The Irish singer-songwriter CMAT has responded to ongoing abuse she has received about her body and her weight following an appearance last week at BBC’s Radio 1 Big Weekend.
The musician, whose real name is Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, wrote on Instagram on Thursday that she had felt “compelled to wade in and speak for myself” after learning of the abuse being directed at photos taken of her on stage at the Sunderland festival on 24 May.
“It is literally so boring for me, a gorgeous genius, to keep having to yap on about how horribly I am treated because of my body,” she wrote. “I would love to stop but I cannot because it keeps happening, at an accelerating and worsening pace as I become more famous.”
CMAT shared screengrabs of a Substack essay by a music fan going by Front Row Feels, which “summed up a lot of what is causing my deep sadness,” she wrote.
The essay compared the treatment of CMAT with fellow Big Weekend acts Zara Larsson and Olivia Dean, who didn’t appear to be subjected to the same level of abuse online.
“What struck me most while scrolling through those toxic comment sections was the glaring disparity in how different women on that same lineup were treated,” Front Row Feels wrote, adding that Larsson and Dean “were granted a level of grace and basic humanity that was completely denied to CMAT”.
CMAT pointed out to “well-meaning” commenters that her body size was not a choice: “I am not being defiant. I am not choosing to look like this or weigh this much as some kind of punk rock act of liberty. I simply have a body, one that I would of course like to change in order to fit in and avoid all of this abuse, but I have had extreme difficulty in doing so. I don’t get a say in whether or not I want to be brave, I simply have to sit here and take it.”
She said that though she was grateful for her success, it is “increasingly becoming tarnished by the fact that I would be allowed to enjoy it so much more if I was thin”.
“There is no relief from this – nobody can protect me or save me from this, and all that is demanded of me is more and more work as every environment I am placed in becomes more hostile,” she wrote.
Last year the singer-songwriter released Take a Sexy Picture of Me, which criticised the scrutiny women face on their bodies and appearance.
She is now touring her third album Euro-Country, including a sold-out headline show in Dublin on Saturday.