Some Taylor Swift Fans Are Calling Out Her New Video As 'Fatphobic' & Here's Their Issue
"A sh*tty way to describe her body image struggles."
Taylor Swift. Right: Taylor Swift stands on a scale in her "Anti-Hero" music video.
Taylor Swift released the official music video for her track Anti-Hero from her tenth album Midnights, and she's already getting a lot of criticism about how she portrayed one scene.
In the video, the Grammy-winning singer meets the anti-hero version of herself and while many are loving her new song, others are calling the musician "fatphobic" over what happens when Swift stands on a bathroom scale.
In the music video, Swift stands on a scale to weigh herself and the scale simply says "fat."
The anti-hero version of Swift then shakes her head at Swift who continues to stand on the scale.
This scene likely references Swift's own struggles with an eating disorder, which she has spoken about in the past.
In the 2020 Netflix documentary Miss Americana, Swift talks about how she stopped eating after seeing pictures of herself.
The scene in the video has stirred up a debate on Twitter, with many people accusing the singer of "fatphobia."
"Taylor Swift’s music video, where she looks down at the scale where it says 'fat,' is a sh*tty way to describe her body image struggles. Fat people don’t need to have it reiterated yet again that it’s everyone’s worst nightmare to look like us," one person wrote on Twitter.
"As an actual fat person genuinely how are we supposed to feel seeing this? watching a thin person remind the whole world that one of their biggest fears is being fat. is looking like me. demonizing the word fat while never having the experience of living in a fat body? fatphobic," another person tweeted.
"Having eating disorders is not an excuse to feed into the narrative that you talk about society making people believe that being fat is unattractive. This video does that. If she can't see it because of her issues, she still has people in her team that should have told her," another person notes.
Others have come to Swift's defence saying she has the right to discuss her feelings through her music.
"It’s about her own mental insecurities and how they feed into her own self perceptions. It’s about defying those perceptions and identifying what’s really important. If you can’t see that then I can’t help you," one Tweet reads.
"She literally has spoken about her ED [eating disorder] in the past and how she struggles with it, not everything she does has to be universally relatable. She’s clearly condemning this view in the MV….it’s calling artistic analysis," another tweet states.
Beyonce and Lizzo have also been called out as insensitive after releasing new music over the last year. Each of them responded by tweaking parts of their work that people said were problematic.
Whether Swift will take the same measures by changing the scene in the video, only time will tell!