Even Taylor Swift Isn't Safe From Body Shaming

Taylor Swift looks so much like a supermodel that she and her BFF, actual supermodel Karlie Kloss, are often indistinguishable.

The fact that she seems to have zero-percent body fat, and legs that could be a mannequin’s, couldn’t save her from being body shamed by some guy who happened to have — and felt he should share — an opinion about her looks.

Diplo, a DJ and Katy Perry’s boyfriend, tweeted, “someone should make a kickstarter to get taylor swift a booty.”

He then retweeted a bunch of fan responses including “@diplo I started a petition on https://whitehouse.gov to include it on the federal budget,” and “@diplo Help Me In Supporting ‘Get Taylor Swift A Booty’ on #fundly.”

What Diplo did to Swift is sect of body shaming, sometimes called “thin-shaming,” and proof that every woman’s body is policed as aggressively as if we were somehow enlisted in some beauty pageant that never ends.

“Women’s bodies seem to be picked apart like chickens," Robyn Silverman, body image expert, professional speaker and author if Good Girls Don’t Get Fat: How Weight Obsession Is Messing Up Our Girls & How We Can Help Them Thrive Despite It, tells Yahoo Style. ”Constant evaluations of parts like breasts, thighs and legs are common. Women aren’t just objectified, they are dissected and criticized. These body shaming messages tell people that your parts are more important than the whole person, you are only as good as the sum of your parts and no matter what you look like you will be critiqued. It’s no wonder that many women develop scripts inside their heads that tell them they are not good enough as they are and no matter what, they never will be.”

Lindy West wrote on Jezebel, in a column about thin-shaming, “Thin-shaming and fat-shaming are not separate, opposing issues — they are stratifications of the same issue: Patriarchal culture’s need to demoralize, distract, and pit women against one another. To keep women shackled by shame and hunger. To keep us obsessing over our flaws rather than our power and potential. To get our money.”

Paper magazine’s Mickey Boardman, talking to The Cut about Kim Kardashian’s show-it-all photo shoot, agreed that women having to endure others’ tossed-off thoughts about their bodies should be stopped. “I just personally think that anything making fun of someone’s appearance, to me, is not funny,” he said. “Especially if it’s a woman. Women get enough shit. Either they’re too skinny or too fat.”

On the funnier side (if you’re not Diplo): Perhaps men are about to take their turn in the body-shaming spotlight too. Swift’s friend and fellow singer Lorde responded to Diplo’s diss with her own—perhaps imagined—criticism of the DJ’s anatomy. The singer-songwriter tweeted to Diplo, “Should we do something about your tiny penis while we’re at it hm.”

The message has already been retweeted over 18,000 times.