Taylor Swift had to water down her artistic expression and how she chose to portray her lived experience with eating disorders because people found the use of the word “FAT” in her “Anti-Hero” video offensive.
During a scene in her “Anti-Hero” visual, Swift originally looked at a scale, and instead of her weight, the word “fat” appeared in capital letters. Some people found the imagery problematic, calling the scene fatphobic because it “reinforces the idea that ‘fat’ is just as bad,” according to The Cut. Now the close-up of the scale has been completely cut from Apple Music and YouTube.
But the picture was simply a representation of Swift’s struggle with eating disorders. If fans can decipher the tiniest Easter eggs in Swift’s videos, they can also understand that Swift’s comment about feeling “FAT” might actually represent her real-life, personal body image issues, looking at the scale, given the context of what She has shared in the past.
Put simply, it’s not that she thinks being fat is a bad thing, it’s that she’s been told it is.
Ahead of her 2020 Miss Americana documentary — in which she spoke about stylists and editors praising her body when she was thinner — Swift described her relationship with food as “unhealthy.”
“I figured I should feel like I was going to pass out at the end of a show or in the middle,” she told Variety, adding that she would lie to people, “Of course I eat . I exercise a lot…but I haven’t eaten.”
“My relationship with food was exactly the same psychology that I applied to everything else in my life: if I got a smack on the head, I recognized it as good,” she said at the time. “If I got a penalty, I registered it as bad.”
Miss Americana shared how she’s learned to embrace her body at any weight and improve her relationship with food: “If you’re skinny enough, you don’t have the butt that everyone wants. But if you’re heavy enough to have an ass, your stomach isn’t flat enough. It’s all just bloody impossible,” she said.
Swift’s lived experience aligns with many people who live with body image issues. According to the National Organization for Women, 78 percent of 17-year-old girls report being “dissatisfied with their bodies,” and more than 20 million women experience a clinically significant eating disorder at some point in their lives.
Swift’s removal of the scene also sparks conversation about the dystopian feel that comes when artists water down their expression due to online complaints. In August, both Lizzo and Beyoncé removed lyrics from their songs after activists described the words as reading.
As Rolling Stone’s Jeff Ihaza put it, “It’s hopeful to see artists willingly make changes to their songs to move towards a more empathetic way of handling controversy, where people who are being treated unfairly speak out and make changes.” can cause. But there looms an uncanny possibility that big releases will generally feel less permanent.”