Taylor Swift Has No Time For Slut Shaming In The Music Industry

Taylor Swift has spoken out about slut shaming and sexism in the music industry. In an interview with Zane Lowe on his Apple Beats 1 show, the singer said that she felt people pigeonholed her after she released her first album at 16, assuming that she could only write about boys.

She said, ‘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.’

‘In a way, it’s figuring out how to completely minimize that skill by taking something that everyone in their darkest, darkest moments loves to do, which is just to slut-shame, you know?’ she continued. ‘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.”'’

Taylor added that women are often stigmatised for being ambitious{ =nofollow}. ‘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. ‘Women are not allowed to want those things the way that men are allowed to want them.’

Taylor also said that women are increasingly talking about sexism in the industry. ‘I think when I was the youngest, it was hard because I didn’t understand why nobody was saying that this was wrong,’ Swift added. ‘We have made incredible progress. We’ve made incredible strides and I can look back at those lessons I learned when I was younger and I really truly don’t think I did anything wrong by having a normal dating life in my early 20s.

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