For an eye-catching spring/summer 2026 look, why not try one of the infinitely fun ways you can dress up misogyny? There’s buttoned-up faux concern. The haughty pince-nez of high dudgeon. The splashy feather boa of outrage. If you’re really bold, why not the full birthday suit of naked disgust? There are far more acceptable options, apparently, than there are for actually dressing as a famous female pop star in 2026. Between the parallel uproar over extremely different outfits worn recently by CMAT and by Olivia Rodrigo, it almost seems as though there are in fact no options at all for how a woman should look in public. Funny, that.
Yesterday, the Irish and American musicians each commented on recent backlash over their appearances that came from the scummy bottom of the internet. On Sunday, CMAT performed at BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend in Sunderland. When the BBC posted clips of her performance on Instagram, comments about her body were so vile that the broadcaster had to disable them; tellingly, clips from the same festival featuring smaller-bodied female performers still have comments enabled. “It’s been very hard to try and describe how difficult the last few days since the bbcr1 big weekend have been,” CMAT posted, saying the commentary caused her “deep sadness”.
Gallingly, two years ago, CMAT went through exactly the same thing at exactly the same festival. Back then she made light of it, posting: “I didn’t realise it was illegal to have a huge ass! I am guilty as charged. It is time to lock me up and throw away the key.” It also inspired one of her breakthrough songs, Take a Sexy Picture of Me, about the impossible beauty standards that women face. How young do we have to look to be considered sexually attractive or even worthy of love from men, it asked: 15? 14? Five? “Or two, like a baby?” Rather than take a good look in the mirror, some idiots claimed her lyrics advocated for the sexualisation of young girls rather than satirising a pernicious pattern: “Is that CMAT song creepy as hell?” a self-professed “older male” asked on Reddit.
Even subverting the male gaze won’t stop you from being accused of pandering to it. In the styling for Rodrigo’s new album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, the 23-year-old pop star is wearing babydoll dresses in tribute to the 90s female punks – Kathleen Hanna, Courtney Love, Kat Bjelland – who revamped the cropped nightgowns into the “kinderwhore” look, shredding and smearing them with makeup to confront men with the discomfort of their unwanted objectification. A concert in Barcelona during which Rodrigo wore a puffy floral number prompted mass online commentary calling her “pedo bait” and “Lolita”. “That’s been making me so upset,” Rodrigo told the New York Times’ Popcast, published yesterday. She pointed out how illogical these comments were: in the past, she has performed in a bra and shorts, to no outcry, “but me fully covered up in a dress that people deem to be childlike was inappropriate”.
Rodrigo continued: “I think it shows how we really normalise paedophilia in our culture. And also it’s just this rhetoric that we’re fed as girls since we’re so little, which is like, ‘Don’t wear that because then a man is going to sexualise your body and it’s your fault.’”
If CMAT is supposedly an affront to the male gaze, but Rodrigo is indulging it, what sliver of ground is left? Even the inverse empowerment narrative is a trap. As CMAT pointed out, many “well-meaning” people have tried to claim her as a figurehead of the body positivity movement, but, she wrote, “I am not choosing to look like this or weigh this much as some kind of punk-rock act of liberty. I simply have a body, one that I would of course like to change in order to fit in and avoid all of this abuse, but I have had extreme difficulty in doing so. I don’t get a say in whether or not I want to be brave, I simply have to sit here and take it.” Every possibility for how a woman in the public eye might look has been co-opted by an agenda that would rather tell her who she is rather than listen to who she is saying she is.
A suggestion often aired in situations like this is that you should never comment on women’s appearances. But in pop stardom, an artist’s look is deeply intentional and integral to the fun of it all, as worthy of analysis and consideration as the music. CMAT’s countrified burlesque encompasses the way Dolly Parton approaches femininity as drag; the vaudevillian inventiveness of drag itself; the huns who look outrageously fabulous on a high-street budget, with a little campy Catholicism to boot. And for all that Rodrigo is known for growing up as a Disney Channel actor, at home, her mum would play her Babes in Toyland and Hole, so her looks nod to her own matrilineal lineage as well as the rock legacy that she is continuing. (It’s probably also pretty comfortable to play live in, a far cry from the stirrups and stilettos that young female pop stars had to wear 20 years ago.)
While millions of fans do understand this, their appreciation is being drowned out. CMAT wrote that she would love to stop discussing how badly some people talk about her body, “but I cannot because it keeps happening at an accelerating and worsening pace as I become more famous … Nobody can protect me from this, and all that is demanded of me is more and more work as every environment I am placed in becomes more hostile.” Success, she wrote, “is increasingly becoming tarnished by the fact that I would be allowed to enjoy it so much more if I was thin”.
We are in the midst of a massive conservative retrenchment around femininity that is also being manipulated by bad actors. To me, the groundswell of comments such as these towards CMAT and Rodrigo comes with a distinct tang of bot farming, a coordinated attack boosted by figures or movements with a vested interest in shrinking the ways that women can exist in public. It’s misogyny’s latest pathetic costume: a bunch of losers stacked up in a grubby trenchcoat, fooling everyone.