The Irish artist CMAT is a delightful, charismatic performer who's been playing on bigger and bigger stages over the past few years. But with that increased visibility, she's been exposed to a lot more comments about how she looks. On Sunday, CMAT performed at BBC Radio 1's Big Weekend festival, and people apparently had a lot to say about her body.
On her Instagram yesterday, CMAT shared a number of screenshots of a post from the Front Row Feels Substack about CMAT's Big Weekend performance. In that piece, Front Row Feels wrote about CMAT's last Big Weekend performance in 2024, pointing out that the body-shaming comments on the BBC's social media channels were so bad that the BBC disabled comments. Front Row Feels writes that the performance itself felt cathartic but that the BBC social-media comments afterwards were just as bad. The piece argues that this "says something much darker about the culture surrounding female performers" and that performers like Olivia Dean and Zara Larsson are "granted a level of grace and basic humanity that was completely denied to CMAT."
In her caption, CMAT writes that she's got social media apps deleted from her phone for mental health reasons but that she felt compelled to address the recent "discourse" over her body and the "deep sadness" that it caused her:
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. i would love to stop but i cannot because it keeps happening , at an accelerating and worsening pace as i become more famous. 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.
i also want to point out, to some very well-meaning people, that 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 dont get a say in whether or not i want to be brave, i simply have to sit here and take it.
Read the Front Row Feels piece here.
