Grammy winner Taylor Swift recently dropped her visual album Midnights. The edited music video for ‘Anti-Hero’ is the third track from her new album, Midnights on Apple Music, removing a shot that showed a ‘fat’ scale which some viewers find fatphobic.
According to an entertainment report, the controversial scene showed Swift, who wrote and directed the video, standing on a scale with the word fat staring back at her. Her party-loving alter ego, who watched closely, then shook her head in disapproval. The updated clip did not include the sound. Instead, it showed Swift stepping on the scale while she alter ego shook her head.
The scene drew backlash on social media with some viewers considering it fatphobic. On Tuesday, the cast of The View defended the scene. Sunny Hostin insisted that fans who were upset about it “Missed the point.” Furthermore, Swift described “Anti-Hero” as her most personal song.
She said, “I don’t think I’ve delved this far into my insecurities in this detail before. I struggle a lot with the idea that my life has become unmanageably sized and, not to sound too dark, I struggle with the idea of not feeling like a person. We all hate things about ourselves, and it’s all of those aspects of the things we dislike and like about ourselves that we have to come to terms with if we’re going to be this person.”
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 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.”