Taylor Swift has elaborated her stance on feminism in a new interview.
The Maxim interview with the singer, who picked up eight Billboard Music Awards last night (May 17), will appear in full in the magazine’s June/July issue.
Explaining why she has been more vocal about feminism, Swift said: “Misogyny is ingrained in people from the time they are born.”
She continued: “Honestly, I didn’t have an accurate definition of feminism when I was younger. I didn’t quite see all the ways that feminism is vital to growing up in the world we live in. I think that when I used to say, ‘Oh, feminism’s not really on my radar,’ it was because when I was just seen as a kid, I wasn’t as threatening. I didn’t see myself being held back until I was a woman. Or the double standards in headlines, the double standards in the way stories are told, the double standards in the way things are perceived. A man writing about his feelings from a vulnerable place is brave; a woman writing about her feelings from a vulnerable place is oversharing or whining.”
Swift sparked debate in 2012 when, asked by the Daily Beast whether she was a feminist, she replied, “I don’t really think about things as guys versus girls. I never have. I was raised by parents who brought me up to think if you work as hard as guys, you can go far in life.”
Recently she has developed her views, telling The Guardian, “As a teenager, I didn’t understand that saying you’re a feminist is just saying that you hope women and men will have equal rights and equal opportunities. What it seemed to me, the way it was phrased in culture, society, was that you hate men. And now, I think a lot of girls have had a feminist awakening because they understand what the word means.”
Swift recently revealed that Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff’s relationship inspired ‘1989’ song ‘You Are In Love’. Swift explained that she wrote the song after the Girls creator and star opened up about her relationship with the Bleachers singer.
Asked by Gevinson about the ‘You Are In Love’ lyric “You’re my best friend”, Swift replied: “I’ve never had that, so I wrote that song about things that Lena [Dunham] has told me about her and Jack [Antonoff]. That’s just basically stuff she’s told me. And I think that that kind of relationship — God, it sounds like it would just be so beautiful — would also be hard. It would also be mundane at times.”
Elsewhere in the interview Swift opened up about relationships and life in the public eye.