Last month, Taylor Swift told fans on Twitter to “watch (her) nightmare scenarios and intrusive thoughts play out in real time” in her new music video for “Anti-Hero”. One of these nightmare scenarios turned out to be a scene of her standing on a scale that simply reads “fat.” Her anti-hero persona, another Swift in a sparkly outfit, reads the word and shakes her head in disappointment.
Fans were also disappointed by Swift using the word “fat” in a derogatory way, rather than as a neutral description of a body. Facing overwhelming criticism online, Taylor’s team quietly cut the shot with the scale from the video.
Since the scene was cut, hundreds of think-pieces have been published either criticizing Taylor for her lackluster response to hurt fans, or calling out “cancel culture” for suppressing Swift’s art for political sensitivity. Well, this is my addition to the discourse (and I am not on Swift’s side, unfortunately).
Stepping on a scale and not wanting to be fat is no more groundbreaking than a 2000s romcom.
Setting aside the tone-deafness of her execution, I can see how the scale scene was a way for Swift to address her experience with an eating disorder. During promotions for her 2020 Miss Americana documentary, Taylor Swift told Variety about how intense public scrutiny of her body — such as stylists praising her thinness and magazines mocking her insecurities — damaged her relationship with food. Knowing this, it is easy to see how Swift’s scale is a metaphor for her distorted body image and hyper-critical self-judgment.
Unfortunately, any positive impact of Swift’s personal admission is minimized by the execution of the scene itself. The “Anti-Hero” music video is full of comedic exaggeration, from a giant-sized Swift to a 2-minute-long sketch of her “sons and daughter-in-law” fighting over their inheritance. So little in the video is serious that it’s difficult to take away a meaningful message from the scale scene, which is disarmingly short and simple. In reality, the scene is too oversimplified to be considered the nuanced representation of disordered eating so many fans want it to be — because stepping on a scale and not wanting to be fat is no more groundbreaking than a 2000s rom-com, or that one episode on the Suite Life of Zack and Cody where Maddie and London see their distorted reflections in a mirror and decide to give binge-eating and anorexia a try. If Swift’s relationship with food and her body can be summed up in a single image, I believe she can create something more innovative and less demeaning than the word “fat” on a scale.
Worse than not being positively impactful, the cut scene might actually be dangerous. Swift’s music video alter-ego represents her “intrusive thoughts,” and what Swift sees in the scale is definitely a disordered thought. Unlike other mental illnesses like depression or anxiety — which can be helpfully combatted through representation and destigmatization of depressive or anxious thoughts — eating disorders are notoriously competitive. They can be triggered and worsened through the spread of disordered thoughts. Though Taylor isn’t doing anything outrageous in the “Anti-Hero” scene, her revealing a personal fear of fatness still serves to normalize a thought fundamental to the propagation of eating disorders.
There is nothing transgressive happening when Swift calls herself fat.
Of course, revealing a personal fear of fatness is also problematic in its own right. By equating “fat” to “bad,” Taylor is directly contributing to the stigmatization of fatness. This invoked the majority of the backlash on Twitter, where @fiadhaich_ wrote, “there is no explanation for portraying fatness as bad and as something to fear which doesn’t justify the hatred of fat people,” and @HappyShiiba wrote “Taylor Swift’s both vulnerable yet /visceral/ Fear of Being Fat actually helps the system which (makes) her afraid of it.” No matter her intentions, Swift distributed a video that used “fat” in its outdated, derogatory form. For all the defenses given to Swift’s right to “artistically represent” her disordered fears, the simple truth is that a fear of fatness is the literal definition of fatphobia. It’s both offensive and dangerous for Swift to reproduce and nurture thin people’s fear of being fat, and to excuse disordered people for eschewing offensive rhetoric does everybody a disservice — especially disordered people themselves, many of whom have been terminally harmed in large part by society’s oppressive body image ideals.
Ultimately, the deleted “Anti-Hero” scene does more to uphold oppressive societal norms than to challenge them. There is nothing transgressive happening when Swift calls herself fat. We aren’t being pushed to challenge our own prejudices. Instead, we’re invited to join Swift in reproducing a dialogue we have all known since childhood: that of the thin woman who fears fatness, and the close friend or comically exasperated spouse who comforts her when she asks, “Do I look fat in this dress?” Swift reads her line from the social script, and we know the response by heart: “But you aren’t fat at all!”