It’s the summer of 2009. The sun is offering the bare minimum for June, but I have my back to the window, methodically typing out a letter to Lady Gaga. The two-page-long document is full of personal details and intimate thoughts, such as the worry I’ll never feel good enough or fit in at school. I pour my heart out to her and swim in the subsequent dopamine hits of a perfect one-way relationship.
I never told anyone about my love for Lady Gaga due to the shame of looking like an over-obsessive fangirl. While there’s now a cultural roadmap for teen girls idolising their favourite boybands, back then I had no idea how to showcase my obsession without looking unhinged.
But, thankfully, I have learned to revel in what it means to be truly consumed by pop culture, thanks to a wave of literature exploring exactly that dynamic. A handful of books, documentaries, films and memoirs are celebrating the fizzy, dizzying heights of female obsession and what it offers teen girls and women. Writers and academics are pushing back against the lazy stereotype of the frivolous, gullible, hysterical teenage girl and giving her a more nuanced backstory.
Part of this wave of insights comes from former obsessive girls writing about their own lived experiences. Journalist Kaitlyn Tiffany was once a screaming One Direction fan, and her book (Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It) investigates how fangirls not only catapulted the boyband from X-Factor failure to international stars, but simultaneously shaped the internet. There’s also journalist Maria Sherman’s celebration of female fandom, Larger Than Life: A History of Boy Bands from NKOTB to BTS, the basis for a documentary directed by Gia Coppola, Superfans: Screaming. Crying. Throwing up. Meanwhile, the Pixar film, Turning Red, follows 13-year-old Mei Lee’s adoration of 4*Town, a cartoonishly gorgeous boyband. Female obsession is being reclaimed, showing it can be joyous, offering emotional support to countless women growing up – and I’m one of them.
“Teen girls are viewed as too much – as too emotional, too passionate, too invested, too expressive,” says Dr Briony Hannell, a sociologist at Sheffield University and an expert on fan culture. “By virtue of their age and their gender, [obsessive girls] are routinely subject to many of the most negative and damaging stereotypes about fans – that they are hysterical, excessive and hypersexual.” It’s not that teen girls are devoid of sexuality – my own, regrettable, infatuation with Justin Timberlake at the age of 15 would never have happened if this were the case – but society has built an absurd caricature of teenage girls who idolise musicians as irrational and unruly. In reality, at least for me, this alleged transgression saw me playing Timberlake’s music videos on repeat before lessons. In hindsight this was possibly the most earnest way to simultaneously fancy and appreciate someone – by simply enjoying the work they put out.
The assumption that screaming girls at a One Direction concert were mentally undressing the band is a one-dimensional perception. It erases the LGBTQ+ voices within the group who enjoy the welcoming community that exists when you love the same thing. For many people, there is a camaraderie and trust built from obsessing over the same person or thing and these communities can be a key way to explore gender identity or sexuality, as they find people going through the same experiences.
There has been little effort to look beyond these narrow tropes, because “girlhood and teenage life has not historically been seen as having any kind of a value or direction”, says Dr Ysabel Gerrard, a lecturer in digital media and society at Sheffield University.
Instead, young girls’ obsessions are reduced to: “Harry Styles/Robert Pattinson is so hot; I will buy whatever he sells.” The assumption is that sexual attraction to these figures robs teenagers of objectivity and taste. Unsurprisingly, many young girls internalise “these derogatory, sexist stereotypes” and feel a sense of shame around their obsessions, despite the importance of them to their daily life and their sense of self, says Hannell.
By contrast, boys and men may be afforded more nuance in their obsessions – but there are still large barriers to how they can experience them. “The difference comes from much longer-standing norms around what people are allowed to do,” says Gerrard. “There is a comparison between football and boybands,” which have a similar level of “emotional investment”, but the response men have towards sports is more socially acceptable.
“Being a teenager is a rich environment for obsession, which I think is lost sometimes in the flat description of obsessive fangirls,” says Tiffany. Bedroom culture is a particularly enjoyable example of this. “It was a girl-focused form of subculture during the 90s, which included sitting in your bedroom, clipping things out of magazines, or doodling, writing in a diary, lip-syncing, listening to your CD player.” Girls are often reduced to simply being hormonal and running after “cute” boys, though within the four walls of their bedroom they might be creating installations and regurgitating inspiration in countless formats, from glitter-adorned photographs to handmade cushions.
The reality is that many obsessive teenage girls possess a level of creativity and self-expression akin to Gaga. They harbour huge creative potential, says Hannell. This might be expressed through the creation of artwork, writing and distributing fan fiction, or developing technically sophisticated fan videos or websites dedicated to what they love. Fangirls routinely deliver huge fanfiction narratives within weeks.
During my own obsession, I carefully papier-mâchéd an eye mask, sticking on mirrored pieces of card, to replicate one of Gaga’s Pokerface accessories in the run-up to her Birmingham concert. I have no doubt it was more Poundland than Picasso but, more than a decade on, I look back with awe at the effortless, joyful way I assembled it.
Tiffany argues that obsessive girls have informed a huge portion of online culture, such as “the totality of Twitter discourse. The emotional balance of Twitter is like, someone is either a hero or a villain,” she says. Any moment, political, humorous or serious, can become a meme with everyone declaring they are either a fan or against the characters involved. It’s now normal for people to respond to a viral TikTok or interview during an election with “I’m a fan”.
Even the gif – the short animation or moving image routinely re-shared on social media – originated on the Tumblr blogs of countless teenage fangirls, who developed it alongside new languages to declare their fandom. “This is something that is now so ordinary and routine in daily digital life, yet it owes much to the creativity and passion of ‘obsessed’ teen girls and their fannish interests,” says Hannell.
Obsessive girls are political, too. They “can lend their weight to causes they believe in and in turn make them super visible,” says Tiffany, pointing to the 2015 rise of Milifandom. The viral hashtag started by 17-year-old student Abby Tomlinson created a fanbase for the then Labour leader Ed Miliband in rapid-time and engaged a generation of young voters. These communities realised what was needed to make a message trend and for tweets to go viral – passing a message around densely connected networks and amplifying one another within it. Today, businesses and political parties attempt to replicate this format, one that most teen girls could do in seconds.
“That’s now how everyone, including political activists, understands how to achieve internet virality, and fans were really the first group of people who were attempting to do that, who even thought to use Twitter in that way,” says Tiffany.
As a former obsessive teenage girl, seeing this electric cultural shift is redemptive. I’m under no illusions that the stereotypes that existed a decade ago have immediately disappeared, but it’s also heartwarming to see obsessive women wearing this status like a gigantic neon sign. It’s also joyous to see younger girls surrounded by media that depicts the effervescent joy of obsession. Maybe they’ll want to scream about their passions, too.
