Taylor Swift has been very vocal lately, in the media and in her new documentary about the pressures that the music industry places on women.

She’s also released a new album, Lover, which features a song that deals with all of this, called ‘The Man’.

In the recently released music video for ‘The Man’, Swift, through some incredible make-up artistry and camera work, literally becomes ‘a man’ who does ‘man things’, like smoking cigars and taking up too much room on the subway.

Here she is, ‘manspreading’ her way through the world.

Make sure to look out for TikTok celebrity Loren Gray’s eye-roll at around the 2:43 mark:

In the scene where he/she is peeing against the subway wall, you’ll notice a ‘no scooters’ sign and a poster stating “if found please return to Taylor Swift” – a deliberate dig at music executive Scooter Braun who purchased her back catalogue last year.

The wall in the background is graffitied with the name of Swift’s first six albums – all of which are owned by Braun’s Big Machine label.

Over to BBC for more on the video:

“The man” in the video bears more than a passing resemblance to Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in The Wolf of Wall Street (the song references DiCaprio’s playboy lifestyle), as he’s congratulated for his business and sporting achievements and being the “greatest dad in the world”, all while getting up to no good.

It’s a thinly-veiled attack on the disparity between how men and women in the same roles are viewed by society.

‘Thinly-veiled’ is a bit of an understatement.

At the end of the music video, the director, real-life Taylor Swift, asks her male counterpart – voiced by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson – if he could do it all again but this time make it “sexier”.

Yeah, her message is far from subtle.

Accurate, though.

[source:bbc]