Irish singer Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, known professionally as CMAT, has experienced a meteoric rise over the past year, bolstered by the critical success of her album EURO-COUNTRY. However, as her profile has expanded, so too has the intensity of the scrutiny she faces from online critics. Following her performance at BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend last weekend, the singer found herself the target of a wave of vitriolic commentary regarding her physical appearance.
The BBC, which had posted a video of CMAT performing her viral hit “Take a Sexy Picture of Me,” was ultimately forced to disable the comments section on the post due to the severity of the harassment. CMAT addressed the incident on Instagram, expressing the emotional toll of the experience. “It’s been very hard to try and describe how difficult the last few days since the bbcr1 big weekend have been,” she wrote. She emphasized that her appearance is not a conscious statement, but simply her reality, noting, “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.”
The discourse surrounding CMAT’s performance has sparked a broader conversation about the music industry’s treatment of women. A recent essay by the blogger Front Row Feels, which CMAT shared, argued that the industry often demands emotional vulnerability from female artists while simultaneously denying them basic physical humanity. The author highlighted a double standard, noting that smaller-bodied performers at the same festival were granted a level of grace that was denied to CMAT.
Reflecting on the impact of this environment, CMAT admitted that the joy of her professional success is increasingly overshadowed by the societal pressure to conform to specific beauty standards. “The success is increasingly becoming tarnished by the fact that I would be allowed to enjoy it so much more if I was thin,” she wrote. The singer has received an outpouring of support from peers, including Brandi Carlile and Katie Gavin of MUNA, as she continues to navigate the challenges of public life in an unforgiving digital landscape.
