Why are you so obsessed with me?

To look closely at a photo of fangirls is to study devotion in practice. The picture is almost always of a group, in various stages of ecstasy. The objects of their adoration may be named, famous—the Beatles; Elvis; One Direction—but girls are, by and large, anonymous. Their eyes are raised up (at a stage, presumably), or else they gaze just beyond the purview of the camera. Some tear at their faces; lips turn downwards in an agonizing grimace. An image can’t capture sound, but with so many mouths open, you can imagine the noise their worship produces.

There's a purity to their expressions, although one wonders: are they in ecstasy or unimaginable pain? At a certain intensity, pleasure and pain can be indistinguishable. One way or another, they are in awe. As in, seeing god.

This is a scene made familiar by endless reproduction, but while the idols may change, the feeling stays the same. A girl carries it with her, even if it eventually becomes loosened from its original object. Do you ever wonder, Where does she take that obsession? What does it become — who does she become when she carries that flame for long enough?

Teen girls are known to be obsessives: as fans, yes, but also as havers of Crushes (often, as Havers of Crushes on the bands they are fans of), as haters. 

I don’t believe you can understand what it’s like to be a teenage girl without exploring obsession. That obsessive quality of girlhood is often taken as a sign of fundamental unseriousness: whatever the object of obsession, girls are often denigrated for it. Why? These are not the correct things to be obsessed with, and girls are always being too much about them, anyway.

We can (and should) push back against that characterization. Can we be curious about the ways in which all-consuming passion actually becomes productive, influential, world-making, instead?

After all, is obsession not a characteristic of many (most?) (all??) great artists, scholars? “Obsessive people make great art,” Susan Sontag once remarked. Earlier this spring, I took a Tin House craft workshop, led by Genevieve Hudson, on Using Your Obsessions in your art. Genevieve asked, somewhat rhetorically, How can you produce something of meaning without being at least kinda obsessed with the subject? They pointed to influential queer and gender studies theorist Eve Sedgwick, who, in Touching Feeling, wrote: “I’m fond of observing how obsession is the most durable form of intellectual capital.”

So obsession can have different valences, obviously. What carries weight and what doesn’t is often more a question of who, exactly, is doing the obsessing-over.

I have long thought of desire as producing propulsive energy. I believe obsession operates in a similar way. It drives you to dive in headfirst, pushes you to know everything there is to know, to immerse yourself so deeply you can’t help but come out different on the other side. But for girls, especially someone (like my younger self) who is fawning over a pop-punk boy band, that level of dedication is considered immature, something you will grow out of.

I know what girls like

As a tween, I dedicated my waking hours to my favourite bands, and Canadian pop-punk outfit Simple Plan was at the top of the list. At school, my friends and I would argue about who would get to date which member. I ate up every single piece of media about them. Then I’d come home, monopolize the family phone line to surf the web, hit up the music forums, read people denigrate my faves as artless “posers,” and feel ashamed.

Do people roll their eyes at what teen girls like because it’s just not very good? Some would argue this—it’s not ageism or misogyny if you’re making fun of a girl for obsessing over some mediocre dudes in a derivative band, right?

I’ve seen enough vitriol directed at fangirls to know this is incorrect. I think people hate what teen girls love because it’s what teen girls love.

This kind of inverse relationship appears in other spheres of life, too. Consider how women taking up a given profession causes salaries to decline in that field or, inversely, how as men enter a field, it becomes more exclusive and better paid, like what happened to computer programming in the latter half of the twentieth century. The way pay and prestige fluctuates has little to do with the quality of work being done and much more to do with who is doing it.

Similarly, society has a gut reaction to culture that becomes sullied by association with the teenage girl. And whether consciously or not, we understand the structural powerlessness and lack of agency that teen girls are up against, so we have to distance ourselves from behaviours that are too teen girl-like, lest we too become condemned to a similar fate.

