One Direction - is this a legit new threat wrt to a new boy band invasion? y/n

if the GQ writer tweeted his descriptions of 1D fans directly to them, i dare say he'd be seen as a particularly creepy and misogynistic troll

xp to self
bcz among teenage girls who love harry styles there is a tendency to kind of... associate him with themselves? the early reactions are v much of the type 'you called my bff a slut, someone hold my earrings'

xp OK, that info wasn't in the original news report I read. That does make the reaction more explicable, though not defensible imo.

My concern is that we can discuss the difference in power between teenage girls threatening adult men and teenage boys threatening adult women, and therefore find one more dangerous and repellent than the other, but the recent debate about the culture of extreme abuse has been about stigmatising and deterring abuse among the people who do it. If people are seen to defend one kind while being outraged by the other then it sends terrible mixed messages. Your angry teenage male tweeter isn't going to go, OK, fair enough, men do have power in society and rape is infinitely more common than castration, so it's not the same. He's going to think that threats can be excused. It's a really bad precedent.

yeah i mean, surely the root of most of this problem is that people think abusive language doesn't actually mean anything cos y'know it's just the internet. like whatever the hell people think of gq, prob read it last at a barber about a decade ago, i assume it's casually sexist given its brief.

He's going to think that threats can be excused

he already thinks this!

i mean i get why GQ is allowed to act so super surprised by this because it has historically been ok to describe teenage girls as a pulsating mass that produces sobs and screams and vaginal discharge -- so okay that it is usually let slide, and even teenage fangirls themselves let it slide. So the idea that that's what the 1D fans are reacting to, that they're defending themselves against this description, is very surprising, because teenage girls who love a boyband don't tend to defend themselves for liking it, they tend to 1. defend the boyband 2. deflect the conversation somewhere else 3. ignore you.

What it seems these twitter users are responding to is the GQ interviewer trying to interpellate Harry Styles in their blokey laddish world by getting him to talk about how he gets laid a lot, which 1D fans are repelled by and I think not on a 'harry styles cannot have sex look at him he is a cherubic angel' level because no-one would ever believe that, 'going to get so much pussy', etc; it's instead that this no doubt 30-something man is trying to co-opt Styles, reduce him to his sexuality (an experience that a teenage girl is p damn familiar with) but also take him away into the value system of laddishness when he belongs in the value system of the 1D fan.

It's not the piece I would have written but why do you think Harry Styles "belongs in the value system of the 1D fan"? The history of fandom is full of fans realising that actually their idols are complicated autonomous individuals who have their own value systems. Styles does behave in certain laddish ways and if you agree to be interviewed by a men's magazine then that's going to come up. Of course the fans are angry because it doesn't suit their version but theirs is not the only version. That said, I've read a lot about fan cultures and attitudes to teenage girl fans over the years and the article's POV feels archaic to me so I'm not surprised they're angry, I just won't defend the more extreme manifestations of that anger.

slightly because when you take someone into the value system of laddishness (whey lad, getting laid) from the imaginative world of the 1D fan (idk, presumably a world in which Styles is having a lot of sex but it's all very sincere and he's probably not having as much sex as people think because it's very tiring touring) you have to go through the value system of the actual world in which, for a teenage girl, having a lot of sex = people think of you as a slut. And because the characterisation of Styles belongs to teenage girls, the values of the world that are applied to teenage girls apply to him, and so talking about him having a lot of sex = implying that he is a slut. (rather than, e.g. a stud)

tl;dr and that is why some of those tweets involve teenage girls calling GQ 'sluts'.

Of course the fans are angry because it doesn't suit their version but theirs is not the only version

but they... want it to be...

like, they are 14 year olds?

ALTHOUGH ACTUALLY one thing that's super interesting is that in a way teenage girls are culturally more powerful than they have ever been, because with the fracturing of various monocultures and 20-odd-years' creation of several separate cultural/commercial spaces that are very very specific to the teen and tween markets, there are places in which the teen consumer and the teen culture-consumer are now dominant.

Which is to say places in which the moral universe of the teenage fan girl can now be treated as the normative moral universe.

1D are an interesting case-in-point because they are a boyband who are not required to pretend that they are not having sex.

NSYNC were required to say that they were not having sex: I have a very vague memory of an interview in which Justin Timberlake was pressured about whether or not he and Britney Spears were sleeping together.

this is partly to do with cultural pressures, the Southern American purity culture from which Timberlake and Spears and many of their fans came, Britney Spears' cultural position, etc etc etc -- but crucially a lot of those 1D fans having shitfits on twitter about GQ are also American and from cultural groups with varying ideas about sex-before-marriage and sex-during-high-school and what is appropriate to show (as distinct from what is actually happening).

So the teenage girl fan - who knows it's not appropriate to be seen to be having sex - has lived in a world in which your boyband members were "not having sex" but you are constantly being told by external media that they are obviously having sex, maybe they're taking girls back after shows, lads will be lads and will take advantage of all the adulation they get because that's normal.

the guys themselves are part of the whole lad culture thing, even if it's mostly concealed.

xp This is all interesting and true. Teenage morality can be a terrifying, unyielding thing. But irl Styles is a grown-up and GQ presented him accordingly.

xp-to-self (sorry, this is getting well convoluted)

i.e. the cultural values of the "real world" are bigger than you, and dominate everyone, and the boyband you love belongs to that "real world"'s cultural values and is only pretending to purity to get your money.

by contrast, in the microuniverse of a teen/tween market, the morals deemed acceptable by Disney and your parents and your peers' self-presentation are all one.

i don't disagree with anything you're saying but i do think there are so many 1d fans it seems a bit difficult to say they're all behaving as one mass for the same reasons, no more than it would be criticised if you attributed negative behaviour to them in a blanket way.

