hands-down one of my all time favorite taylor moments
What fucks me up about this is that he’s using a classic abusive behaviour on her.
He starts out by doing something that seems innocent but which is often a tactic used by abusive men to get past women’s defenses and justify their own behaviour. “I’m a nice guy. I’m not mean. I wouldn’t do anything bad.” And without being specific to this guy, TSwift calls him on it: she points out that there’s a very high correlation between self-labeling as a “nice guy” and not actually being very nice. It’s as polite as she can be without actually saying explicitly that this guy’s a jerk, but everyone listening knows that she’s basically just said, “Hey, you just did this thing that’s shitty.”
And his response is to try to gaslight her. Gaslighting is when you try to manipulate someone by making them doubt their perception of reality. It sounds like it would be impossible, but it’s actually incredibly common among abusive men, and often appears hand in hand with this creepy “I’m nice” crap. What he does is, rather than argue with her about whether most guys who self-label as nice are actually jerks, or move on to another topic, or shout her down—-what he does is DENY REALITY. Guys who self-label as nice aren’t nice? Cool—he’ll just assert that he never did that. Despite the fact that he JUST DID IT. ON CAMERA.
People who date men: if a man ever does this to you, run like hell. It’s the beginning of a very steep slope. Men who lie to you about behaviour you’ve observed—who lie to you about documented reality—in order to serve their own ends are not men you can trust. They are not good people. RUN THE FUCK AWAY.
Meanwhile, a million props to Taylor Swift for calling that shit out.