Christine and The Queens wants women in the music industry to be “respected”.
The 32-year-old singer has posted a lengthy statement on social media in support of the #MeToo movement in her native France, where she insisted women shouldn’t have to “pay for men’s mistakes”.
Part of her message – which was originally posted in French – read: “I am not surprised to learn that, in the musical world, as in all other circles, the liberation of speech generates an upheaval that it is then difficult to master. Each of us has experienced a more or less tenuous form of harassment, sexist remarks, like all our sisters who walk in offices, who come home late at night, who are from professions radically different from ours.
“Being a woman in a record company office is being a woman like any other. A body in a photoshoot; the photographer holds the lens at the level of his crotch. A body in a studio, when a hand goes up the back, ‘It’s time for the hug break.’ ”
The ‘Tilted’ hitmaker – whose real name is Héloïse Letissier – then went on to say she stands with “all women”, and called for the end of “patriarchal violence”.
She added: “I am a singer. I recognise in the eyes of my sisters what I have known, they have known it too; we all have that little glow. I hardly know of any exception to the brutality of this reality: this is our body. All women, all women. All my sisters, starry, glorious, liquid gold. My sister who is a victim of transphobia. My sister who is a victim of homophobia. My sister who is alone with her memory.
“Let there be respect, let there be a horizontality of speech. Let the voice become again a tool of liberation. I would even say that it is time for all of us to sit at the same table; it’s time to start this unpleasant, terrifying discussion of patriarchal violence in earnest. It’s time to deconstruct it, to dissect it.”
And Christine also insisted she wants to see up and coming female artists treated better than the stars before them.
She wrote: “I would like us to think differently about power. young female artists. Let them not steal their works, let them sexualise themselves as they wish.
“I am the ally of all my sisters, wherever they are in their own commitments or their own convictions. I stand in solidarity with those who speak and those who decide to clench their fists. When violence is systemic, it also creates a family. In silence, without even seeing each other, at a distance, alive or dead, we know each other.”
Christine and the Queens: Women in the music industry should be ‘respected’
