Taylor Swift’s Lover may have come out this past August, but the Lover era is far from over. On Thursday morning, the singer released her latest music video for her feminist empowerment track “The Man,” in which Swift dons full drag to portray the worst of masculinity.
Swift previously shared an animated lyric video for the song, which even included a storyline centered around women rising up in the workplace. But in the newest visual, Swift is The Man himself — boisterous, rude, yelling at his coworkers, smoking cigars on the subway, going HAM in a strip club, even getting undeserved credit as the “World’s Greatest Dad” simply for spending time with his kids. A flash-forward shows The Man as an octogenarian, getting married to a significantly younger woman.
At the end of the video, The Man walks off the soundstage and interacts with Swift herself, who’s credited as the video’s director. His voice is dubbed over by Dwayne Johnson. A time-lapse slideshow in the video credits shows how Swift and her makeup artists transformed her into The Man.
Swift was the subject of the Netflix documentary Miss Americana released earlier this year. Among other things, the film follows the pop star’s political awakening and efforts to get more publicly involved in activism, including standing up for women and other marginalized people in the music industry. She released a standalone single, “Only the Young,” to coincide with the film. Swift also played a role in (and wrote a song for) the box office bomb Cats, which she apparently still likes a lot.