A Recent History of Fangirls
In 1995 an article by Monique Roffey was published in The Independent called “Clive laughed, and suddenly I was sixteen again,” in which Roffey describes her experience meeting British comedian Clive Anderson. She reveals her instant, intense crush; the charm and allure of Anderson creating a fantasy and obsession she could no longer justify. “His fame had dissolved my intelligence and rendered reality irrelevant,” she wrote. By the end, Roffey swears to preserve her reputation and sanity by avoiding celebrities all together. “I won’t inflict my bug-eyed fangirl self on any more mature, talented men. No more heart throbs. For now, anyway.”
The phrase “fangirl” was first used in 1943 by A.P. Herbert in his book “Holy Deadlock.” He used it to describe girls obsessed with musicians. Fan girls were present during the era of Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, but there were no egregious labels or sexist remarks. They were just that—fans. Then a few decades later, during the era of the Beatles, the press described the obsessive female fan culture as “Beatlemania”--an undiagnosable, but simple medical definition for anyone who dedicated themselves to the band, or screamed at the top of their lungs at the sight of one of them.
During “Beatlemania,” girls were described by the press as having a level of insanity never seen before—the fainting, screaming, and sweatiness of a Beatles concert confused the press, and the general public. Teenage girls were seen as strange, hysterical beings that lacked a sense of the real world.
Like Monique Roffey pointed out in 1995, the desirability of a celebrity has less to do with their real life personality, but more with the differences “famous” versus “non-famous.” The fangirl worships the celebrity, and thrives on the humanlike relatability of someone who appears to be godlike.
About forty years later, during the early days of Justin Bieber’s fame, “Bieberfever” became the newest symptom for fangirls. Tacking fame at only 15 years old, Bieber attracted the youngest, newest generation of girls, capturing the “heartthrob” title of the 2010s, and bringing back the boyish charm that had been lacking in the stars of the late 90s and early 2000s. And with the rise of stars Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, One Direction, along with early 2010s technology and rise of the internet, the typical “fangirl” took on a larger, more serious role—now, the era of internet fandoms and “Stan culture” was beginning.
In 1983, United Press International published a story of 18-year old Terry Flasch, founder of the ‘Jimmy Connors Fan Club’ dedicated to said former number one American tennis player. She used her college money to fund a physical newsletter, and helped manage Connors’ fanmail. Flasch kept the business going with help of advertiser money, and the assistance of Jimmy Connors’ own agent. Her love for the tennis star began when she was 14, and by the time the fan club took off, she was making a profit of around $250 dollars a year.
This was all before the digital age, and before sites like Twitter and Tumblr became home base for “fan pages” and before “fan clubs” became an obsolete term. Twitter was the first to be born–but the world wasn’t quite ready for the era of “fansites” (a foreign concept at the time). Twitter and Tumblr released within a year of each other, Twitter in 2006 and Tumblr the following year, but the sites didn’t find fame until the first iPhones were released, and the sites were put into “apps” (applications), and were available for downloading in 2009 and 2010. “Stan Twitter” began shortly after, as young people began to learn the ins and outs of social media, and that with social media, a much larger, and much more widespread connection can happen. Unlike the previous generation of Facebook and MySpace, you could interact with anyone and everyone, not just people you knew in real life.
In 2011, with the help of iPhones, anyone who was signed on to platforms like Twitter and Tumblr were now able to publish their own photos. Spotting a celebrity on the street, in a restaurant, at a party, now became public information, and getting proof was as simple as pressing a few buttons.
And then celebrities began joining in, too. In 2012, Lady Gaga became the first person to hit 20 million followers. Her fans identified themselves as “Little Monsters” and were willing to fight (virtually) with anyone who claimed to be anti-Lady Gaga. Justin Bieber fans became “Beliebers,” Taylor Swift fans were “Swifties,” Selena Gomez had “Selenators,” Ariana Grande had “Arianators,” and as One Direction gained global fame, their fans coined themselves as “Directioners.”
In journalist Kaitlyn Tiffany’s book How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It, she describes the landscape of joining Twitter in 2012: “A person could be a Justin Bieber fan or a person could be a One Direction fan, or a person could be both—but if that were the case, they’d better cleave their personality in two and pick one half to keep off the internet.” Fans took it upon themselves to create a rivalry between the two (without any sort of real-life altercations between the musicians). Now, being the first on the music charts and winning at award shows became the fans responsibility, and how they dominated social media became a badge of honor.
