CMAT for president
My body has changed a lot in my 30 years of life, but the pressure to look a certain way has followed me through every era, every different size, and every time I broke down over not looking ‘right’.
I grew up in the age of Special K diets and the tabloid’s obsession with mocking celebrities for being a size 10. Bridget Jones was deemed this woman who desperately needed to lose weight, despite being of average size and perfectly normal looking.
I was tricked into thinking that being anything over a size 10 was wrong, and it’s something that is still ingrained in my mind, no matter how hard I try to shake it off.
I’m now a size 14, and it’s something I’m still struggling to accept because society continues to put pressure on women to look one way, and that isn’t like me.
As someone who has struggled with body image and self-acceptance for most of her adult life, hearing CMAT be so beautifully honest about commercial attractiveness gave me the lift I so desperately needed.
Her latest release Take A Sexy Picture Of Me is a song I wish my teenage self could’ve listened to, but I’m grateful 30-year-old me has it as a comfort anthem as many of us continue to grapple with the societal pressures placed on women.
Speaking about the inspiration behind the song, Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson explained why she wanted to write about body image.
She told BBC Radio 1’s Jack Saunders that she was inspired to write after being trolled over her appearance.
She explained that the inspiration sparked when she was mocked over how she looked on social media.
“I was just wearing clothes and everyone was very annoyed at me for that,” she tells Radio 1’s Jack Saunders.
“Everyone is constantly being judged on whether or not they’re commercially attractive and where they fall within these really weird goal posts.
“The thing with this song was, I wanted it to sound joyous and uplifting to sing, but also to be a bit of a rallying cry. If we’re dealing with a song that’s as dark as this, and as grim as this, we have to make it a bit funny.”
“I just was annoyed, and I wanted to write a song about being annoyed about it.”
And CMAT is right, the tiny box society expects us to fit into when it comes to ‘beauty’ is annoying. Annoying is almost too gentle a word to describe it. It’s a drain on not only our energy, but our self-worth too.
Like CMAT, I also fall out of the very small box that commercial attractiveness can fit.
I’m forever worried about how big my stomach looks and fear people are judging me because it isn’t flat. I don’t wear sleeveless tops because I hate my arms, and I didn’t wear a swimsuit for nearly eight years because I felt so ashamed of how I looked.
I still panic about eating in front of people and feel a sense of dread when getting in photos because I just feel less than everybody else.
Society and the toxic diet culture I was all too familiar with since my teenage years made me think I was worthless because I wasn’t ‘commercially attractive.’
I’ve made little progress in recent years, but I am slowly learning that looking different isn’t a character flaw.
CMAT has helped me see that there really is no shame in not being ‘stereotypically pretty’ because it really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
I may be a little bit fat, but CMAT has helped me see that these unrealistic beauty standards don’t deserve space in our lives.
“I wanted the song to act as a support group for everyone who goes through this kind of thing,” CMAT shared, and that’s exactly what she’s done.
She’s given this 30-year-old woman a little bit of hope in a world where she’s never felt fully accepted.
