The women of pop are not putting up with speculation about their bodies today.
Rumors abounded that Lady Gaga was pregnant after she was photographed at her sister’s wedding on June 3, but Mother Monster cleverly dismissed them in a new TikTok.
“Not pregnant — just down bad cryin at the gym,” she captioned a video of herself, in which she shows off freshly bleached brows and thick eyeliner.
The video includes a “register to vote” line, so Gaga clearly thought that tabloids should be focusing on more pressing matters than her body.
“[R]egister to vote or check if you’re registered EASILY at www.headcount.com,” she added in the comments.
The “Rain on Me” singer posted a similar message, accompanied by a selfie, to her Instagram story.
Taylor Swift — summoned either by Gaga’s reference to her “Down Bad” song lyric or the fact that another woman in music was having to deal with comments about her figure — posted her thoughts on the matter.
“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,” the star wrote in Gaga’s TikTok comments.
Gaga received more support from friends on Wednesday when her makeup artist, Sarah Tanno, added her thoughts on the matter on X.
“Honestly, it’s really sad that she had to address this because people were commenting about her body,” Tanno wrote. “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! Even if she was pregnant, it’s none of your business to know at all.”
This certainly isn’t the first time the typically poker-faced singer has had to shut down rumors about her body. Gaga took to Instagram in 2017 to remind fans that she didn’t care what was said about her, and neither should they.
“I heard my body is a topic of conversation,” she wrote at the time, “So I wanted to say, I’m proud of my body and you should be proud of yours too.”
Swift also has dealt with a plethora of pregnancy rumors, and in her documentary “Miss Americana,” she opened up about how the remarks affected her relationship with food.
Swift described how she would see “a picture of me where I feel like I looked like my tummy was too big, or … someone said that I looked pregnant … and that’ll just trigger me to just starve a little bit — just stop eating.”
Swift recalled in an interview with Variety the first time that she appeared on a magazine cover. “And the headline was like, ‘Pregnant at 18?’ And it was because I had worn something that made my lower stomach look not flat.”
But Swift says she’s left that vulnerability behind, and she is quick to support fellow stars like Gaga and speak out about self-love in the face of online bullying.
“I thought that I was supposed to feel like I was going to pass out at the end of a show, or in the middle of it,” she said in “Miss Americana.” Now, Swift said, she eats to stoke her energy and power through performances. As her defense of Gaga shows, she has plenty of energy left over to flex a little muscle online.