In 2013, Chris Pine and Benedict Cumberbatch appeared on an episode of the British talk show, the Graham Norton Show, to promote Star Trek: Into Darkness. The two actors were asked about their fans, and what they call themselves. Pine was open about it: “Pine-nuts” they’re called. Cumberbatch, however, was too shy to even say the name of his fans (Cumberbitches). “I don’t think they meant to offend themselves when they called them that,” he says. “I do worry about how far feminism is being set back.” (Little did he know “bitch” was going to become the word women slowly reclaimed and made their own throughout the next decade).
It’s a funny interview–it was one of the first times mainstream actors were addressing fan culture and this new, strange world of pop culture. While fans of the original Star Trek shows (the “Trekkies”) have existed and reigned over the sci-fi genre for over 50 years, we had entered a digital age in the early 2010s that created a part of the internet for everyone, and anyone. Although Pine and Cumberbatch were already quite famous as actors, there were now fan spaces available for niche interests, and usually, there was already an online community waiting for you. And if there wasn’t, there was plenty of room to create one.
Sawliha Kidwai first discovered One Direction when she was 10-years old. It defined her middle school experience—she ran a One Direction fan page and spent most of her days online, back when social media was just really taking off. “I remember staying up with girls from Twitter and Instagram to hear them drop their new music on BBC Radio in London, which was always around 8am, so 4am my time,” she recalls. Although her time in the fandom only lasted about five years (One Direction would break up permanently in 2016), she joined a community that was figuring out how to cater the internet to their own interests—having the ability to take videos, photos, and access platforms like Twitter were enriching the fan experience more than anything else before.
The app “Vine” played a big part in this (you could compare it to today’s TikTok). Vine was a platform where you could record/upload six second videos. And fandoms took advantage of it—accounts uploaded clips from One Direction concerts, funny moments that became “memes,” or inside jokes for Directioners to share and bond over. YouTube helped too—fans would string together clips from interviews and post it, titling the videos “One Direction Funny Moments,” or “One Direction Ruining Everything (Funny Fails).”
Kayti Burt, a journalist who has spent over a decade writing about fan culture, believes this newer wave of fangirls and fandom began with something called “transformative fandom.”
She describes it like this: there’s two types of fandom—curative and transformative. Curative is the basis of most fan cultures: it’s all about knowing the information, the characters, actors, episode names. Curative fandom is being a fan of something based on what already exists, and finding people who enjoy the same thing as you. It’s collecting action figures, and dressing up as a superhero for Halloween.
Transformative fandom is, in simple terms, transforming the content in some way. It’s taking the current canon media (canon meaning what was created by the original author, director, writer, etc.) and turning it into something slightly different, and more detailed. With this comes a new wave of “fan” created material: fanfiction, fan edits, fan art, and so on. “It’s about, what can I create with this,” says Kayti. “Or like, If I’m not feeling represented by mainstream pop culture, how can I change this myself, make it more inclusive, have my perspective and personality become more a part of the story.”
It’s part of why “shipping” or “OTPs” (One True Pairings) became fan culture lingo. Fans would put two people together (real people or tv/movie characters) and “ship” them—and even if they never got together for real, the idea of it was enough to create buzz throughout the internet. The One Direction fandom spent a lot of time shipping two of the five boys together—specifically Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson (Larry Stylinson was their “ship” name). Even as fans compiled shreds of evidence—their longing glances and touches on stage or during interviews—it never became anything more than a rumor. But the ship Larry still lived on in spaces online, and throughout the fandom itself. Fanfiction created the space for the two to be a couple, even if it was all made up by fangirls themselves.
“I think in the early days of fandom, we were creating the communities as we went, versus now, there’s still people creating them, but mostly you’re coming into something that’s already there,” Kayti Burt says. And the internet is what made it all possible.
In 1998, FanFiction.net was created. It remains the largest fanfiction archival site, with over 2.2 million registered users. According to How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It, there was once a small collection of Beatles fanfiction, including stories of the real life band members Paul McCartney and John Lennon. (These stories would be deleted by FanFiction.net’s new rule in 2001 that banned stories about non-fictional characters).
But by the time social media took over, FanFiction.net was considered an ancient relic–with bad navigational tools and no easy way to shift through stories, the site quickly became obsolete with the new phase of fandom.
In 2006, the fanfic site Wattpad was released. It would later become the biggest fanfic site with its own app (the only one to really dive into the app realm). In 2007, Tumblr would become the new site to hang out on—not only a space for fanfic, but for fan edits and fan art as well. Its only competition would come in 2009, when the fanfic site Archive Of Our Own was released. But these sites never implemented the non-fiction rules that FanFiction.net did. It quickly became a free for all: even the most famous celebrities could become characters in a story.
