Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It

by Kaitlyn Tiffany

Infatuation is irrational but it can be a precursor to introspection.

The experience of bodily joy is an invitation to reconsider the conditions that hold you away from it most of the time.

screaming does not make a person a revolutionary, or even resistant, but what screaming can and does do is punctu...

the women who were writing to Vallée were surprised by their own emotional reactions to his music and were confused by the idea of falling in love with a voice

“They were writing to him and saying, Can you explain what’s happening to me?”

So long as teens existed as a lucrative market category, the industry would supply them with a “teeny-bopper” idol.

“They play the part almost resentfully, with the mien of people who know better …

he situates himself in alignment with the put-upon boys, and implicitly blames the girls who love them for the fact of their presumably beleaguered existence.

Every scream has a personal context, but we rarely hear about it.

In 1964, a group of girls in Encino, California, founded an organization they called Beatlesaniacs, Ltd. It was advertised as “group therapy” and offered “withdrawal literature” for fans of the Beatles who felt that their emotions had gotten out of hand.

nobody is primed to see self-critique or sarcasm in fans.

Beatlemania was “the first mass outburst of the 1960s to feature women,”

They weren’t rioting for anything, “but they did have plenty to riot against.”

was the fifty-thousand-person shouting match disguised as a sing-along, and the thunderclap of sneakers hitting concrete on every downbeat, eliminating the need to speak or catch any individual eye.

Outside, the strange things we were capable of feeling were sneered at or smiled off or commercially packaged as “girl power,” but here they were rough and loud.

We knew that our lives would not be fantasies, except for the fact that they were right now. When we shrieked, it was at the knowledge that the moment would end.

an expression of devotion that is also a prolonged creative exercise.

the screaming girls who went home and holed up in their bedrooms to make whatever they were going to make in response to their outsized emotions, did have plenty of free time and “little freedom.”

Never does she suggest that it’s unrealistic to dream of personal interactions with the extremely famous members of a boy band.

What I like about it is its senselessness and the creator’s evident delight in her own unusual mind;

I’d billed this trip as a pilgrimage, and I felt a feverish dedication to securing a moment of spiritual bliss.

It’s one of these patches of dirt here, I imagined telling a double-decker tour bus. It’s very important to remember.

Just something to report back to the girls on the internet.

Girls were writing “to maintain connection rather than to convey information,”

being pregnant by accident even for a few days made me very sad.

I listened to it while I wandered, sweating, up and down

Eastern Parkway in cutoff shorts, waiting for my boyfriend to get back from the beach so I could tell him what all had gone on. And I kept listening to “Kiwi.”

told her I’d had an abortion earlier in the week. I tried to say this in a way that conveyed exactly how I felt about it—it’s not a big deal, but I have some complicated feelings, and I’ll talk about them, but not in a weird way, and only if you have a true curiosity. I’m having your baby! It’s none of your business!

now I was at a Harry Styles concert as an adult woman who’d just had an abortion, and that was funny, but also, I guessed, statistically likely to be a common experience.

it’s hard to imagine your mother as a person. My mother is my mother.

I asked her if she thinks about when Bruce Springsteen will die, and she started crying, so I did too. “I honestly can’t imagine a world without him in it,” she said. “It would make me feel even older than I already feel. It would be the end of my youth. Because even if he’s not running around onstage anymore, it’s in my head. When I see him, I’m nineteen.” How else do you get to be nineteen forever? Is there an easier way to do a quick check and remember who you are?

I felt, because it had been so long since she’d dated anyone other than my dad, and because anyone she thought she loved in early high school probably didn’t even count, that she’d really robbed me of something. She had deliberately refused to have an experience that would make her useful to me now.

I had to admit that listening to those words—sheets soaking wet, freight train through the head, hey little girl—felt like sucking on a piece of ginger after the longest bus ride of all time.

The scene in One Direction’s case was online rather than downtown or in basements, but it had its own language and culture and signifiers of belonging.

They labored unproductively or counterproductively on something that most people considered emphatically dumb.

The internet lets them make One Direction into a shared project in which we are all involved—in which every living person is considered a candidate for becoming involved.

whether the media chooses to take it seriously or not, it will be compelled to observe it,

There are pregnant Harry Styles photos everywhere she’s gone, she told me. “I always have a pouch with me and wherever I go I just leave a few. It’s my little bread-crumb trail.”

Talking to her, I felt like I’d been sent to the seaside to put the color back in my cheeks.

our fascination with celebrities is not primarily about their wealth or their beauty, Anna Martin argued in 2014, but of living “a life in which love is the only concern”—

I want a famous boy, who I grew up with, to understand and support me, because that is what I feel like I have done for him.

She identified this as a form of populist politics and observed that the fans wanted to play “a direct role in developing his political meaning.”

they do love him, they don’t think he’s racist, they just want him to do better, maybe he’s not a political activist but he is an adult man who is capable of processing information and altering his behavior, if he cares to.

Fandom activism has been mostly visibility based so far, but it could still be a precursor to something bigger: visibility is a starting point for activism, and not its end goal.

But the gift of pop is that it actualizes a fantasy: visions of a world that doesn’t yet and maybe won’t ever exist.”

To hope that Niall Horan deeply cares about my rights is to hope that the other men I love do. To expect that Liam Payne understands why there are so many rainbow flags in the crowd is to believe that anyone should. To want Harry Styles to wave a Black Lives Matter flag onstage is to believe that the world is shifting, and to ask him to do it is to insist on it. We don’t need to be told that these men are more a reflection of us than we are of them.

We love to fan so much, we’ll take nobodies and make them into stars, just because they filmed themselves skateboarding, drinking cranberry juice, and listening to Fleetwood Mac, or simply because they yodeled for a few minutes in a Walmart.

We stan everything now, from Supreme Court justices to new flavors of sparkling water. I have recently stanned a local news blog, a stranger in the comments of a YouTube video, my own sister, a friend’s puppy, and a bottle of skin-contact wine.

When anybody, anywhere, says something critical about Taylor Swift, they know what kind of week they’re in for.

When President Trump announced that he and his wife had tested positive for the coronavirus, the replies to his tweet filled up with the same nonsensical fake hexes, translated from English into Punjabi or Amharic, that Swift fans had been using in the months prior to harass music journalists.