1989 (Taylor’s Version) did more than bring back the music from Taylor Swift’s hit 2014 pop album. It also added a major footnote to that era of her life and the media attention it received. Swift particularly reflected on why she chose to have an all-female squad, along with rumors about her sexuality.

Swift explains that she pivoted to public female friendships because she was tired of her being romantically liked to every man she hung out with. She wrote in a prologue for the album:

You see—in the years preceding this, I had become the target of slut-shaming—the intensity and relentlessness of which would be criticized and called out if it happened today. The jokes about my amount of boyfriends. The trivialization of my songwriting as if it were a predatory act of a boy crazy psychopath. The media co-signing of this narrative. I had to make it stop. Because it was starting to really hurt.

It became clear to me that for me, there was no such thing as casual dating, or even having a male friend who you platonically hang out with. If I was seen with him, it was assumed I was sleeping with him, and so I swore off hanging out with guys. Dating, flirting, or anything that could be weaponized against me by a culture that claimed to believe in liberating women but consistently treated me with the harsh moral codes of the Victorian era.

Being a consummate optimist, I assumed I could fix this if I simply changed my behavior. I swore off dating and decided to focus only on myself, my music, my growth, and my female friendships. If I only hung out with my female friends, people couldn’t sensationalize or sexualize that, right? I would learn later on that people could and people would.

But none of that mattered then because I had a plan and I had demeanor as trusting as a basket of golden retriever puppies. I had the keys to my own apartment in New York and I had new melodies bursting from my imagination.

Her heartfelt message wasn’t only about that, though. Swift also explained why she was compelled at the time to “completely reinvent myself,” and what it was like working with songwriter Max Martin and producer Jack Antonoff, her then-new friend. Reflecting on at that era, almost a decade ago, she realizes that there was so much she didn’t know. “This time of my life was marked by right kind of naïveté, a hunger for adventure, and a sense of freedom that I hadn’t tasted before.”

And, of course, she expresses her gratitude to her fans. “I’ll always be so incredibly grateful to how you loved and embraced this album,” she writes. Later on, she even jokes how her supporters “knew that maybe a girl who surrounds herself with female friends in adulthood is making up for a lack of them in childhood (not starting a tyrannical girl cult).”

She adds, alluding to her own repertoire, “Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine the magic you would sprinkle on my life for so long.”

Read Swift’s full prologue below:

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