Taylor Swift is Done Being Polite

You can call Taylor Swift a lot of things, but polite is no longer one of them. The singer recently sat down with Variety to promote her new Netflix documentary,  Taylor Swift: Miss Americana, which is premiering at the Sundance Film Festival. The film covers a range of topics in Swift’s life from balancing being an artist and stardom to her “good girl” image.

In a candid moment with Variety, Swift shared about learning how to stick up for herself and others after her sexual assault trial against a DJ that groped her backstage at an event:

I experienced it as a person with extreme privilege, so I can only imagine what it’s like when you don’t have that. And I think one theme that ended up emerging in the film is what happens when you are not just a people pleaser but someone who’s always been respectful of authority figures, doing what you were supposed to do, being polite at all costs. I still think it’s important to be polite, but not at all costs.

She continued:

Not when you’re being pushed beyond your limits, and not when people are walking all over you. I needed to get to a point where I was ready, able and willing to call out bulls— rather than just smiling my way through it.

Two events that highlighted Swift’s need to be more self-assertive were when Kanye West stormed the stage at the 2009 VMAs and again when he called her to tell her that he had written a derogatory line about her in a song. Both events are covered in the documentary as the director believed that Swift’s reaction – especially to the 2009 incident- were too important not to include.

Maybe now that Swift is done being polite, her breakup songs will stop sounding like subtweets. It will be interesting to see the buzz around this documentary since it was given a coveted time slot at Sundance. I guess that it will mostly go ignored until Swift writes a catchy tune about her disappointment.