Probably not on your 2024 bingo card: Taylor Swift defending Lady Gaga against pregnancy rumors. But while we love to see an unexpected celeb mash-up, the entire conversation can’t help but make us wonder: why are we still commenting on women’s bodies?
The background: After paparazzi pictures of Lady Gaga at her sister’s June 3rd wedding surfaced online, people online began speculating that the singer was pregnant. The conversation reached such a fever pitch that Gaga took to TikTok this week to set the record straight with a 10-second video doing a quick pan of her face makeup with the caption “not pregnant–just down bad cryin’ at the gym,” — a nod to lyrics from Taylor Swift’s track ‘Down Bad’ off her latest chart-topping album “The Tortured Poets Department.” Gaga followed up with a call to action for followers to “register to vote at www.headcount.org.”
Swift herself swooped into the comments of the TikTok post, saying, “Can we all agree that it’s invasive & irresponsible to comment on a woman’s body? Gaga doesn’t owe anyone an explanation & neither does any woman.”
While Swift and Gaga have long shared a mutual respect and Gaga’s use of Swift’s lyrics may have encouraged the popstar to fire off her supportive comment, Swift has also dealt with body-shaming sentiments as of late. Several pictures and videos taken during her recent Eras Tour performances have circulated, with people speculating that she, too, is pregnant, or comparing her current physique against video taken at her earlier shows. While Swift hasn’t addressed these gratuitous rumors about her directly, the same sentiment she used in her defense of Gaga can be applied to the conversations taking place about her.
Regardless of whether or not these comments are intended to be malicious, there’s one thing we should take away from this: stop making assumptions about women’s bodies. (And yes, that applies to comments like, “She looks so healthy!” too.) To put it simply, these remarks can be detrimental to one’s mental health.
Pregnancy speculation in particular can be harmful. Even if the person in question does end up being pregnant (such as Rihanna during her 2023 Super Bowl performance), speculation about a person’s body contributes to weight stigma. One study in the journal Social Science & Medicine noted that pregnant and postpartum women reported “feeling chronic pressures to meet ideals of thinness” after negative body-shaming comments, which can then lead to “an array of serious negative psychological and physical health outcomes.”
Lady Gaga’s makeup artist, Sarah Tanno, said it best in a tweet supporting the singer, “Why spread a rumor about somebody that you care about or love? It does affect people’s mental health, people should not be body shaming people or assuming they are pregnant when they aren’t!” Amen to that.
Ali Faccenda is a writer with years of experience covering fashion, beauty, pop culture, and commerce beats. Her work has been published in People, InStyle, Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, Real Simple, Popsugar, BuzzFeed, and Better Homes & Gardens.