To some, teen girls are the ones in the drivers’ seat. And in some instances, you can see how historical events characterized as mass hysteria were actually instances of girls exercising agency. In “Beatlemania: Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” coauthors Barbara Ehrenreich,  Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs cast the movement so often dismissed as swarms of girls gone mad as “the first and most dramatic uprising of women’s sexual revolution.”

But more often than not, arguments about the supposedly outsized influence girls have on culture and society ring hollow—especially (although not exclusively) when coming from grown men seeking to justify their desire to sleep with underage girls and who, as a result, play up the girls’ maturity, agency, and ability to seduce. One need not be a feminist scholar to observe how teens and women who wield their sexuality like a tool to operate within a framework of heteropatriarchal logic in which what little power you have is derived from your fuckability.

Embittered fans of “real” music, meanwhile, will point to the ways in which marketers cater to female-dominated fandoms. Behold the popularity of Taylor Swift! Girls wield the power to decide what is popular and what is not, no matter how bad the result! Now I am become Girl, the Ruiner of Cultures.

Paradoxically, girls are often also portrayed as mindless consumers of mediocre music pumped out to satisfy their pubescent brains. As writer and activist Bailey Poland told LiveAbout, “There's an underlying assumption that teen girls are not in control of their emotions or interests and become overly excited or upset for no reason [...]. When the reality is that teen girls are often very intentional about what they're interested in.”

So which is it? Are record companies prostrate at their feet, or are they nothing but sheep bleating at a K-Pop band?

Lest it need be said, yes, teen girls are being sold to (aren’t we all?); they are economically valuable. Teenagehood as a category has long been a helpful tool for advertisers. According to American studies professor Allison McCracken, almost as soon as adolescence became a discrete developmental phase, advertisers started selling to them. But that does not mean they are “in charge,” even if they represent a profitable consumer market in fashion, beauty, or music. Is it empowerment when you’re able to buy something off of TikTok because a company collected your personal data and sent you a targeted ad? Are you an influencer if your musical tastes are the result of a multimillion-dollar marketing effort?

I’m not saying that we need to, as a corrective to the devaluation of the things girls like, shower them with love or adoration. I’m saying it doesn’t matter whether Simple Plan was actually “any good”. So long as they are associated with girlhood, these things will matter less to most people.

This distaste isn’t just confined to the things girls consume; the very way girls are must be disavowed. Think about the level of discomfort around emotionality, a hallmark of sexist discourse all around but often targeted at “hysterical” young fangirls, who are supposedly characterized by “ungovernable emotional excess,” as Hannah Ewens writes in Fangirls: Scenes from Modern Music Culture.

The politics of respectability at play here reach beyond age and gender: “Being a fan is very much associated with feminine excess, with working-class people, people of colour, people whose emotions are seen as being out of control,” according to McCracken (cited in Kaitlyn Tiffany’s Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It).

In a favourite essay of mine, Rax King writes about the glorious excess of Meat Loaf, and the ways in which we consciously separate ourselves from teenagehood as we age: “...as adult creators, we are never again to partake of the gasping desperation of those teenage years once they pass us by. If we only wrote what we felt, we’d be teen idols forever, enslaved and enfeebled by our emotions. If we said what we felt as soon as we felt it, what havoc we would wreak!”

The double standard that evaluates girls’ interests and finds them less worthy, while uplifting others for the very type of dedication they display, then, is a self-protective mechanism. All-consuming obsession is dangerous—you must divorce yourself from it in order to be taken seriously. Better to close yourself off from the thing with the potential to remake you.

What is the remedy, then? Uncritically praising feeling (supposedly femme-coded) at the expense of reason (too masculine) is not where we are at. For one thing, that’s gender essentialism, and notyrgirls is also, uh, not about that life. I am not arguing that to be emotional is to be girl!

I also believe we need to do a couple of things, on a cultural level. First, dispel associations between girlish obsession and superficiality. Second, explore the role obsession plays in driving loves, lives, careers. Third (and this is where I start splitting hairs), we need to apprehend how girl culture itself can both create community and meaning for participants while also holding us back in important ways.

