Taylor Swift Says She Was "Slut-Shamed" Just for Having Relationships

Thanks to Taylor Swift's earnest approach to songwriting and the fact that she's not afraid to wear her heart on her sleeve, she's managed to release six No. 1 albums and earn a legion of loyal fans. During an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music's Beats 1, however, she explains that success wasn't guaranteed and that when she just started out — and even now — she's often reduced to being nothing more than a girl singing about boys.

"When I was 23 and people were just kind of reducing me to, like, kind of making slideshows of my dating life and putting people in there that I'd sat next to at a party once," Swift explained.

She added that she's had to endure a specific kind of slut-shaming, because critics don't take into account all the hard work that goes into writing her own material. They simply take all the success and dismiss it because the way they see it, Swift is doing nothing more than taking a romantic situation and turning it into a song.

"It's a way to take a woman who's doing her job and succeeding at doing her job and making things, and — in a way — 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," Swift added. "So now when I see this happening, I can see a headline about a young artist, about a young female artist, about another breakup, and it sends me into a real sad place because I don't want that to keep happening."

She called out the double standard in music, saying that all the things that female artists strive for, such as money, love, and success, are fine for their male counterparts to want. When women want them, however, it's frowned upon and, Swift says, "wrong."

"I don't think people understand how easy it is to infer that someone who's a female artist or a female in our industry is somehow doing something wrong by wanting love, wanting money, wanting success," she noted. "Women are not allowed to want those things the way that men are allowed to want them, and so I think when I was the youngest, it was hard because I didn't understand why nobody was saying that this was wrong."

But, Swift says that she wouldn't change anything. It's not her responsibility to censor herself just because people will pick her apart for wanting to be in a relationship. The way she sees it, she had a "normal" dating life, except for the fact that everything she did made headlines.

"I can look back at those lessons I learned when I was younger and I really truly don't think I did anything wrong by having a normal dating life in my early 20s," she said.