Taylor Swift’s music video for the ‘Midnights’ lead single ‘Anti-Hero’ has been edited, reports ‘Variety’, to remove a scene that shows her stepping on a bathroom scale that reads “fat”.
‘Variety’ can confirm the music video on Apple Music no longer shows the scale; instead, Swift’s anti-hero clone just looks at her with a face of disappointment. The music video on YouTube still features the scale displaying “fat”. Contacted by ‘Variety’, reps for Swift and Apple Music did not immediately have a comment.
Speculation surrounding the reasoning behind the removal of those frames comes from the online debate over the scene, which has since been labelled by some as “anti-fat” because of its negative connotations.
In an Instagram post promoting the release of the music video (which she wrote and directed), Swift says that the visual treatment was reflective of her own “nightmare scenarios and intrusive thoughts [playing] out in real time.” Within that context, the video matches the song’s introspective and analytical lyrics, which include lines such as “Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby / And I’m a monster on the hill.”
‘Variety’ adds that Swift has talked about struggling with an eating disorder in the past, most extensively in her 2020 Netflix documentary ‘Miss Americana’.
In the film, Swift admits there have been times in the past (“It’s only happened a few times, and I’m not in any way proud of it”) when she’s seen “a picture of me where I feel like I looked like my tummy was too big, or … someone said that I looked pregnant … and that’ll just trigger me to just starve a little bit — just stop eating.”
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