The hosts of US talk show The View have defended Taylor Swift amid criticism of the new music video for her track “Anti-Hero”.
The video features a scene in which Swift steps onto a scale that reads “Fat”, prompting some viewers to describe the video as fatphobic.
“Anti-Hero” features on Swift’s latest album, Midnights, which was released last week.
Appearing on The View on Tuesday 25 October, hosts Sunny Hostin and Whoopi Goldberg voiced their support for the music video.
“They missed the point,” 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,” she continued. “You get on the scale and you’re a 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.’”
Goldberg, meanwhile, argued that people should “just let [Swift] have her feelings”.
“Why are you wasting your time on this?” she said. “You all want to say something about Taylor Swift. Leave her ass alone!
“You can never be just what you are. Everybody wants you to be something more, be less this, more that, and it’s what people do to each other on social media,” she continued.
Swift has previously described “Anti-Hero” as being a song about her “insecurities”.
Earlier this week, it was revealed that Midnights has become the best-selling record of 2022 so far.
In just a few days, over a million copies of the album have been sold in the US, according to Billboard.
You can read The Independent’s five-star review of the album here.
Swift has also released other music videos to accompany the album, including a video for the track “Bejeweled”, which has delighted fans with its hidden Easter eggs.
