s received has led to her having thoughts on “not wanting to be here anymore”. She also said she’s been on good terms with Selena for years.
But that didn’t stop Selena’s fans targeting Hailey with yet another pile on, which was so bad, the singer and actor had to share a video to her own Instagram asking them to stop.
It seems social media has only ramped up the stale trope of the female feud.
The media loves pitting women against each other (think: Kate vs Meghan, Angelina Jolie vs Jennifer Aniston, Christina Aguilera vs Britney Spears).
It’s so prevalent both on and off screen, that Dr Martha Lauzen, executive director at the Centre for the Study of Women in Television and Film, believes “encouraging women to distrust one another has been a deeply-embedded feature of our culture”.
“There are so many examples of these portrayals, they are almost transparent,” she told Refinery29. “From The Women (1939) to My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), we’re so used to seeing these stories, we don’t even think about them. They’re like the air we breathe.”
But Selena Gomez and Hailey Bieber are showing it’s time to stop positioning women as rivals – especially when the source of the alleged conflict is a romance with a man.
In the era of ‘be kind’ – when we all should be working to stop online hate – the message could not be more timely.