Taylor Swift Has Been Sentenced to Fat!

By Julia Keikilani Edwards

Taylor Swift has yet again incited online discourse. This is not a new phenomenon—since her debut in 2004, America’s singer-songwriter sweetheart has consistently reaffirmed her position in ever-changing pop culture through tactics that have paid off in irrefutable stardom. Be it her country-goes-pop transition that allowed her to continue to dominate music charts, her recent projects to take back the rights to her own albums, or her critically acclaimed extended release of her song “All Too Well,” Swift’s relevancy has remained steadfast for over a decade, and it is the product of her constant innovation. As a result, every few months, there is almost always something new to talk about with Taylor. 

In October, the newest topic was brought to my attention through a text message that read, “apparently Taylor Swift is fatphobic,” alongside a link to her music video “Anti-Hero” on YouTube. Such a brazen claim was enough of a push to get me to pull up the video and see for myself. The lead single from her most recent album Midnights, “Anti-Hero” follows Swift as she sings, screams, and dances around her home while tormented by an evil-twin version of herself. This sinister Swift twin is meant to be the embodiment of her destructive behavior, a sort of self-saboteur, a human embodiment of her toxic thoughts. 

Midnights itself is an allegory for this same reflection on self torture––one writer documented the star’s explanation that the thirteen tracks on the album represent thirteen distinct sleepless nights throughout her career. This album is Swift at her most vulnerable, sharing pivotal moments in which sleep had evaded her by either triumph or tribulation. 

The “Anti-Hero” music video is a glimpse into the latter of these two. The two Taylors, the Saboteur and the Real, act out the songwriter and director’s cognitive dissonance from a sleepless night in which she reckons with the public reception of her own contradictory behavior. 

The song begins with a moment of reflection for Real Taylor: I have this thing where I get older but just never wiser. Real Taylor is struggling to reconcile the image she has of herself against the less flattering celebrity image created by public criticism throughout her immense success. Even before Saboteur Taylor arrives on screen, Real Taylor is suffering at the hands of her symbolic anxieties, the results of growing older but not wiser. She screams and sprints away from bedsheet ghosts, symbols of the people no longer in her life. She dials a rotary phone for help only to discover that the line has been––gasp!––cut. She books it to the front door to escape from her wretched reality, and opens the door to Saboteur Taylor, the smiling manifestation of her invasive shadow of anxiety, a blonde mirror that sings, It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me!

 This song is a response to those of us asking to understand the methodology behind the Swift strategy to pursue the narrative of persecution. Swift’s constant relevancy has not been exclusively a product of the aforementioned reinventions; a major strategy that has preserved her popularity is maintaining her image as a constant victim. Taylor Swift was disrespected by Kanye West at the 2009 VMAs; Swift was famously betrayed by a close friend in 2014’s  “Bad Blood” music video, rumored to be Katy Perry. Swift was wronged yet again by Kanye West in 2016, this time with Kim Kardashian, when he released his controversial song “Famous” that jabs at Swift. Swift spoke out in 2019 with her song “The Man” to express how she has not been given enough credit as a female artist. Even in the “Anti-Hero” music video, Saboteur Taylor instructs Actual Taylor to take notes from a chalkboard that reads, “EVERYONE WILL BETRAY YOU.” 

As B.D. McClay writes in The Outline, several successful figures maintain their success on the idea that it is always subject to scrutiny, and explains this construct of prosecution is a power play on Swift’s part. “Swift is always being betrayed by somebody, or, in some cases, anticipating such betrayal,” he says. “Nobody needed to be told that she keeps a list of enemies. She is always rising—above the haters, up from the dead, in fame—even when she doesn’t seem to have any space left to rise to.” 

“Anti-Hero” is yet another installment of Taylor Swift: The Victim Rises. However, this time she now occupies the roles of both the betrayed and the betrayer. Taylor Swift is no hero, yet not a villain. She is an anti-hero. She is complicated, tortured, contradictory, paradoxical. She is the problem and she’s not afraid to say it. She is so real, so vulnerable. But is she fatphobic?

Back to the music video. I’m watching as Real Taylor is being tortured by Saboteur Taylor around the kitchen, through the living room, and finally into the bathroom. I keep my eyes peeled for any indication of what my friend’s text could be referencing. In the midst of pastel pink and teal decor, Actual Taylor steps on a scale. Ah. The camera pans above the weight indicator to display the verdict. It calibrates in a whirl, and rather than Swift’s weight as a number, the word “FAT” appears in the viewfinder. As the word swivels back and forth on the scale, she sings: I’ll stare directly in the sun but never in the mirror. The scale begins to settle, and her fat fate is sealed as the word in all its uppercase glory lands bullseye on the red marker. Real Taylor has been sentenced to FAT! Saboteur Taylor bends down to look at the ruling. Once they lock eyes, Saboteur Taylor shakes her head to reinforce her disappointment. 

