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According to this year’s “Hot 100” list, an annual inventory in which Maxim‘s editors meticulously rank famous women by level of attractiveness, Taylor Swift is 2015’s reigning queen of female hotness. Rather than use the title to gloat about her declared hotness, Swift used the magazine’s cover to call out the double standards women face everyday and the importance of feminism in her life today: From Maxim:
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.
Swift’s interview is especially noteworthy considering in 2012, she shied away from the label to the Daily Beast, telling the news site she didn’t view matters as a “guys versus girls” situation. This was also during a time in which the media unfairly portrayed Swift as something of a pathetic boy chaser—a female singer who used her lyrics to lament about the latest boy who got away.
Since then, she has shattered that image with very real, thoughtful insight into an industry built on sexist frameworks:
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. Misogyny is ingrained in people from the time they are born. So to me, feminism is probably the most important movement that you could embrace, because it’s just basically another word for equality.
This is what young girls need today. Now, we leave you with her badass new video, “Bad Blood.”
