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

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.”