Unfortunately, dealing with online trolls spewing violence and misogyny is commonplace for many women these days. Chvrches singer Lauren Mayberry has been vocal about the problem for some time, calling attention time and again to an online climate in which men feel comfortable subjecting women to the kind of abuse that would constitute an actionable offense in person. And now, the musician has granted an interview to Channel 4 News in response to a new wave of abusive comments in the wake of the band’s video for new song “Leave A Trace.”
Saying, “Ignoring it doesn’t make a difference,” Mayberry outlines a lucid and empathetic response to all the online viciousness, explaining why it was important for her to speak out about this issue:
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.
We won’t cite any examples of the sorts of appalling threats Mayberry has received online, because they’re exactly as bad as you might imagine. Mayberry lists just one example, and it’s sadly on the milder end, to give you a sense of these guys and their mentality:
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.
The whole interview, embedded below, is well worth watching, and not only for her sharp retort to the just-ignore-it, “don’t feed the trolls” advice regularly trotted out in these cases, but because she also dismisses potential solutions via online censorship, government or otherwise. In the meantime, it’s never too soon to start teaching your 13-year-old cousin that those “LULZ” are anything but.