The way we've tended to think of boybands' "not having sex" is that it's to convince teenage girl fans that they could be in with a chance-- or at least that no other girl is further ahead in this heart than you potentially could be.

But there's also an extent to which their "not having sex" is the same "not having sex" that teenage girl fans are expected to uphold. It is a state of being that's true and false in the same ways, and the penalties associated with visibly breaking it are similar -- and people from "the real world" will attack you about it in the same ways.

xp yeah this really cannot hold for all of them!

I mean, the reason I started thinking about this was that I was surprised that they were so offended by the "harry styles as total LAD" characterisation, because that was, you know, obviously what GQ would do to make him palatable to their audience.

I'm interested on what set them off here. Lex assumes it's the same thing that bothers him (condescension towards the fans) but the tweets I've seen suggest, as c sharp major does, that it's more about the handling of Harry Styles' promiscuity. Those are two distinct grievances and GQ is culpable in the first case but merely doing its job in the second.

xp-to-self
And because I think at the same kind of age I was very impressed by lad mag culture, there was a coolness associated with it -- i guess because i was v embedded in the UK of the 90s? I think I would have been pleased that this object of my affection was getting a male-world stamp of approval.

So it is AMAZING to me that these girls are so vehemently against GQ making Harry Styles palatable to lad culture.

like, they are basically less impressed by patriarchy than i was at their age, this is astounding

I still don't think it's possible to be fully clear as to what the annoyance is about. Like, this is fanaticism (I don't mean that in a loaded or negative way.) It's like people raging about religion or something, everyone has their own interpretation.

and it's super self-feeding, i think a lot of people are just doing it because other people are doing it.

there's a group of 1D bloggers who are in their 20s and refer to the process of being into 1D and writing on tumblr about it and sharing images and ideas as the 'Contagion'

also, lest we forget, other 1D fan twitter users' greatest hits:
1. being convinced that harry and louis are in a secret relationship and that louis' girlfriend is a paid beard
2. being absolute nightmares to anyone remotely connected to anyone in the band
3. so much racism toward zayn, so much racism, in a way the lulzy ironic racism is more offensive than the straightforward, oh my days

I'm interested on what set them off here. Lex assumes it's the same thing that bothers him (condescension towards the fans) but the tweets I've seen suggest, as c sharp major does, that it's more about the handling of Harry Styles' promiscuity. Those are two distinct grievances and GQ is culpable in the first case but merely doing its job in the second.

I honestly do not think that many teenage girl fans know that they could defend themselves, tbh, that's kind of where i'm coming from.

and it's super self-feeding, i think a lot of people are just doing it because other people are doing it.

otm. it is really like this. twitter obv is a medium that lends itself to this. i kinda use twitter for work pretty much all of my day and i often gaze into the lake of souls of a given trending topic. it does have that feeling of a lot of people who are sort of joining in but not fully aware of what's going on. the multiplication of the words/tweets is kind of scary in a sense of how much person power (in the sense of manpower) it constitutes.

i should really do some work rather than continue to think about The Teenage Girls And Their Complicated Selfhood but

But irl Styles is a grown-up and GQ presented him accordingly.

gq didn't present him "as a grown up", or indeed as irl Styles-- they wanted to interview him as the kind of young man who impresses other young men with bragging about his sex life, and he resisted that (as is kind of his job)

also, if you think "Can you give me a rough, ballpark figure [of the number of people you've slept with]" is a question that a grown-up asks of another grown-up, then... you really need to think about your concept of adulthood.

for ref, here's the images that were floating about at the beginning of the whole kerfuffle:
https://twitter.com/oh1dstalker/status/362234283580076032/photo/1/large
https://twitter.com/alexandergold/status/362232475239469056/photo/1/large

** he resisted that (as is kind of his job) and then his resistance could v easily be read as "him being pressured about the number of people he's slept with" and etc etc etc etc etc etc etc

I"m astounded by this conversation because Harry Styles is an ugly little man.

he's not

I mean if you wanted to blow him up there's aesthetic reasons for doing so

up?

missing a comma.

"Up there's asthetic reasons" etc. Probably a bookshelf or something.

I am surprised that Harry has only awkwardly had sex with two people.

up?

― some dude, Thursday, August 1, 2013

ew

You know yr a gay homosexual when it totally shocks you that harry gets paid any attention whatsoever.

Poor Harry is just rhyming slang for haemorrhoids in our house. Sorry thread, that's all I've got to offer.

― trippin' on brostep beats (NickB), Thursday, August 1, 2013 1:24 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

love this

i can see how harry is attractive though i guess looking hygienic has always been more important to me than some others

also his tattoos are an embarrassment

The GQ description of their fans was unquestionably gross and misogynistic, but their fans' perceived need to defend Harry from being "badgered" about his sexual proclivities seems misplaced. What are the consequences for a dude like him being seen as sexually promiscuous? Not many, I'd imagine. Actually I don't have to imagine, the guy already has a reputation as a womanizer, false or not and it doesn't seem to be hurting him the way it would if he were to be a woman. And speaking of that, I also can't help but take their defense of him and put it in context with how the same fandom has treated just about every woman he's dated or been seen with. I mean, their reaction to him dating Taylor Swift was incredibly gross.

I'm also confused as to why Zayn is not universally agreed to be the obligatory "Hot One" but I feel like if I spent time thinking about why the unfortunate reasons would become clear.

I'm also confused as to why Zayn is not universally agreed to be the obligatory "Hot One"

I'm saying.

Though the second part of your sentence is probably correct too.

I think a lot of fans maybe also equate big fluffy hair with innocence?

I equate big fluffy hair with 1981.

a/k/a innocence

it's no "What Makes You Beautiful" but i like "Best Song Ever"