CMAT says the abuse that followed her Radio 1 Big Weekend set in Sunderland has left her in “deep sadness,” after the broadcaster disabled comments on clips of her performance because of vile body-related remarks.
The singer posted on Sunday that it had been “very hard to try and describe how difficult the last few days since the bbcr1 big weekend have been,” and said the commentary had caused her “deep sadness.” The reaction has put fresh focus on how quickly online abuse can gather around women performers after a festival appearance, especially when that criticism turns on their bodies rather than the music.
The backlash came after CMAT performed at Radio 1’s Big Weekend in Sunderland on Sunday, where Instagram clips of her set drew comments so aggressive that the broadcaster switched them off. The move was aimed at stopping abuse from spreading under the posts, but it also exposed a harder question about why some performers are treated as targets while others at the same event are not.
Clips from the same festival featuring smaller-bodied female performers still had comments enabled, even though comments on CMAT’s clips were disabled. That gap matters because it shows the moderation response was not applied evenly across the event’s own content, even as the public conversation around her appearance kept growing.
CMAT has seen this before. Two years ago, she said she went through the same thing at the same festival, and responded with a joke that she had not realised it was illegal to have a huge ass. Her song Take a Sexy Picture of Me was inspired by impossible beauty standards for women, and this latest episode lands in the same painful territory: a female artist being judged online for how she looks while she is onstage trying to perform.
The broader pattern is not confined to CMAT. Yesterday, Olivia Rodrigo spoke about backlash over a Barcelona concert outfit and said she had performed in a bra and shorts without outcry before being criticised for a fully covered dress, arguing that the rhetoric showed how paedophilia is normalised in culture. Put alongside CMAT’s response, the episode underlines how often women in pop are still punished for the bodies they have, or the clothes they wear, and the unanswered question now is whether the broadcaster will keep changing how it handles comments on future clips of women performers when the abuse starts to escalate.
