There has been some healthy debate on social media and among my own friends about Taylor Swift's new song and music video, Anti-Hero. I encourage all of you to check it out and see what feelings it brings up for you.
So, if we are talking marginalization, I might argue that TS is making a point about the nuances of feeling marginalized (as opposed to actual marginalization and its effects) and the irony and actual absurdity in the fact of how even someone in her position could have those feelings even in the absence of things like fatness, poverty, age.
The whole song/video sets up the dichotomy between the FEELING OF “I’m the problem, it’s me” and her OBJECTIVE lack of problems - beauty, thinness, whiteness, youth, money, etc – PRIVILEGE. The internal struggle wherein she does feel like a marginalized person, as ridiculous as that sounds to us, is actually presented ironically in the video I think. The tall thin person on the scale. The young beautiful girl in the coffin who we have been told has died of old age.
The tone of the funeral scene is infused with so much absurdity, which makes me think we are intended not to feel sorry for the poor dead Taylor who was never loved for anything but her money, but rather to consider this regressed inner child-fear that must be pretty constant for her and isn’t actually coming from any real place at all, certainly not her money or fame. It’s fear of abandonment right? Contextualized in her case by fame and money.
Similarly in the scale scene, Taylor pushes us to feel uncomfortable when we see this tall thin body who is publicly praised for her beauty berate herself for the number on the scale. But there is another dichotomy here between feeling marginalized and being marginalized. She acknowledges the feeling is ridiculous, I think. It is right there in the image. We are meant to experience the absurdity of this moment. But then. Taylor as she presents to the world is the “shamer,” and Taylor in her Tshirt/jammies, standing on the scale, is the one being shamed. The world DOES shame her and always has and that isn’t a feeling, that is objective truth. And frankly I think it has more to do with her youth and femaleness than her body. Her body became the scapegoat at some point. Of course, the difference between Taylor’s marginalization as a woman and mine for example, is that she has so many more privileges to make up for it. But, my friends, what I did there is called gaslighting.
And, my Swifties, Anti-swifties, Heroes and Anti-heroes, aren’t we kind of gaslighting her? If Obama made a statement about “it can be tough to be the first black president, would we all be like, “please dude, you’re still Barak Obama.” I don’t think so. I think this whole debate has much more to do with how we treat women. Again, I think when TS says “It’s hard to be a rich thin beautiful famous person,” that’s totally offensive to many people. So should she not say it because she’s in a position of power and influence? That’s exactly what she claims to be scared of – being unseen, small, and inauthentic because of her fame. Or should she just stop feeling that way? I don’t think any of us would encourage that. She wasn’t scared of upsetting people, and that’s something I talk to my clients about all the time – speaking your truth no matter the consequences. So I’m proud of her.
I don’t know if this video – especially the scale scene - is MEANT to be provocative or offensive to groups who are literally objectively marginalized. I also agree that it is, and I also don’t think that’s the point.