Taylor Swift has opened up on how she was “slut-shamed” in her twenties after a string of high-profile romances with the likes of Harry Styles and Tom Hiddleston.
The singer, who released her seventh album ‘Lover’ in August, explained how it was “hard” to deal with criticism surrounding her personal life.
“When I was like 23 and people were just kind of reducing me to, kind of making slideshows of my dating life and putting people in there that I’d sat next to at a party once and deciding that my songwriting was like a trick rather than a skill and a craft,” she told Zane Lowe’s Beats 1 show.
"If I had to pick a favorite lyricist, it would be a tie between @petewentz and @LanaDelRey." @taylorswift13 talks art, #Lover and @catsmovie with @zanelowe. https://t.co/tkeX4Hx582 pic.twitter.com/qXodUoeNVu
— Beats 1 (@Beats1) October 30, 2019
“It’s a way to take a woman who’s doing her job and succeeding at doing her job and making things. And in a way it’s figuring out how to completely minimise that skill by taking something that everyone in their darkest, darkest moments loves to do, which is just to slut shame, you know? And that happened to me at a very young age, so that was a bit hard.”
She also credited the rise of the #MeToo movement for providing focus on the “internalised misogyny” that exists in the world.
“I can see a headline about a young artist, about a young female artist, about another breakup. And it sends me into a real sad place because I don’t want that to keep happening. And I don’t think people understand how easy it is to infer that someone who’s a female artist or a female in our industry is somehow doing something wrong by wanting love, wanting money, wanting success,” she said.
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“Women are not allowed to want those things the way that men are allowed to want them. And so I think when I was the youngest, it was hard because I didn’t understand why nobody was saying that this was wrong. And I think now, thank god we’ve had Me Too movements and moments where we’re looking at ourselves as a society and we’re looking at internalised misogyny. We’re looking at the way we treat critiquing women’s bodies.”
Earlier this week, it was confirmed that a lawsuit filed against Taylor Swift alleging she stole the lyrics of her 2014 song ‘Shake It Off’ has been revived by an appeals court.
The lawsuit, which was filed in 2017, was dismissed in February 2018 by a federal judge in California. On Monday (October 28), a federal appeals court reversed that decision, Variety reports.
The lawsuit was filed by Sean Hall and Nathan Butler, a songwriting duo who claim that Swift’s ‘1989’ single ripped off the lyrics of their 2001 song ‘Playas Gon’ Play’, which was performed by the girl group 3LW.