Over the past decade, Taylor Swift has been involved in (or rumored to have been involved in) relationships with some high-profile celebrities, and the attention she got for it during that time had an impact on her. She spoke about it in a recent interview with Beats 1’s Zane Lowe, and said that being “slut shamed” was “hard”:
“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. It’s a way to take a woman who’s doing her job and succeeding at doing her job and making things, and 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.”
She went on to talk about how she doesn’t want the same things that happened to her to happen to other young female artists:
“So now when I see this happening… I can see a headline about a young artist, about a young female artist, about another breakup. It sends me into a real sad place because I don’t want that to keep happening. And 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. Women are not allowed to want those things the way that men are allowed to want them.”
Watch Swift and Lowe’s conversation above.
