If you haven’t caught any of PAPER’s Girl Crush series, they’ve facilitated some interesting conversations between leading women in various fields who share a mutual admiration for each other. My personal favorite was the unlikely (at least in my estimation) conversation between Emma Watson and bell hooks because hooks has been an ink hero of mine for quite some time. Anyway, we can’t post all of these because we like to keep things music-centric here at the ‘Gum, but an encounter between Perfect Pussy’s Meredith Graves and Chvrches’ Lauren Mayberry is certainly fitting, and it helps that the conversation is a scintillating one. Graves and Mayberry address why they’re lumped together frequently in music writing — what Graves calls “misogyny porn” and how readers relish partaking in women’s suffering — as well as how marketing yourself as a feminist does not pay, interacting with fans, and the life adjustments they had to make with their success. Here is a brief excerpt from Graves on “misogyny porn”:

When people talk to women in music about music, the primary topic is suffering, because people love to read about how hard it is to be a woman. They love to have it validated that we are really struggling; it’s never just, like, fun and easy for us. Misogyny porn is “tell us the worst thing a music writer has ever written about you,” or “tell us about the times when people privileged your appearance over your music,” or “tell us the most sexist thing anyone has ever said to you.” Why don’t you ask me about my guitar tone? Why do you want me to recount, for free, the times that I have been abused? Why is that the story?

Read the conversation in its entirety over at PAPER.