Taylor Swift’s ‘Anti-Hero’ video clearly isn’t fatphobic. Context matters

The scene that shows Taylor on a scale reading ‘fat’ is supposed to show the warped perspective of someone with an eating disorder. We owe it to Swift to approach this clip in good faith

Last week, Taylor Swift unveiled the music video for “Anti-Hero”, one of the songs on her new album Midnights. She said in an Instagram post that the video, which she wrote and directed, involves her “nightmare scenarios and intrusive thoughts [playing] out in real time.” In that sense, it matches the song’s personal, self-reflective lyrics, which include lines such as “Midnights become my afternoons/When my depression works the graveyard shift”, and of course the ear-wormy chorus “It’s me/Hi/I’m the problem, it’s me.”

About two minutes into the video, Swift is seen stepping on a scale. The camera switches to focus on the display, where a needle settles not on a number, but on the word “fat”. Swift is then seen in full length again, turning to the mean alter-ego who has been after her since the beginning of the video and is now shaking her head.

The sequence is a clear reference to Swift’s past struggles with an eating disorder. She first discussed it in the 2020 Netflix documentary Miss Americana, explaining she had sometimes been driven to “just starve a little bit – just stop eating” after seeing photos of herself in which she deemed her body to be inadequate. She elaborated in an interview with Variety, in which she linked her eating disorder to the intense scrutiny she has been subjected to from a young age.

“I remember how, when I was 18, that was the first time I was on the cover of a magazine,” she told the publication. “And the headline was like ‘Pregnant at 18?’ And it was because I had worn something that made my lower stomach look not flat. So I just registered that as a punishment.”

In the same interview, Swift said that on the other hand, when she received praise for fitting into sample sizes during fittings before photo shoots, she took that as “a pat on the head”. “You register that enough times, and you just start to accommodate everything towards praise and punishment, including your own body,” she said.

But the scale sequence in Swift’s “Anti-Hero” video has led to some backlash, including allegations of fatphobia. Some see the part of the video where Swift looks down and sees “fat” written on the scale as a reinforcement of the stigma faced by fat people. Indeed, the Taylor Swift on the scale is clearly distressed when the word appears. I understand that this might not the best look – a thin, white woman looking at the word “fat” like it’s the worst judgment she might ever face. But context matters here.

“Anti-Hero”, by Swift’s own admission, is about her mental health struggles. With this sequence, she’s clearly illustrating the warped workings of her brain back when she was in the throes of an eating disorder. She’s calling out the thoughts she held in that moment, when weight gain felt like the most dangerous outcome and she wanted to avoid it at all costs, even if it involved “[starving] – just a little bit.” Or, as Twitter user @mrbeardofficial put it: “The message Taylor is very clearly promoting is that society teaches girls and women to fear being fat, and that this is something that has been very harmful to her mental health, and it’s also harmful to the fat people who are stigmatized in the process.”

There is real violence, and real trauma, at the core of an eating disorder. If you did to someone else what a person with anorexia does to themselves, you might end up in a courtroom – or at least subject to an HR investigation. Swift has made it clear that her eating disorder was at least in part the result of other people’s comments on her body, an experience that will likely sound familiar to thousands of her fans. Online, listeners have welcomed her increasing openness about disordered eating and mental health issues.

I have tried to think of other imagery Swift could have used to symbolize her eating disorder. She could have used a different word. She could have ditched the scale altogether. But doing so would have been emotionally dishonest when conveying her own experience — and also less accurate in terms of a depiction of the world as it is. Thankfully, she did avoid a significant misstep in not featuring a specific number, which would have been infinitely more harmful, and triggering for a lot of people.

Anti-fat bias harms people in a myriad of ways (including in potentially life-changing settings, such as in healthcare). But what Swift is doing in the video for “Anti-Hero” is quite obviously not an example of fatphobia. It is an expression of something that is both painful and personal to her, and relatable to millions of people around the world. If we are generous enough to receive her work in good faith, that much should be evident.