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CMU Approved
Approved: Chvrches’ Lauren Mayberry on misogyny
By Andy Malt | Published on Tuesday 1 October 2013
Last week Glaswegian electro trio Chrvches released their debut album, ‘The Bones Of What You Believe’, pulling off that most difficult of challenges in the process; delivering a record that lives up to the hype that surrounded the band arrival. When I first wrote about them in the summer of 2012 the fear that I might have just contributed to the band’s fall (or that they might just turn out to be a bit rubbish down the line), as praise for their early releases spread, quickly gripped me. Thankfully it turned out alright.
Today’s approval is of something entirely different though, and something that has already been spread out on social media as wildly as the band’s music. Chvrches frontwoman Lauren Mayberry, as you may have noticed, is a woman. She’s also the person who manages the outfit’s Facebook page, and as such receives all comments about the band – good and bad – direct to her mobile phone.
Last week she posted a screengrab of one of the less welcome messages posted to that Facebook profile, a direct message into the band’s inbox suggesting that the sender and Mayberry should “make superior love together”. Though she noted that it was rather more polite than another recent suggestion that someone might be able to “fuck the accent right out of her”.
Writing on the Guardian Music blog yesterday, Mayberry wrote about the suggestion that she should just learn to “deal” with stuff like this if she wants to be in the public eye. She is not the first woman to tackle this issue online (or off), of course. And not the first to subsequently receive a new barrage of exactly the same sort of abuse in response.
That this is still happening is depressing, to say the least, and as a man it’s hard not to feel embarrassed for and by the grown men (“they are all men”, notes Mayberry) who still see fit to fire off comments like this. So, let’s have this conversation now in the hope that we don’t have to have it again later. Read Mayberry’s blog post here.