“Imagines” became popular within the One Direction fandom—for example: ”Imagine you are Niall Horan’s girlfriend” they’d be titled, along with a short story of a non-descriptive female called “Y/N” (Your Name). Inserting yourself into fanfiction became the norm, especially when it was centered around a real life celebrity.
A common trope within fanfiction on places like Wattpad and Tumblr, in the case of One Direction specifically, centered around disturbing prompts like “Your mother sells you to One Direction to pay off her debt,” or “Mob boss Harry Styles is your boyfriend.”
“I think Wattpad fanfic was interesting because aside from school books, a lot of people didn’t go out of their way to read, but they enjoyed fanfics, and were able to read over a hundred chapters of it,” says Kidwai. “But a lot of fanfic tropes were centered around abusive or unhealthy relationships that made young girls think things like addiction and gaslighting were normal, or romanticized.”
While most fanfiction consisted of improper grammar and spelling mistakes, having clearly been written by teenage girls, young authors began taking fanfiction more seriously as it became a more mainstream outlet.
Then, Anna Todd released a story called After on Wattpad in 2014 under the pseudonym Imaginator1D. It was originally published as fanfiction—with Harry Styles being the lead character—but instead of being a member of the boyband One Direction, he was a 19-year old college student who was in a toxic, and slightly abusive relationship with the female character, Tessa.
Later, after intense success, and two sequels, the stories would be republished as novels, and even a movie series. Harry Styles would be renamed as an original character, Hardin Scott—and although the character would always be reminiscent of a version of Harry Styles he himself shed over the years, it would become another example of fanfiction becoming a bit more respected, or just less taboo. As Kayti Burt points out, 50 Shades of Grey started out as a Twilight fanfiction, first posted on FanFiction.net, “I don’t personally love the series, but I get frustrated when people dismiss it just because there’s aspects of it that aren’t great—obviously it’s connecting with people, or it wouldn’t be successful.”
Years later, users would phase out of Wattpad as it became filled with advertisements and unsightly updates on the app. “Paid stories” (requiring subscriptions and payments to read) slowly became the norm as writers began publishing original fiction, and not just fanfiction. Today, Archive Of Our Own is the only popular non commercial and nonprofit housing for fanfiction, with stats in 2020 counting over a hundred million page visits a week.
Today, the golden era of fan culture seems to be behind us. Twitter has been taken over and renamed by billionaire Elon Musk and his MAGA crew; Tumblr is now a desolate wasteland of forgotten memes and fanfiction blurbs. Instagram has been altered by incessant advertisements and a terrible algorithm. The new-age version of what we used to have exists in some part on TikTok, but within a new era of fandom. Fan edits are more popular than ever—they appear on our “For You Pages” (also a new development for user-based algorithms). We no longer have to search too hard to find what we’re looking for on the internet. But we’ve gotten to the point where One Direction and other fan cultures have slipped by an entire generation of kids. No one under the age of 16 remembers the glory days of Vine or Wattpad, or even what it was like to not spend $1,200 dollars on concert tickets.
Now, the entirety of a Taylor Swift concert is live streamed on TikTok. The girls who ran fan accounts during their teenage years have hung up the cape and passed it onto the next generation of fans—whether that be for the next Taylor Swift, or the next One Direction.
And just like Beatlemania, girls (and boys) still scream, and faint, and dedicate their time to celebrities and fan communities. They will be misunderstood and ridiculed for another generation as history repeats itself. And even if these social media platforms change, dissolve, or get banned, fan culture seems to have a way of finding a way to adapt and relocate.
Monique Roffey may have vowed in 1995 to swear off her fangirl ways, but she left the door open, claiming to simply be taking a step away from it “for now.” It never truly goes away—that fanatic feeling of obsession and absurdity that possesses us momentarily in the face of fame and celebrity. It’s as if it's human nature, a right of passage capturing each generation of young girls. Just in slightly different ways.
References:
Clive Laughed and Suddenly I was Sixteen https://advance-lexis-com.proxy.library.nyu.edu/document/?pdmfid=1519360&crid=a6907486-8031-43a3-a70c-3066c4fded76&pddocfullpath=%2Fshared%2Fdocument%2Fnews%2Furn%3AcontentItem%3A3S7T-9570-008G-C4PH-00000-00&pdcontentcomponentid=8200&pdteaserkey=sr17&pditab=allpods&ecomp=hc-yk&earg=sr17&prid=7bc028ba-bca4-457c-9e60-00558903b689
Teenage Girl Runs Connors Fan Club
Tiffany, Kaitlyn. Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It. MCD x FSG Originals, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.
