Mocking Fan Culture Has Always Been Rooted in Misogyny
As seen in Blueprint Magazine
It is no secret that boy bands have very large and dedicated fan bases. Just a quick web search for the biggest music fandoms will bring up names like One Direction, BTS and 5 Seconds of Summer, all boy bands that have made their fame not only through their talent but through the unwavering dedication and passion of their fans. While these fan bases are undeniably a group of creative individuals passionate about music, their societal reputation does not reflect this truth.
Crazy, obsessed, silly. These are all words that are usually associated with boy band fandoms. Just mentioning any boy band fandom is usually met with remarks that mock these fandoms for being too obsessed and usually some accompanying comments on how bad the respective boy band is. But if these fandoms are extremely dedicated and have the power to not only catapult a talented group to new levels of fame but also contribute to societal change (for example, BTS ARMY raised $1 million for the Black Lives Matter movement last June, matching BTS’ donation) then why are they mocked? The simple answer—it’s because these fandoms are mostly made up of young women and girls.
Boyband fandoms are an incredibly diverse group with people of different genders, nationalities and ages, but there’s no escaping the fact that the majority are young women and girls. Conducted over the course of three months in 2020, the BTS Army Census, which has an incredible sample size of just over 400,000, found that 86.34% of ARMYs (that’s the name for the BTS fandom) identify as women. The same census found that 50.31% of ARMYs are under 18. These statistics show that an overwhelming majority of BTS’ fan base are women and over half are young people.
This is not meant to dismiss the fans that don’t fall into either of these categories but to highlight how society judges fans and their respective groups based on boy band fandoms being primarily made up of young women. The above statistics are enough to disqualify BTS as serious musicians for most people, branding their fans as ‘obsessed’ teenage girls, only listening to BTS because of their looks, when this couldn’t be further from the truth. For society, musicians with a fandom of mainly teenage girls are not to be taken seriously. We’ve seen this with groups like One Direction and 5 Seconds of Summer, and now with BTS, which are seen by the general population as less-than-serious musicians because of the harmful stigma attached to their fandom.
This stereotype of boy band fandoms being full of young screaming girls is typically considered a modern phenomenon, with the fandoms of groups like One Direction and performers such as Justin Beiber often being the blueprint for this image. However, if we delve a little further into music history we can see that boy band fandoms have often been painted as full of ‘hysterical’, screaming young women. By delving into the history of one of the originators of this phenomenon, The Beatles, we can see how passionate fans are often labelled as just a little bit too ‘obsessed’.
The Liverpool-born group are now considered a nationwide favourite, but their 1960s fan base is something today’s society would mock. Their fan base of teenage girls was coined “Beatlemania”, an obvious reference to the supposed ‘manic’ and ‘crazy’ nature of their fans, a term rooted in harmful beliefs that passionate women are erratic. The Museum of Youth Culture has stated “the Beatlemania era of the band’s career set a new precedent for fan culture and is one of the few examples of a youth scene or subculture that was instigated and dominated by girls”. Put simply, those passionate teenage girls changed the landscape of fandom and celebrity forever. The passion and unwavering determination of teenage girls and young women has the power to not only influence the future of fandom but also catapult artists to new levels of success. However, these young girls are mocked simply because of the stereotypes and stigma attached to their label of ‘boy band fan’.
Despite the initial fame of The Beatles being heavily influenced by young female fans, a group that is now viewed as ‘silly’ for their music interests, The Beatles have now cemented their place as a national music favourite for all ages and genders. The initial “Beatlemania” of excited young girls at concerts has been largely overshadowed by journalism and historical work that is largely produced by men. The Beatles’ history of having a primarily young, female fan base is often overlooked in significant music circles with Weber from The Historian and The Beatles noting “how male-dominated the field of Beatles historiography is” and how in “their earliest days [...] the interviews the band provided were almost unerringly granted to male journalists”. This clear favouring of historians and writers that are men, despite having a large fan base of women that shaped modern day fan culture, is evidence on how fans and experts that are men are used by society to provide validity for musicians. For the patriarchal society, men’s journalistic or historical work on musicians, and The Beatles specifically, provides a certain validity that can not be found through the interests of young women.
The idea of the ‘irrational’ and ‘crazy’ woman has heavy historical roots, and this idea of the obsessed and fanatical fangirl driven by emotion instead of logic could link back to the long tradition of painting women as irrational and emotional. By looking at the characterisation of fans that are young women as obsessive and irrational through a lens of historical medical beliefs, it might provide some answers on why men are often used in society to provide this validity to fan bases or musicians. Medical beliefs that date back centuries state that women are innately emotional and irrational and men, logical and reasonable. Barclay’s essay “Women’s History: Approaches from the History of Emotion” states that “the Victorians thought women were more emotionally unstable and inclined to hysteria”. While not so clear cut, this view has managed to survive in today’s society and is upheld by patriarchy.
This history of women and emotion has seeped into society’s portrayal of women’s interests as silly and their acts of fandom as ‘irrational’ and ‘obsessive’. The patriarchy does not allow for women to have interests without mocking them because, according to the patriarchy, women are emotional and erratic. We can even see this history mapped onto the phrase “Beatlemania”, which draws upon the incredibly gendered medical history of hysteria in order to paint these young women and girls as irrational and ‘crazy’ simply for being passionate.
These boy band fandoms of ‘screaming’ teenage girls are made up of dedicated and passionate people who focus their efforts and skills on breaking records, streaming their favourite band’s music and creating content to entertain their peers. The dedication and passion of boy band fandoms is admirable and shouldn’t be mocked.
The real question we should be asking is not ‘are boy band fandoms mainly screaming teenage girls?’ and is instead ‘even if fandoms are mainly screaming teenage girls, why would it matter?’. As the BTS ARMY Census shows, boyband fandoms are a diverse group of individuals united in their passion for the same musicians, but there’s no denying that a large number of them are young women. Why should this matter? Instead of trying to move away from the stereotype that boy band fans are primarily young teenage girls that are enamoured with their favourite group, we need to interrogate why people are so determined to mock this stereotype.
We need to combat the systems that belittle women’s interests, deems them silly and renders them obsessive. Instead, we need to uplift and celebrate women for their passions and trust them as authorities on subjects they clearly know a lot about. If we work to do this, we not only change attitudes to fandoms, we change attitudes to women.
Sources:
https://www.btsarmycensus.com/results
https://museumofyouthculture.com/beatlemania/
https://womenshistorynetwork.org/womens-history-approaches-from-the-history-of-emotion/
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