After poor reception and requests from those that found it inappropriate, the “FAT ” scale shot from the music video was removed after just a few days. Taylor Swift’s fat sentence has been overruled! All is well, the tree made no sound since the video of it falling got taken down and no one can look it up to hear it, right? 

That is unless you’re fat, saw the original video, and are now left with the irreversible impact of watching one of the most influential musical artists of all time use the description of your body as a target for her own thin self loathing.

Taylor Swift may have been taught to hate her body as a result of indoctrinated fatphobia; most of us have. Swift may have chosen the word “fat” as a way of critiquing this internalized hatred, to show solidarity with all of us that have learned to loathe our image. Though this may be true, the critical difference is that Swift merely learned to hate a hypothetical version of her body that has never existed, a version that is an everyday living reality for actual fat human beings. Swift is incapable of understanding what it’s like to inhabit the body she grew up learning to hate because she has never lived in it. As a thin woman, it is impossible for Swift to reclaim this word without lacking key substance, without lacking sincere weight, without lacking the same intricate rage and exhaustion that comes with trying to make a home in the very body you have been hardwired to fear. 

The controversy over the scale scene in the “Anti-Hero” music video is yet another example of how thin people have shoved fat people out of conversations about eating disorders in order to mask thin victimhood as liberation; when fat people call this behavior out, we endure the trauma of their loathing. Our bodies become the haunting sign of their biggest fears. Our descriptors pop up on scales in music videos, and when we attempt to explain why it’s more damaging than productive, we get silenced, we get invalidated, our tweets get reported, our replies get saturated with cruelty. The content is erased rather than acknowledged, and we’re left wondering what to make of it all as the perpetrator remains the victim.

As a fat person, watching the original version of “Anti-Hero” is just one of countless memories I have of thin people weaponizing my body to project their own insecurities onto me. This past summer, while studying abroad in Paris, I was eating lunch when a woman sat down next to me and berated me about my meal choice and my body for the sake of my health for almost an hour. I told her I was happy and unconcerned with food or my weight. She looked me in the eyes and asked, “How could someone so fat be happy?”

I am over three thousand miles away from where this woman ruined my lunch, but watching a music video that poses the same insidious question:

How could anyone fat be happy?

Taylor Swift answers that in the original version of this music video—one can’t. At least not according to her, to her Real Taylor self, to her Saboteur Taylor self. Taylor Swift is miserable and tortured at the idea of being fat, and by using that label to show her discontent, she suggests to fat people that we must be miserable and tortured, too.

 I am no stranger to eating disorders. I know Taylor Swift has opened up about her struggle with hers in the past with Variety and Elle, and even delves into her strained relationship with food in her Netflix documentary “Miss Americana.” I’m not here to invalidate any of Swift’s experiences or feelings. I’m not here to question the credibility of her sufferings. What I would like to know is how fat people who saw the original version of this music video are supposed to feel, knowing that one of Taylor Swift’s biggest fears is to look like us.

Does this make Taylor Swift fatphobic? Social media figure and social justice advocate Victoria Abraham (@fatfabfeminist) argues it does. In a Twitter thread with a screenshot of the two Taylors in the bathroom scene with the “FAT” scale marker, Abraham poignantly condemns Swift’s actions no matter her intentions: “demonizing the word fat while never having the experience of living in a fat body? Fatphobic.” 

Abraham’s thread incited a plethora of people disagreeing with this claim in order to absolve Swift of her mistake; at one point, the thread was even removed from Twitter. Abraham even replies later with a disclaimer that she never intended to cancel or attack Swift, but wanted to start a conversation about how the singer’s message demonizes the word “fat” at the expense of real fat people’s well being. 

To Abraham’s point: Taylor Swift has never been fat. She’s never had to face the same oppression that fat people endure as a marginalized community. She has never struggled to fit in a chair nor felt the humiliation of being reminded how the world around her was built to ignore fat bodies like hers. She has never faced constant reminders that her fat dad died of heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes, nor that she needs to be careful because she’s his fat daughter, so the same fate must be inevitable. She has never wanted a T-shirt from her favorite loveable country-pop singer as a kid only to find out there weren’t any big enough for her fat body. 

With no statement out, staying silent as a response to the chance to critically engage in a highly nuanced topic like fatphobia is yet another example of the Swift Sidestep Strategy. Swift has neither condemned nor defended her actions, merely concealed them from further observation. It’s almost bureaucratic, no statement as her statement, and Swift even sings of this sort of contradictory behavior in the second pre-chorus of “Anti-Hero”: Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism / Like some kind of congressman? Perhaps her choice to triage her own inculpability over the traumas of actual fat people is truly what makes Miss Americana akin to our politicians: unwilling to speak on social reform beyond the occasional defense of her own privileged dog in the fight, all the while profiting off of these declarations of lucidity as she dresses them up as indicators of sincere change.