Let’s be honest, you don’t hate The Backstreet Boys or Justin Bieber. You don’t hate their music, you just can’t stand their fans.
Despite their success, Justin Bieber and One Direction are mocked and dismissed as having no real value only because teenage girls constitute the majority of their fanbases. I’m not claiming that Bieber is a lyrical genius, and it’s perfectly fine for people to hate his music or his attitude, but it’s not fine to bash him because “all of his fans are prepubescent girls.” It’s as if society thinks bands that appeal primarily to adolescent girls are not worth taking seriously.
While teenage fangirls have long been a subject of mockery, a recent GQ article by Jonathan Heaf about the fans of the British boy band One Direction took it to another level. The author portrayed the fans as nothing but sex-crazed, hormonal girls with little concern for anything other than dreaming about boys. In a bout of extreme misogyny, he says that we should by now be familiar with “the immense transformative power of a boy band to turn a butter-wouldn’t-melt teenage girl into a rabid, knicker-wetting banshee,” and that “these women don’t care about the Rolling Stones. They don’t care about the meta-modernist cycle of cultural repetition. They don’t care about history. All these female fans care about is their immediate vociferous reverence.”
I consider myself a One Direction fan, I like their music, and I think they’re cute and funny. Being a fan of a boy band doesn’t make me a shallow banshee, it doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy other activities, nor does it imply that attending a One Direction concert would make me part of the “dark pink oil slick that howls and moans and undulates with every impish crotch-thrust from their idols’ plinths.”
I’d like to think I could be passionate about something without being reduced to a single-minded idiot. Although Heaf’s article may be an extreme example, I think it’s indicative of a general societal malevolence toward teenage girls and the things they care about.
Girls with crushes on celebrity heartthrobs are easily belittled, but, in a way, these crushes can be a way for girls to safely express their sexuality where they might not have other outlets to do so. Crushing on teen idols can even be empowering. The message of songs such as “What Makes You Beautiful,” embraced by a sentimental fangirl, can provide a positive contrast to the struggles she may face in daily life that make her feel bad about herself or pressure her in a way that her favorite star never will. Yes, it’s a fantasy. But, it is a harmless one that can make reality easier to navigate.
Some people argue that this antipathy isn’t directed toward teenage girls, but toward the obsessive attitude regarding things like boy bands. I agree that extreme levels of obsession can be unhealthy, but why do we only subject teenage girls to this disdain? There are sports fans, oftentimes adult men, who cry over the losses of their favorite teams, paint their faces and bodies at large sporting events, spend hours engaged in fantasy leagues, and even participate in violent riots and demonstrations triggered by their obsessions. But they aren’t met with the level of derision that is directed at an adolescent girl whose room is covered in posters and who writes “Mrs. Bieber” on the back of all of her school notebooks.
It’s important that we stop hating on girls for liking the things that they like, whether that involves devaluing the things that are marketed toward them, or, in a different manifestation, calling girls “posers” or “fake geeks” if they express interest in historically male-dominated hobbies such as video games or comic books.
We are not giving young women space to have interests in our society. By regarding things that girls like as inherently stupid or valueless, we are saying the same thing about them through one of the most pervasive forms of misogyny in popular culture.
