Performing before roughly 70,000 people in Arizona, Taylor Swift told her audience that she loves to “explain to men how to apologize.”
Swift, spoke of her 2020 album “Folklore,” in which she deviated from her usual method of autobiographical songs in her previous seven albums to weaving songs revolving around other characters she could imagine.
“It was kind of like journaling for you or something,” she said of her previous work. “I wanted to do a different thing that I had done before.”
“You know, my albums have characteristically been, sort of, excruciatingly autobiographical where, like, when I put out an album, it just feels like getting some sort of live-streamed, public autopsy or something,” she continued. “With this one I felt like, ‘Wouldn’t it be so fun to create characters and storylines and they could live in different times, and they could do all these things and they could fall in love and hurt each other, go to wars and all these things?’ So, I created all these characters, right?”
“Okay, so, sort of a recurring theme in my music is that I love to explain to men how to apologize,” she declared. “I just love it. It’s kind of my thing. I love to tell them step-by-step, ‘Here’s how simple this is to fix things if you just follow these easy steps that I’m laying out for you in a three-minute song.’ I just love the idea of men apologizing.”
"i love to explain to men how to apologise" pic.twitter.com/QIvLamcQ4l
— rafia ✰ (@repromantic) March 18, 2023
Swift then explained how the song she was about to perform revolved around a teenage boy “named James trying to apologize to the love of his life and her name is Betty.” Those characters were inspired by actors Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively’s two young daughters.
Ironically, in late 2019, Swift suggested that she was discriminated against for being a woman, tweeting, “When you’re pretttttty sure that if you were a man, you’d be the man.”
When you’re pretttttty sure that if you were a man, you’d be the man 💅
📷: Sami Drasin pic.twitter.com/rjJesldpEQ— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) December 11, 2019
That followed her album “Lover,” which included her song “The Man,” of which CNBC News reported, “In the song, Swift imagines how society would view her if she were a man. She revealed a preview of the lyrics in the Vogue interview: ‘I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?’”
In the September 2019 issue of Vogue, Swift complained, “I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague.”
“It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, ‘How cute that she’s having some hit songs,’” Swift continued. “But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums — when I started to look like a woman — that wasn’t as cool anymore.”
Swift also stated in her 2019 acceptance speech for Billboard’s “Woman of the Decade” award, “The definition of the ‘toxic male privilege’ in this industry is people saying ‘but he’s always been nice to me’ when I’m raising valid concerns about artists and their right to own their music.’”
Related: Taylor Swift: I’d Be ‘The Man’ If I Were A Man