Chvrches’ Lauren Mayberry Discusses Battle With Misogynistic Trolls On UK TV

All around legend Lauren Mayberry of CHVRCHES‘ has for a good while now been standing up to the grossly rampant misogyny that women in the public eye tend to face.

Most recently, she has been dealing with the rabid denizens of 4chan, where there was a thread filled with slut shaming objectifying comments on her appearance in the band’s new video for single Leave A Trace. Speaking out against the reams of vile and hate filled comments to the UK’s Channel 4 News she had the following to say of the unfair and uncalled misogyny she has had to deal with:

“I’m a 27-year-old woman wearing a minidress with wet look hair. If you don’t like it, that’s fine, but there’s a difference between criticism and hatred. And I guess at this point, we’re aware that we’re lucky enough to have a certain audience for our band, and although we get the cyber-misogyny on a certain level because of visibility, this happens to women all the time anyway. And I hate the idea that young girls who follow our band who deal with stuff like that — I don’t want them to feel isolated, I don’t want them to feel like it’s just happening to them. Because it happens everywhere, and I don’t think the “just ignore it and it’ll go away” argument is working …

“It’s always sadly predictable … If you don’t like what a woman is doing, you don’t like her opinion, you don’t like what it is that she represents, then you fall back on the basic caveman arguments of threatening with physical and sexual violence, because it’s your trump card. Because that’s the way you get somebody to shut up. And I just think that’s a very sad state of affairs to be living in.”

She didn’t just stop there though, with the short interview covering a lot of ground, the singer pointing out that we can’t change this by legislation, but rather we need to change people’s attitudes. She also answered the perennial piece of advice parroted to her over and over again of “don’t feed the trolls”, implying she is somehow responsible for the campaign of juvenile hatred by engaging with the trolls in the first place.

“Maybe to an extent, because we’ve spoken out about it more, I paint a target on my back, because people think they’ll get a response. But to me, it’s not necessarily you responding that trolls want. They want to scare and they want to intimidate and they want to silence people. So ignoring it, to me, doesn’t make a difference.”

Watch the full interview below.

Gallery: CHVRCHES @ Splendour In The Grass 2014, Byron Bay / Photos: Ashley Mar