Following the release of Taylor Swift‘s vulnerable “Anti-Hero” music video on Friday (Oct. 21), the star received some backlash, with critics accusing her of being “fatphobic” due to a scene in which Swift steps on a scale that reads “fat.”
However, on Tuesday morning’s (Oct. 25) episode of The View, the hosts took to Swift’s defense, noting that she is expressing her personal experience with body image. “They missed the point,” Sunny Hostin said. “For someone who’s an artist, she gets to have agency over her artistry. She was describing a personal experience, and quite frankly, it’s a personal experience a lot of women experience. I’ve experienced it, and men. You get on the scale and you’re a perfectly normal weight and all you see is fat, all you see is, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m five pounds heavier than I should be.’”
Whoopi Goldberg urged critics to “just let her have her feelings,” and not to watch the video if don’t like it. “Why are you wasting your time on this?” she continued. “You all want to say something about Taylor Swift, leave her a– alone!”
Goldberg concluded by calling out “our society” instead Swift. “You can never be just what you are. Everybody wants you to be something more, be less this, more that, and it’s what people do to each other on social media,” she said.
Swift has previously opened up about personal nature of “Anti-Hero,” calling it “one of my favorite songs I’ve ever written,” as she’s never “delved this far into my insecurities in this detail before.”
“I struggle a lot with the idea that my life has become unmanageably sized,” she continued. “Not to sound too dark, but I just struggle with the idea of not feeling like a person — don’t feel bad for me, you don’t need to. But this song really is a real guided tour through all the things I tend to hate about myself; we all hate things about ourselves.”
Watch The View segment below.
