Amid Taylor Swift’s ‘Ginny & Georgia’ spat, Antonia Gentry is getting harassed over a ‘throwaway line’

The Muse

Gentry has received a barrage of harassment on her Instagram account after her character Ginny's joke that “you go through men faster than Taylor Swift" to her on-screen mom Georgia on the brand-new Netflix drama went viral over the weekend. The joke prompted Swift fans to get "RESPECT TAYLOR SWIFT" to trend, a line repeated numerous times on Gentry's most recent Instagram post from Sunday. On Monday morning. Swift responded by slamming not only the show, but Netflix, which showed her Miss Americana documentary last year. "Hey Ginny & Georgia, 2010 called and it wants its lazy, deeply sexist joke back," Swift tweeted. "How about we stop degrading hard working women by defining this horse sh*t as FuNnY. Also, @netflix after Miss Americana this outfit doesn’t look cute on you (broken heart emoji) Happy Women’s History Month I guess." Netflix has yet to comment on the controversy. "Several things can be true at once," says Ashley Reese of the controversy. "One truth is that Antonia Gentry, the 25-year-old actor from Atlanta, Georgia, in her first semi-major role, didn’t write the Taylor Swift line, and attacking her in the name of Taylor Swift is not feminism, it’s being boneheaded online. Another truth is this: Taylor Swift’s love life has been the center of both tabloid fodder and entire album cycles for the majority of her career. She has made a point to both poke fun at her reputation as a chronic dater and object to the media’s fixation with her relationship status, a fixation that has hounded her since her teens. That Swift is unhappy about a line poking fun at her multiple relationships is her prerogative. Plus, she’s right in saying that the line was outdated: Using Taylor Swift’s love life as a punchline would have been right at home in a script from 2014, but 2021? Not so much. But it’s also true that Ginny Miller is a fictional 15-year-old girl who, from the little I’ve managed to decipher from this program, is not the moral arbiter of the Ginny and Georgia universe. Granted, my understanding of this show is largely limited to the viral 'oppression olympics' clip depicting Ginny and her love interest, Hunter, getting into an argument over who is more white-adjacent: Ginny, who is half-Black, or Hunter, who is half-Taiwanese. The scene is somewhat cringe-worthy and, again, feels outdated, but the fact that Ginny sneers, 'I know more Mandarin than you do, you’re barely even Asian!' indicates that Ginny is a character riddled with flaws and might not always say the nicest, most charitable thing. The context of the Taylor Swift line matters too: Ginny says it during an argument with her loving but somewhat dysfunctional mother, Georgia, who has a tendency to bounce around the country, landing wherever a new romance takes her. The Taylor Swift comparison was Ginny’s way of saying she craves stability, and while it doesn’t negate the sexist ways in which Swift’s love life has been portrayed in the media and interpreted by the public, nothing about this line suggests that the show’s writers are giving Ginny an encouraging pat on the back for saying it. But context is a pesky thing when you can, instead, get worked up in a mob-like frenzy. At the end of the day, an angry fictional character said a throwaway line about one of the biggest celebrities in the world. The line wasn’t great, but maybe people’s time would be better spent getting upset about a line uttered by a real person instead of a fake one."