Yes, Taylor Swift's Music Video is Fatphobic

But don't worry, she won't be cancelled any time soon.

As a white woman in her thirties, it’s fair to say I am familiar with the songs of one Taylor Swift.

I can’t hear the word “bleachers” without humming the tune of You Belong With Me under (sometimes over) my breath; I saw her live in Dublin, sang along breathlessly to Bad Blood and Shake it Off and We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together; I’ve even spent more time than I’d like trying to find a particular T-shirt I saw once that said “give the scarf back, Jake”.

Though I didn’t pre-order the new album, Midnights, or stay up to listen to it when it dropped at, well, midnight, I did listen to it the day it was released. More than once.

I then watched the video for Anti-Hero and thought, well this – a video in which Taylor is confronted with her own inner critic, another version of Taylor, as well as, er, a giant version of Taylor – is quirky.

But when Taylor steps up on the scale and looks down to see what we’re meant to understand is her worst fear, realised – the word “FAT” where the numbers should be – I thought, well this is kind of shitty, Tay-Tay.

Let’s get one thing straight, for starters: Taylor wouldn’t be the only thin, white woman for whom the very notion of fatness is terrifying. We’ve all grown up in this world, as I’ve said more than once, a world in which thin is beautiful and fat is, among other things, lazy and weak-willed and unattractive and unhealthy and, and, and.

It’s not shocking for someone like Taylor to fear being fat, even to think of it as one of the worst things she could ever be. What is shocking is that, in the creation of the Anti-Hero video, no one stopped to think, maybe we shouldn’t be perpetuating the damaging idea that being fat is terrible, especially when the target demographic for Midnights is an audience of Swifties who are majority female, in their late teens and early twenties.

According to the National Eating Disorders Association, women aged 15-24 comprise the only group in which the incidence of anorexia has increased over the past 50 years. And according to John Hopkins, the most common onset of eating disorders occurs between the ages of 12 and 25.

Furthermore, the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders states that “less than 6% of of people with eating disorders are medically diagnosed as being underweight” and “larger body size is both a risk factor for developing an eating disorder and a common outcome for people who struggle with bulimia and binge eating disorder”.

In other words, Taylor’s target demographic already struggles with issues around body image and weight and, what’s worse, her fat fans are already all too aware that being fat is viewed as terrible, shameful and terrifying, all without her presenting us with this shot of perfectly manicured toes atop a retro-kitsch weighing scale.

It’s not even an issue that Tay-Tay has somehow managed to avoid herself; she has admitted, in the 2020 documentary, Miss Americana, to suffering from an eating disorder in the past. The idea that she may simply have overlooked the significance of that word and its placement in Anti-Hero simply doesn’t give her the credit she deserves.

There will, of course, be pushback against this rhetoric, from two distinct camps. Firstly, the die-hard Swifties will be out in force, wishing plagues on the houses of any who dare speak ill of their queen (I truly believe that a combination of five of the biggiest Swifties, five of the biggest Beyhive-dwellers and five of the biggest lambs, ie Mariah Carey fans, could join forces to become an unstoppable force for change, if they so desired).

But secondly, and perhaps more damaging, will be the cohort of people who think this is all just much ado about nothing. “Get over it,” they’ll say. “It’s just a music video.”

They’re right, of course, it is a music video, with or without the “just”. But it’s also a cultural event. In the four days since its release, Anti-Hero has clocked up 27 million views – in a day and age when music videos are seeming less and less relevant.

Even if every single person watching the video watched it five times, that’s still more than five million people tuning into and absorbing the message that the sheer possibility of being fat keeps multi-Grammy Award winning songwriter and performer Taylor Swift, one of the most famous women in the world, Forbes’ top earning woman in music, up at night.

This is, of course, the true tragedy of the whole thing. No matter how rich, how successful, how record-breaking she is, she is no more able to escape the clutches of diet culture than the rest of us.

But Taylor Swift should, at the very least, have people around her who could point this out to her – and who could have suggested altering the message so that it wasn’t further pointing the finger at one of the most maligned groups in society, fat folk, who still have to deal with weight stigma in work, on planes and public transport and, most crucially, in healthcare.

With all of the privilege and power of being Taylor Swift (she directed the video herself), she chose to target fat people with her in-your-face anti-fat messaging, when she could have done the exact opposite.

I wouldn’t exactly say I’m done with Taylor Swift, and I don’t think this backlash will affect her in any significant way, but I am disappointed in her and, in a sense, isn’t that worse?