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

by Kaitlyn Tiffany

Girl culture, or “bedroom culture,” was not discussed until 1976, when Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber wrote a now famous criticism of subcultural studies as a field: “The absence of girls from the whole of the literature in this area is quite striking, and demands explanation.”

girls were doing entirely their own thing within the constraints that had been placed on them.

The idea of bedroom culture is that subcultural activities can happen anywhere, and that they often happen in private.

Far from petering out, as the well-examined subcultures of the 1970s did, bedroom culture lasted and grew and changed with the times.

Girls were “problematizing the conventional construction of the bedroom as private,” Kearney wrote, “by using this space not only as a production studio, but also a distribution center.”

The whole web is created in a girl’s image now.

They realized that the platforms they had created to celebrate and amplify their favorite artists could be at any moment used for other things.

(When President Trump contracted the coronavirus, he was of course informed that he should have stanned Loona.)

It didn’t mean that K-pop fans were suddenly the most politically active people in the world; it meant that K-pop fans were the best in the world at flooding social media with easily repeated messages.

The fandom’s skill set mostly allows it to amplify ideas, not to stifle them.

One Direction made me care about the internet. Time will tell if this was a blessing or the worst thing that ever happened to me.

I reasoned I could date someone who worked in finance, so long as they were also cursed by a Kansan witch.

I cried over it not because I was going to miss him, but because I’d have to go back to being a little freak, wandering around aimlessly and sneaking chicken salad sandwiches into buildings they shouldn’t be in.

I would have to go back to dealing with myself, which had been making me so tired.

Stupidly, the taxi became a getaway car and the darkness of early morning became electric.

How important that Harry Styles and I were learning about love with such similar timing,

It was one of the rare moments in which the shape of my life, normally hazy, took on a bright outline.

a boy in pearls and high-waisted pants, for example, plus fifteen thousand people who have grounded themselves the same way I have, using someone else’s gestures and vocal tics to mark time, to help them remember, and to return them over and over to the question of who they are.

It is inappropriate now to make fun of girls for screaming or boy bands for existing or anybody for liking anything—this is what we asked for, but it doesn’t feel like enough.

As is often the case with “acceptance,” what’s really been agreed on is that women and girls are “important” enough where it makes good business sense that they be marketed to with greater specificity than they were before.

I once met a Taylor Swift fan who had been paid to promote sponsored content from some of the brands Swift had endorsement deals with.

I spoke to a Lorde fan who was offered free tickets to an award show in exchange for tweeting branded promotional images, and who had started adding public relations skills to his résumé.

The little indignities of being young and the big disappointments of not finding the love you want or of not becoming the person you’d hoped—these things are tempered by fandom, which is such an ugly, boring word.

but because fans are connecting based on affinity and instinct and participating in hyperconnected networks that they built for one purpose but can use for many others.