Taylor Swift has criticised the ongoing speculation surrounding her love life, labelling the heightened interest in her personal affairs as “sexist”.

Speaking to Australia’s 2Day FM about the inspiration behind her music and how she feels about claims that she only writes songs about ex-boyfriends.

The singer said: “You’re going to have people who are going to see the depth from which you approached a song, the fact that you put your real emotions into it and that’s valuable and that’s good and that’s real.”

She continued: “And then you’re gonna have people who are gonna say, ‘Oh, she just writes songs about her ex-boyfriends’, and I think frankly that’s a very sexist angle to take. No-one says that about Ed Sheeran, no-one says that about Bruno Mars – they’re all writing songs about their exes, their current girlfriends, their love life… and no-one raises a red flag there.”

The singer recently told The Guardian that she regards herself as a feminist, thanking Girls writer Lena Dunham for helping her in her self-discovery.

“As a teenager, I didn’t understand that saying you’re a feminist is just saying that you hope women and men will have equal rights and equal opportunities,” she said back in August. “What it seemed to me, the way it was phrased in culture, society, was that you hate men. And now, I think a lot of girls have had a feminist awakening because they understand what the word means. For so long it’s been made to seem like something where you’d picket against the opposite sex, whereas it’s not about that at all. Becoming friends with Lena – without her preaching to me, but just seeing why she believes what she believes, why she says what she says, why she stands for what she stands for – has made me realise that I’ve been taking a feminist stance without actually saying so.”

Taylor Swift releases her new album ‘1989’ next week (October 27), having already unveiled lead single ‘Shake It Off’. The record is Swift’s fifth studio effort to date.