The View ladies defend Taylor Swift's 'fat' scale in 'Anti-Hero' music video: 'Leave her ass alone'

It's you. Hi. You're the problem, it's you — according to the ladies of The View.

After several listeners criticized Taylor Swift for including a scene in her "Anti-Hero" music video in which she steps on a scale that then reveals the word "fat" in place of a number, the ABC talk show panel came to her defense for engaging with deeply personal body image issues.

"They missed the point," Sunny Hostin said on Tuesday's episode of the series. "For someone who's an artist, she gets to have agency over her artistry. She was describing a personal experience, and quite frankly, it's a personal experience a lot of women experience. I've experienced it, and men. You get on the scale and you're a perfectly normal weight and all you see is fat, all you see is, 'Oh my gosh, I'm five pounds heavier than I should be.'"

After Sara Haines equated barring someone like Swift from working through her emotions to sanitizing art, panel moderator Whoopi Goldberg urged detractors to "just let her have her feelings," and cautioned naysayers to steer clear of the song if they don't like it.

"Why are you wasting your time on this?" the Oscar-winning actress continued. "You all want to say something about Taylor Swift, leave her ass alone!"

Joy Behar added that the discourse reminded her of a conversation she had years ago with former View cohost Star Jones, which made her realize that there was power in re-contextualizing a word that some see as negative.

"Take the word back. If you feel like saying you're fat, say you're fat. It's like 'bitch,' we own the word now, they can't really use it against us."

Goldberg finished the segment by targeting "our society" instead of Swift for commenting on it.

"You can never be just what you are. Everybody wants you to be something more, be less this, more that, and it's what people do to each other on social media," she said.

Following the release of "Anti-Hero" and its parent album, Midnights, Swift — who directed the music video — said the clip served as a way for fans to "watch my nightmare scenarios and intrusive thoughts play out in real time."

In an Instagram video, Swift further elaborated on the origins of the song.

"I don't think I've delved this far into my insecurities in this detail before. I struggle a lot with the idea that my life has become unmanageably sized and, not to sound too dark, I struggle with the idea of not feeling like a person," she said. "We all hate things about ourselves, and it's all of those aspects of the things we dislike and like about ourselves that we have to come to terms with if we're going to be this person."

Watch Swift's "Anti-Hero" music video above.

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