"I Simply Have a Body." - A Defence of CMAT
Your body's worth gets calculated before you sing a note. Fat means lazy means can't work means binned.
CMAT ripped off her shirt at Radio 1's Big Weekend and they called her fat in English then the video went viral and they called her fat in Spanish.
fat fat fat.
Like that's the only word when a woman opens her mouth, and sound comes out, the kind of songwriting comes once in a generation, but who gives a fuck when there's a ‘fat’ arse to comment on.
"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." - CMAT
I simply have a body.
No you don't.
Nine years old. Sticky tape pressed to small legs because the hair there is wrong. Rip. Tape pulling from skin pulling hairs from roots the sting the understanding settling in small bones: you are the problem. Your flesh. Your space. The pain is the lesson and the lesson is you're wrong.
CMAT writes about this instead of anything else.
Full names on the abuse. Full faces. No shame.
I simply have a body.
Women in the industry are not given enough time. Not allowed to age. Just that window of:
young, thin, fuckable, consumable.
Kelly Clarkson was shown naked women on magazine covers. This is what you're competing with. When she got thin: "When I was really skinny I wanted to kill myself. Miserable for four years. But no one cared because aesthetically you make sense."
She ran until her feet broke. Bone grinding, tendon snapping, the foot that can’t bear weight, the knee giving out, the body destroying itself trying to be small enough.
I simply have a body.
Demi Lovato, at twelve, was bullied for being fat, that’s when the purging started. At seventeen, it was cocaine. "I used to break down into tears in grocery stores." Fluorescent lights. Rows of food. Throat closing. Can't breathe. Aisles becoming walls. Just food, just seeing food, and the panic the body rejects sustenance because you've taught it food is an enemy, food is what makes you wrong.
Her team controlled what she ate. Monitored it. Restricted it. In 2018, heroin laced with fentanyl nearly killed her. The industry wants thin and stable and productive and profitable, and you can't when you're starving, when the job makes you sick, and the sickness is what keeps you marketable.
Amy Winehouse, at twenty-seven was dead. Her brother stated: "What really killed her was the bulimia." Years of vomiting. Throat burning, acid eating the oesophagus, tooth enamel dissolving, the body eating itself, stomach acid in your mouth, the retching that becomes reflex becomes the only control you have, becomes what kills you.
Jesy Nelson at twenty took an overdose. Pills in hand, pills on tongue, pills down throat because they called her the fat, ugly one. The body is trying to stop, the body is trying to end, the body is at war.
I simply have a body.
The arts industry is a system where flesh is profit margin. CMAT sings about being nine years old, waxing with sticky tape and now by the time she's on stage her body's been assessed, audited, rejected for two decades, told to stand there, sing, be grateful and shut up about being called fat in Spanish.
Meta turns your flesh into engagement, turns engagement into ad revenue, turns ad revenue into £100 billion and somewhere in that equation is CMAT's body is turned into money fed into an algorithm that knows body shaming spikes clicks, knows cruelty drives profit. They know. The machine runs on our pain.
The music industry creates the eating disorders, the drug addiction and the conditions for collapse, then profits from the collapse, then finds the next one and the next one and the next one.
I simply have a body.
No. None of us do.
We are born with flesh, and the flesh gets assessed, and the assessment decides if you're allowed to exist and whether your music matters or just the size of your arse
I simply have a body.
No.
Meta made £100 billion from engagement from our flesh from clicking on abuse.
No opting out. No escape.
I simply have a body.