In Taylor Swift’s music video for her song “Anti-Hero,” there is one scene in which the word ‘fat’ is displayed on the scale as she weighs herself. According to Swift’s Instagram, the video which she wrote and directed herself, is meant to portray her “nightmare scenarios and intrusive thoughts.” Unfortunately, it’s come to my attention that on TikTok, Swift has been accused of being fatphobic for that scene. One such viral tweet read, “Taylor Swift’s music video, where she looks down at the scale where it says ‘fat’, is a [explicit] 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.”
What makes the situation worse is that Swift has a very severe eating disorder called anorexia. It was revealed in her documentary “Miss Americana,” which was made in 2020, that Swift had starved herself not only on tour but also while exercising excessively. In the documentary, there is one scene where she is in a car and looking at pictures of herself. In that scene, she said, “I’ve learned over the years that it’s not good for me to see pictures of myself every day because I have a tendency, and it’s only happened a few times and I’m not in any way proud of it, but I tend to get triggered by something whether it’s a picture of me where I feel like I looked my stomach was too big or someone said I looked pregnant. That’ll just trigger me to just starve a little bit, just stop eating.”
She goes on to say, “I thought I was just supposed to feel like I was going to pass out at the end or the middle of the show. I thought that was how it was and now I realize: no, if you eat food, have energy, get stronger, you can do all these shows and not feel it. Which is a really good revelation because I’m a lot happier with who I am. I don’t care as much if someone points out that I have gained weight. It’s just something that makes my life better.” “The fact that I’m a size six instead of a size double zero. I mean that was how my body was supposed to be. I just didn’t really understand at the time.”
Swift points out the unrealistic beauty standards in another scene in “Miss Americana” saying, “There’s always some standard of beauty that you’re not meeting. ‘Cause if you’re thin enough, then you don’t have that butt that everybody wants. But if you have enough weight on you to have a butt, then your stomach isn’t flat enough. It’s all just [explicit] impossible.”
In the article “Taylor Swift lets fans down by removing ‘fatphobic’ scene from the ‘Anti-Hero’ video,” written by Maya Georgi, an editorial assistant at NBC News Think, states, “By showing the scale with “FAT” on it, Swift was boldly demonstrating the damage the rhetoric of valuing thinness and demonizing larger bodies has done to her.” She explores the topic even more by saying, “There are many offensive images and lyrics that artists put out today that deserve to be walked back, but this wasn’t one of them.”
As for my opinion, I would say Taylor Swift was not remotely in the wrong, although I was disappointed that she removed the scene. As someone with anorexia myself, I know how debilitating it can be. It’s also not something I like to share and only people close to me know that about me. This is why it’s so important that I’m sharing something this personal with the whole school. How shameful is our culture that we call an anorexic person fatphobic for sharing in a music video how she used to view herself? It would be like me being called fatphobic for sharing that I used to think of myself as fat. I fully believe that these people who called Taylor Swift fatphobic didn’t care about or even consider her eating disorder. Eating disorders are already stigmatized. Do not make it worse.