In her latest interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music’s Beats 1, Taylor Swift spoke openly about her experience with being slut-shamed early in her career, and praised movements like Me Too for helping to turn the tide.
“I was 23 and people were… 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 a trick rather than a skill and a craft,” she said. “It’s a way to take a woman who’s doing her job and succeeding at doing her job… [and] completely minimize that skill by [slut-shaming her]. And that happened to me at a very young age, so that was a bit hard. That was one of the first times I was like, ‘Wow, this is not fair.’”
She went on to say that watching other young women in the industry go through what she went through puts her “in a real sad place.”
“When I was the youngest, it was hard because I didn’t understand why nobody was saying that this was wrong,” she said. “Thank God we’ve had Me Too movements and moments where we’re looking at ourselves as a society and we’re looking at internalized misogyny. We’re looking at the way we treat critiquing women’s bodies. We have amazing women out there like Jameela Jamil saying, ‘I’m not trying to spread body positivity. I’m trying to spread body neutrality where I can sit here and not think about what my body is looking like.’”
Elsewhere in the interview, Swift said her favorite lyricists are Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy and Lana Del Rey. She also took time to praise Phoebe Waller-Bridge for her hosting stint on Saturday Night Live (Swift was the musical guest for her episode), and gave kudos to artists like Halsey and Selena Gomez.