Considering that fans of Katy Perry, Gaga, and most female singers are, for the most part, women, why is there this ruthlessness in elevating one queen by beating down all the others? The answer can be found in any corner of our popular culture. Take television, for instance: The Real Housewives of Wherever make a living fighting their peers, with the knowledge that, if they are not sensational enough, they will be replaced with someone who is scrappier, while The Bad Girls Club takes this a step further and trades in subtle digs at charity events for actual scratch and claw violence. They're not here to make friends, after all.

Not only are women encouraged to battle with each other, but it's become so mainstream that it's now accepted as entertainment on most television channels, in the pop music world, and even finds itself in real life conversations when a girl hates "the other woman" instead of the man who made promises to her. All of this is a symptom of a culture in which misogyny is so pervasive that it becomes internalized and then perpetuated by the very women that it victimizes.

These unfortunate realities of our society are more apparent in this digital age, in which anyone can write anything from behind a screen, often something too extreme and hateful for them to actually say in the real world. There's no easy fix to this problem, but there is an easy way to make some progress: don't pollute your love of one artist with your disdain for another. If you don't like Taylor Swift or Mariah Carey or whomever, then why spend time and energy saying so? Use that time to support the artists you actually do appreciate and try to remember that there are enough people in this country saying demeaning things about women, whether they're famous or not. Do you really want to add your voice to that?

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Katy Perry vs. Lady Gaga: What Today's Stan Wars Say About Our Culture