Lauren Mayberry, the singer of Chvrches, has condemned trolls, saying that they’re practically cavemen for making these threats of ‘physical and sexual violence’
Sadly no stranger to being trolled – remember our story of her responding to a vile threat posted to her Instagram where a random dickhead threatened sexual violence involving a cheese grater? – Lauren experienced a backlash after Chvrches’ new video was released.
You can watch it here:
As you can see, it’s Lauren, in a black mini-dress, walking on some huge puddles, doing some singing. And then she lies down in them for a bit, enjoying a little splash in the water. It’s sexual, but as far as music videos go, it’s as vanilla as In The Night Garden.
But some people saw fit to call Lauren a ‘whore’ and much worse online.
‘The response to the video, that to me just seemed ludicrous, really,’ she told Channel 4 News: ‘I am a 27-year-old woman wearing a minidress with wet-look hair. If you don’t like it, that’s fine, but there is a difference between criticism and hatred. For me, it is sadly predictable, you fall back on the base argument.’
She explained that the instinct to resort to crass, violent put-downs is the most knuckle-dragging method of silencing people: ‘If you don’t like what a woman is wearing, you don’t like her opinion, you don’t like what it is she represents, then you fall back on the basic caveman arguments of threatening with physical and sexual violence because it is your trump card. Because that’s the way you get somebody to shut up. And I just think that is a very sad state of affairs.’
And what’s worse is that when she’s complained about this sort of harassment, some people respond by amping it up: ‘Somebody tweeted me the other day, “If you can’t learn to deal with this sort of shit, stick a gun in your mouth before the record even comes out. I have one and I’ll give it to you.”’
‘Personally, that’s horrifying, if somebody put that through your door, you would go to the police with that.’
She decided to speak out again because: ‘This happens to women all the time anyway, and I hate the idea that young girls who follow our band deal with stuff like that. I don’t want them to feel isolated, I don’t want them to feel like it is just happening to them, because it happens everywhere.'
And while legal action could be important in changing the way people act online, (there have been some high profile convictions made against trolls, which might go some way to teaching people to be accountable for what they do online) Lauren – perhaps cynically - said that it’s ‘unrealistic for companies’ to get lawyers in to sift through messages deciding what’s ok and what’s not. What she did suggest, though, to stop this sort of trolling, is: ‘a shift in the cultural approach to women, and that will take time.’
Hopefully not too much longer…
Like this? You might also be interested in:
Pop Singer Hits Back Against Disgusting Violent Comments On Instagram
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Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.