she originally tried to convince Eilish not to cover the song before changing her mind. “It shouldn’t be about me,” Williams said. “People grow and learn. I’d already called myself out and done a lot of work on the misogyny I’d metabolized as a young girl.”
Now that the backlash has quieted, Paramore has decided to embrace the song. At their October 2nd show, Williams said, “Four years ago, we said were gonna retire this song for a little while, and I guess technically we did! But what we did not know was that just about five minutes after I got canceled for saying the word ‘whore’ in a song, all of TikTok decided that it was OK. Make it make sense.”
“I remember a time when we had a MySpace and we were still a really small band,” she continued. “We were really small. We hadn’t even put out this song and we had noticed that kids were calling themselves ‘Parawhores.’ We were like, ‘Eugh, that’s weird!’ But I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s a word, and if you’re cool you won’t call a woman a whore because that’s bullshit.”
“We can all learn from ourselves, right?” she concluded. “Just for the record, 90 percent of you said whore tonight. That’s all I’m gonna say — I’m not gonna preach about it. I’m just gonna say thank you for being nostalgic about this because this is one of the coolest moments of our show and it’s very nice to feel like there’s a reason to bring it back that’s positive.”