Taylor Swift slams critics who shamed her for ‘dating a normal young woman’

In the liner notes to her latest album, Taylor Swift addresses critics who have scrutinized her love life.

The pop star, whose Friday release of “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” adds to her re-recording journey, wrote that she “decided to completely reinvent herself” at age 24 before describing how she felt about the comments from the public and the media about his relationships. .

“The voices that had started to shame me into new ways of dating like a normal young woman? I wanted to silence them,” Swift wrote.

“You see – in the years leading up to this, I had become the target of slut shaming – the intensity and relentlessness of which would be criticized and denounced if it happened today. Jokes about my number of boyfriends. The trivialization of my writing as if it were a predatory act of a crazy psychopathic boy. The media co-signature of this story. I had to stop it because it started to really hurt.

Swift, who generally keeps quiet about her relationships in public, has previously taken aim at detractors who attacked her romantic activities and songwriting.

She told Rolling Stone in 2014 that people “watching my love life has become a bit of a national pastime.”

“I don’t like seeing slideshows of guys I’ve apparently dated. I don’t like giving comedians the opportunity to make jokes about me at award shows. I don’t like it when the headlines say, ‘Watch out, bro, she’s going to write a song about you,’ because it trivializes my work,” she said at the time.

“And most of all, I don’t like how all of these factors add up to create so much pressure in a new relationship that it fizzles out before it even has a chance to begin. And so… I just don’t go out.

In this week’s notes, Swift wrote that she had vowed to do “anything that could be used against me by a culture that claimed to believe in women’s liberation but systematically treated me with the harsh moral codes of Victorian era.

She then appeared to address her famous “squad” of friends, a group that has already led fans to speculate that she might be gay. (Swift never stated that she was.)

“If I only hung out with my friends, people wouldn’t be able to sensationalize or sexualize it, right?” wrote the singer. “I would later learn that people could and would.”

She added that “everyone has something to say” about his behavior and acknowledged that “they always will” before referencing one of her most famous songs.

“I learned lessons, paid prices and tried to…don’t say it…don’t say it…I’m sorry, I have to say it…get rid of it,” a- she writes. .

Read more about Swift’s “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” liner notes here.