Bullied into Silence for Not Feeling Beautiful: Experiencing Thin-Shaming, Weight Gain and Body Dysmorphia

By Emily Rolson

I stayed up until midnight – because of course I did – to hear the launch of the Midnights album. The minute I heard Anti-Hero, it became my immediate favourite. Her opening line, ‘I have this thing where I get older but just never wiser’ and her later line ‘when my depression works the graveyard shift, all of the people I’ve ghosted stand there in the room,’ make me feel a little less alone in my frequent anxiety-induced episodes of insomnia. I hear those lines and think to myself I know how that feels.

In the music video for Anti-Hero, Swift is standing on a scale to weigh herself and in the little window where there would normally be numbers, the word ‘fat’ appears. Of course, the people of the internet lost their minds.

There have been multiple interviews of her discussing the frenzy that would begin in her mind when she saw a photo of herself in which she did not look especially ‘thin,’ and how it would trigger her to simply not eat. It truly breaks my heart to see a woman bare such a vulnerable, intimate part of her soul and experience as a human being only to be torn down and bullied into being silent. I make no apologies for saying to the people who contributed to this: you are part of the problem.

As someone who has been shamed my whole life for the way I feel about my body, I feel anger and resentment toward this narrative that is continuously pushed that women who fit into the traditional mould of ‘thin’ are not allowed to feel negatively about their bodies. Virtually my entire life, any time I have expressed unhappiness with my body, the responses have been overwhelmingly unsupportive. In expressing when I feel this way, I have had friends and family members tell me I’m ‘ridiculous’. Someone once told me to ‘shut up’, because I was ‘the size of their leg’ (obviously an exaggeration).

I want us as a society to stop telling other people how to feel about their bodies based on how we feel about ours. Swift getting on a scale and then labelling herself as ‘fat’ is not her telling you that you are fat. It is not her telling you that your body is unacceptable. It is not her making a jab at people who may fit into the traditional category of ‘fat.’ This is a mental illness. And anyone who has struggled with body dysmorphia and disordered eating, myself included, knows that it wouldn’t matter what number appeared on that scale, they would feel ‘fat’.

I won’t pretend it doesn’t make me uncomfortable to see the word ‘fat’ on the scale so boldly like that, especially under someone who, to me, does not appear ‘fat.’ But the narrative of this story isn’t ‘I used to be fat and now I’m not and your body is unacceptable if you’re bigger than me.’ The narrative of the story in this video is ‘this is how I felt about myself in the darkest corners of my soul, which I am now allowing you to see.’

One summer I went through a painful breakup. All I did for months was come home from work and lie in bed and eat. And eat. And eat. And not good food that nourished my body the way it deserves to be; it was exclusively junk food. I didn’t go to the gym. I didn’t drink a lot of water. The result? I gained fifteen pounds and I was the heaviest I have ever weighed.

Of course, gaining fifteen pounds on its face isn’t the end of the world. I may have felt alright with it if I’d been going to the gym and eating well and was feeling good about what I was doing to my body. But that’s not what was happening and now I still look back at pictures from that summer and I am mortified at how awful I look.

None of my clothes fit. My cheeks looked like those of a squirrel storing nuts in its mouth. My stomach and arms looked more bloated than any period had ever made them. The only person I could talk to was a therapist because no one wants to hear their friend who is still thinner than her say that she ‘feels fat’. And even for my friends who didn’t make comments like that to my face, there was still shame and the unspoken demand to be quiet the same way there is for every other mental health issue.

I felt so alone and so unhappy because up until gaining that unhealthy weight, I had been accused of having an eating disorder so many times in the past. Family members had commented on how thin I was for years and regularly asked me if I ‘even ate’. I clearly gained a drastic amount of weight in a short amount of time and wasn’t adhering to my normal, relatively healthy eating habits, but no one batted an eye and it made me wonder if maybe they preferred me like this. Even though I felt like absolute shit.

When I finally realised how awful I felt, I did what lots of women do when they think they’re fat. I stopped eating. I stopped eating and over-exercised, consciously ensuring I was working off more calories that I was taking in. I lost those fifteen pounds and then some. But that wasn’t the answer either. I went from one unhealthy end of the spectrum to the other.

I have since worked very hard to develop a healthier relationship with food and with my body and exercise. It’s a lot of work and I’m still working on it. Because, as we all know, it’s a lot easier to get into these spirals of self-hatred and disordered eating than it is to get out of it.

Right now, for my age and height I’m actually right in the bracket of where my weight should be, and I feel better than I did at either end of that spectrum. But I’m still back to being asked by family if I eat enough or being told I am ‘too thin’. The only difference this time is that I have done enough work on myself to know that I’m not doing anything wrong and those comments have more to do with the person they’re coming from than they do about me.

I felt fat that summer. I still think I look fat when I look back at those pictures. But that’s not to say that the weight I was at was unhealthy across the board, someone who normally hovers around the weight I was at is likely still healthy. But what was unhealthy wasn’t the number on the scale: it was my habits. I looked awful because I was treating my body poorly, not because I was X pounds.

I am of the school of thought that our weights don’t really matter all that much. I think we were all born to be built a certain way and how much I weighed when I looked my worst is probably someone’s ideal weight. But they don’t have my body. We all have our own. All of them are different. All of them are correct.

I just want us all to take a deep breath and think about our reaction to being hurt before we bully someone into silencing how they feel. I think there are so many things that warrant our mass attention more than the fact Taylor Swift used to think she was fat and a few people can’t handle it because they are somehow unhappy with themselves. And this all stems from where we are at with cancel culture, but that’s a topic for another article.

Someone calling themselves fat is not their critique of you. It’s a reflection of how they are navigating the way they feel about their own existence and the body they have been assigned to live it in. I know a lot of people will not like the things I’ve said in this article. And that’s okay. Taylor Swift also doesn’t need defending from me. But what I am trying to get at as eloquently as possible without alienating anyone, is so much bigger than her and bigger than this video.

The entire purpose of functional feminism is its intersectionality. We need to be able to allow women who experience their existence differently than we experience ours the opportunity to speak out about these issues impact us. No one will care about the ‘controversy’ of this particular video in a year. It’ll be forgotten about, and society’s chanters of ‘what aboutism’ will move along to the next person they want to silence.

This article is not meant as a criticism of the people who are so clearly hurting or struggling or have struggled that they would feel the need to bully an artist into changing her work and doing it in the name of feminism. Rather this is meant to be a love letter. A plea to take a deep breath. It’s okay for us to feel uncomfortable about Taylor Swift hinting at an eating disorder. It’s okay to feel a little bitter when someone who (seemingly) has something you want or is (seemingly) doing better than you is expressing dissatisfaction. But your feelings about what you think ‘fat’ or an eating disorder should look like don’t negate another woman’s feelings.

One reason why so many of our issues as women have gone without change for so long is because we constantly feel the need to be competing with one another. Imagine what women could do if we didn’t feel the need to put each other down every time any of us steps even the tiniest bit out of line. We must stop getting in our own way.

All of us are trying our very best. That’s all we can ask of ourselves in a world that is still figuring out the female identity and experience after having it suppressed and controlled for so long. But our legacy shouldn’t be policing one another, and I hope that we can all find a way to turn our insecurities into a source of empathy.