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Taylor Swift fires shots at famous men in her new music video – who are they?

Taylor Swift’s latest venture into performative feminism is her song The Man, in which she imagines what life would be like if she were an incredibly wealthy white man, instead of an incredible wealthy white woman.

But that’s by-the-by, because the music video just came out and everyone is theorizing about who Swift is firing shots at in it. Swift loves to use her work to make an example of those who have wronged her, and this video is no different. She takes aim at the male double standard – and some famous men in particular. Let us decode it for you.

Jake Gyllenhaal

Swift’s male alter ego, Tyler Swift, looks a lot like Jake Gyllenhaal. Which could be a snub, seeing as Swift dated Gyllenhaal back in 2010 and several of her songs are rumored to be about him (something Gyllenhaal hates being asked about).

In this scene, a movie poster shows Tyler in “Mr Americana” (Miss Americana is a song on her latest album, and the subsequent name of Swift’s Netflix documentary) showing at “Mandance”, looking uncannily like Gyllenhaal.

But as Tyler is played by Swift, this may just be a sign of the fact that people tend to date people who look similar to them.

Leonardo DiCaprio

Leonardo DiCaprio has a habit of partying on yachts with super models in St Tropez, and nobody bats an eyelid. Good for him! Swift, on the other hand, has been criticized for her dating history. She references this in the lyrics: “They would toast to me, oh/ ‘Let the players play’/ I’d be just like Leo, in St Tropez.”

She also seems to be referencing Jordan Belfort, DiCaprio’s character in the movie Wolf of Wall Street, throughout the video – probably because Belfort’s character is the ultimate example of toxic masculinity.

John McEnroe

In this shot, an angry Tyler is seen smashing his tennis racket and pulling a hissy fit on court. It’s hard to be sure exactly who she is portraying because many male tennis players (Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal included) have smashed their rackets on the court – but this scene feels particularly reminiscent of McEnroe’s infamous 1984 game in which he went ballistic at an umpire.

Meanwhile, people within the sport have tried to regulate women for merely breathing as they hit the ball: Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova have had to defend themselves for their “distracting” grunts during play.

Scooter Braun

In this scene, Tyler is seen urinating on a wall on which the titles of Swift’s albums are spray-painted, next to a missing poster sign that reads: “If found return to Taylor Swift.”

This is undoubtedly a reference to the label owner Scooter Braun (which is confirmed in another closeup, where we see a “banned scooter” sign). Braun, a sworn enemy of Swift’s, acquired her back catalogue in 2019 and Swift claimed that this prevented her from performing her own music. Swift then vowed to re-record her first five albums so that they could truly be hers again.

Related: Taylor Swift, coming to terms with never-ending scrutiny | Rebecca Nicholson

Tellingly, in the shot, Swift’s album Lover is missing – which Braun never got his hands on (in one interview Swift said about Lover: “[What] is really special to me is that it’s the first one that I will own.”)

One title spray-painted on the wall isn’t an album of Swift’s – yet – so we’re assuming her next album might be called Karma.

The ending

The ending is a classic Swift device: she lifts the curtain and reminds you that she’s the director of this movie (literally). Tyler anxiously asks Swift, sitting in her director’s chair, how he did, and Swift responds: “Pretty good. But could you try to be sexier – maybe more likable – this time?”

Swift then praises the ballgirl (played by the TikTok celebrity Loren Gray) for just sitting there – a reminder that men often get praised by other men at work for doing sweet FA, while women are told off for not wearing the right clothes.