Taylor Swift's 1989: The real meaning of the song Slut

A tender love song rather than a furious anthem, "Slut!" nevertheless contains a damning message and powerful lyrics, writes Clare Thorp.

As expected, when Taylor Swift released a re-recorded edition of her album 1989 last week – the latest in an ongoing project to take back ownership of her old material – it shot straight to the top of the streaming charts. The record, originally released in 2014, is her masterpiece, featuring pop classics like Blank Space, Style and Out of The Woods. But it was one of five new "from the vault" tracks – songs written at the time that never made the original edit – that fans were most eager to hear. Ever since Swift had announced "Slut!" as one of 1989 (Taylor's Version)'s bonus tracks back in September, anticipation for it had mounted. On release, the song debuted at No. 1 on Spotify in the US with 5.2m streams.

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Excitement for the song was two-fold. There was the provocative title, unusual for Swift, with its quotation marks and pointed exclamation mark that suggested we might be in for some kind of punk-pop treatise on misogyny. This was coupled with the fact that, in recent years, Swift has increasingly spoken out about the "slut-shaming" she experienced earlier in her career – especially around the time she was writing and recording 1989. This was the first time the word would appear in one of her songs – would this be Swift's call to arms?

As it was, "Slut!" turned out to be less a furious anthem and instead a woozy, tender love song in which a new affair is so magical, she's willing to deal with whatever narrative comes with it. "And if they call me a slut, you know it might be worth it for once," she sings on the chorus. Yet, hidden along with the dream melody are some damning lines, too. The song's most powerful lyric comes when Swift says of the liaison: "I'll pay the price, you won't."

If the mood is less righteous anger than weary resignation, it makes sense. This was a song written a decade ago, when Swift was still figuring out how to deal with the media obsession over her relationships. If 1989 is the album that signalled Swift's transition from country star to fully fledged pop icon ("I was born in 1989, reinvented for the first time in 2014" she writes in the accompanying album notes), it was also the record that saw the then 24-year-old start to grapple with her public persona.

In her late teens and early 20s, Swift dated several high-profile men, including Joe Jonas, Harry Styles, Jake Gyllenhaal, John Mayer and Taylor Lautner. She wrote about the good, the bad and the ugly of these early loves in her songs – turning heartbreak into material, as songwriters have for decades. But besides inspiring some of her best music (fan favourite All Too Well chronicles a doomed romance with actor Jake Gyllenhaal), her relationships also became the subject of intense fascination for the media and public.

While the word "slut" wasn't explicitly used, Swift was nicknamed a serial dater and called "boy crazy". One TV commentator said: "She's going through guys like a train." At the 2013 Golden Globes, hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler joked about keeping Swift away from Michael J Fox's son. In an appearance on Ellen Degeneres' show, the host flashed up images of famous men on the screen and told Swift to ring a bell when the man she'd written a song about appeared. Swift appeared uncomfortable, but tried to laugh along. For a while, that seemed to be her coping strategy.

She started playfully referencing her public persona in her songs – notably on 1989's Shake it Off ("I go on too many dates, but I can't make them stay") and Blank Space ("Got a long list of ex-lovers, They'll tell you I'm insane"). For the latter, she created a character inspired by the media coverage that was "so opposite my actual life."

But, as a new prologue included in physical copies of 1989 (Taylor's Version) reveals, it was affecting her more than she let on. She talks about "the pain behind the satire" and her treatment in the years preceding 1989. "I had become the target of slut-shaming – the intensity and relentlessness of which would be criticised and called out if it happened today. The jokes about my amount of boyfriends. The trivialisation of my songwriting as if it were a predatory act of a boy-crazy psychopath. The media co-signing of this narrative. I had to make it stop because it was starting to really hurt." She couldn't make it stop, though.

At the 2015 Grammys, an Entertainment Tonight reporter told Swift: "You're going to walk home with more than maybe just a trophy tonight… I think lots of men." Swift looks momentarily stunned, before smiling and replying: "I'm not going to go home with any men. I'm going to hang out with my friends, then I'm going to go home to the cats." Even at events meant to honour her musical talent, the focus came back to her love life.

The 'girl squad'

As she writes in the prologue, she tried another tactic. "I swore off hanging out with guys, dating, flirting or anything that could be weaponised against me by a culture that claimed to believe in liberating women but consistently treated me with the harsh moral codes of the Victorian Era." She cultivated a group of female friends instead, including Gigi Hadid, Selena Gomez, Cara Delevingne and Lena Dunham. "If I only hung out with my female friends, people couldn't sensationalise or sexualise that – right? I would learn later on that people could and people would." Some criticised her "squad" for being performative and exclusionary.

In 2016 – after several high-profile feuds with Kanye West (and his then wife Kim Kardashian, who called Swift "self-serving"), Katy Perry, ex Calvin Harris and Nicki Minaj, Swift retreated from the spotlight. She started a new relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn – one that lasted six years and which she shielded fiercely from the media. But while gossip about her relationships subsided, Swift's anger only grew.

In the years since 1989 was released, Swift has spoken out on slut-shaming on several occasions. In a 2016 video interview for Vogue, when asked what she would tell her 19-year-old self, she said: "You're going to date like a normal 20-something should be allowed to, but you're going to be a national lightening rod for slut-shaming." In an interview for the print edition of the magazine she said: "You know, I went out on a normal amount of dates in my early 20s, and I got absolutely slaughtered for it. It took a lot of hard work and altering my decision-making. I didn't date for two and a half years."

Swift should never have had to stop dating for people to take her music seriously. Leonardo DiCaprio might get teased over his own long list of ex-lovers – and their age – but it's never been correlated with his ability to do his job. It was this diminishment of her talent that seemed to upset Swift the most. In a 2019 chat with Zane Lowe for Apple Music's Beats 1, she spoke of being reduced to "slideshows of my dating life… putting people in there that I'd sat next to at a party once… 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 minimise that skill by taking something that everyone in their darkest, darkest moments loves to do, which is just to slut-shame."

In her 2020 Netflix documentary Miss Americana, Swift talked about trying to "reject" the ingrained misogyny she herself had absorbed, saying "there is no such thing as a slut." That might explain her decision to tweak a lyric on her re-record of the song Better Than Revenge on Fearless (Taylor's Version), switching "She's better known for the things she does on the mattress" to "He was a moth to the flame, she was holding the matches."

Even when in a long-term relationship, Swift felt she couldn't win. As she wrote on Lavender Haze, the opening track of 2022's Midnights: "All they keep asking me/ Is if I'm gonna be your bride / The only kind of girl they see/ Is a one night or a wife."

After six years, Swift's relationship with Alwyn ended in early 2023 – and interest in her dating life fired up once more. There was a brief – and controversial – relationship with The 1975's Matty Healy and, more recently, a burgeoning romance with NFL star Travis Kelce. Compared to her last serious relationship, it's been a very public courting, with the couple pictured hand-in-hand on several dates and Swift happily showing up at his games to lend her support. Some have called it a PR stunt – as if the woman whose record-breaking Eras tour (and accompanying film) has propelled her to billionaire status needs any help with publicity.

She's even got the girl squad back together – with actress Sophie Turner (her ex's ex), joining Blake Lively, the Haim sisters and Gigi Hadid for nights on the town. A new celebrity romance, a high-profile friendship group… much is as it was back when 1989 first came out. Except, perhaps, this is Swift in her "I don't care what you think anymore" era. And if the media does have something to say about her? Well, she might just have a song to write about that.

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