In The Female Complaint, Lauren Berlant explores how sentimentality, once placed in the domain of womanhood, is used to create a parapublic sphere (what they call an intimate public) to hive women off from political decision-making and power. The formation of a shared  “women’s culture” (or, in this case, girl culture), can keep us “attached to disaffirming scenarios of necessity and optimism” because we are told, in different ways, that we are already seen, heard, and represented in this politically adjacent sphere.

Anyone who has gazed longingly for hours at a time at the poster of a boy band they ripped out of Cool! magazine (um, hypothetically) will understand the appeal of this siren song. “No one else takes you seriously—but we do,” it croons. Who wouldn’t be into that? (Bob’s Burgers totally nails this dynamic with its One Direction-esque spoof band Boyz4Now.)

Becoming part of a fandom can foster connections, provide meaning, make you feel heard and seen, foster a lifelong interest (or even career in) music.

At the same time, to follow Berlant’s line of thinking, this feeling of belonging can be a dangerous lure, even as it also allows you to find a sense of community. The very powerlessness of girls on a structural level can be concealed by the sense that, through participation in this intimate public, they have achieved freedom. As with the women that Berlant studies who spend their time adjacent to the forms of power that they could leverage for radical change, but never pursuing it, seeking liberation anywhere except politics is destined to end in disappointment.

I’ve long felt the pull towards writing about obsession and its cognate, desire, in part because it is a realm replete with mystery and half-knowns. Desire, to me, has often seemed at once so opaque, but shedding just enough light on a path it creates. I believe in obsession’s ability to transform you, too, and I want girls to be able to follow that path, if they want to. It could be a treacherous road to tread, propelling or ensnaring you. But I want girls, if they feel a tug towards something, to be able to examine that, see where it leads them, be it towards joy, towards connection, towards feats as of yet undreamt of… or towards nothing at all besides the satisfaction of having done something. The ability to do that on your own terms, and in so doing remake the world? We might call that power.

Each newsletter is written by either Jac (hi!) or Cass. In The Dish, this issue’s author asks the other (notyr)girl about what that month’s topic means to them.

Jac: What were you obsessed with as a t(w)een? What is your relationship to that object of desire now?

Cass: You can say I was obsessed with obsessing over things. I was always making collages in agendas and notebooks of artwork, clothes, accessories, bands, and famous boys I loved. A long-time obsession was Stevo32 (aka Steve Jocz), the drummer of Sum 41. They were one of my favourite bands and, as a t(w)een, I went to see them every time they came to Montreal. I enjoyed the music, of course. But every concert also felt like an opportunity to finally meet Stevo face to face. I waited in line to be in the front row. Maybe he would notice me (please note he was obviously a grown man and I was basically a child). Since they often played in smaller settings, like Metropolis (now MTELUS) and Club Soda in Montreal, it actually felt possible. I visited HMV (RIP) on a weekly basis because I wanted to own everything Sum 41 ever produced. I would watch their “Introduction to Destruction” DVD constantly. They were hilarious and I thought I would fit right in. It was one of my first parasocial relationships, as it would be described today.

A few years ago, I decided to look up what Stevo is up to now. I discovered that he is a realtor in Palm Springs. Weird. It’s not his vibe, I thought. Even though the vibe I perpetually know him for is as a twenty-year-old drummer singing “Pain for Pleasure” and making sex jokes. Would I fangirl over him if I met him today? 1000%. But I would also make so much fun of him for going into real estate, like we’re old friends.

Coming up

Between The Royal Diaries, Dear Canada and America, and the Two of a Kind Diaries series, tween girls consumed a lot of “diary content” in the early 2000s. How were these series used by and presented to us? How did girls model our own self-documentation based on them? Diary content taught us how to be the main characters of our own stories. But what are the consequences that emerge from girlhood teaching us to document ourselves, while boys weren’t encouraged to do the same? Cass explores these questions and more in issue 3.