Story at a glance
- Taylor Swift criticized Netflix for a joke at her expense on the new series “Ginny & Georgia.”
- The reference to her dating history recalls an often sexist focus on the singer’s love life that verges on “slut-shaming.”
- While the show and platform have not responded, fans and supporters are coming to Swift’s defense.
It’s a throwaway line in Netflix’s new series “Ginny & Georgia,” a joke that you might’ve missed entirely — if you weren’t the butt of it.
“What do you care? You go through men faster than Taylor Swift,” Ginny, played by Antonia Gentry, quips at her mom Georgia, played by Brianne Howey.
Swift quipped back at Netflix — and the show — calling the joke “lazy, deeply sexist,” “degrading” and “horse shit” as well as reminding the streaming platform of their partnership on the documentary “Miss Americana,” in which Swift addressed some of the sexism she experienced in the industry.
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It’s not an entirely original line either. Since Swift’s debut at 16, who the musician’s dating life has been a hot subject of tabloid press, as have her own songs, generating speculation about who each song is (or isn’t) about. In her 2014 pop debut album, Swift alluded to “a long list of ex-lovers” in the song “Blank Space” and more recently addressed the “Reputation” (the name of her sixth album, released in 2017) of women who dated multiple men.
“I would be complex. I would be cool. They’d say I played the field before I found someone to commit to and that would be ok for me to do. Every conquest I had made would make me more of a boss to you,” sang Swift in “The Man,” released in 2019 on her seventh album, “Lover.”
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“It’s a way to take a woman who’s doing her job and succeeding at doing her job and making things… it’s figuring out how to completely minimize that skill by taking something that everyone in their darkest, darkest moments loves to do, which is just to slut-shame,” she said in a 2019 interview.
By everyone, Swift means herself, as well, having been criticized for “slut-shaming” in early songs such as “You Belong With Me” and “Better Than Revenge,” singing about girls with “short skirts” who were “better known for the things that she does on the mattress.”
Netflix has not yet responded publicly, but fans and supporters, including Swift’s boyfriend of almost four years, Joe Alywn, backed the singer online.
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Published on Mar 02,2021