Everything I Need I Get from You

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 at pop music is not direct action, and screaming does not make a person a revolutionary, or even resistant, but what screaming can and does do is punctuate prolonged periods of silence.

It would be nice if we could talk about how we went online, driven by some sort of longing, and why we stayed there, pushing that want outward, over and over, until it couldn’t be ignored.

I was marking time, I thought. Today, I’m twenty-four and in love and it doesn’t always feel good. Last year, I was lonely. Next year, I’ll be lonely again. These songs will sound right, even if they hit me differently. I felt almost entirely normal and almost exactly like myself.

If I'm really honest, I like One Direction because their music reminds me of myself. I'm 19, and I'm not 19. I get to hold the two images side by side and think about the ways in which I'm changing, and the ways in which I'll always be the same.

There was a before and an after, turning on a moment of transition from an old point of view, “dominated by ignorance and disenchantment,” to a dramatically different one, “filled with energy and insight.

They made One Direction into the biggest band in the world not simply by loving them, but by sowing chaos on every online platform they touched.

The joke is that we've talked so much about these people that we no longer have anything left to say that isn't totally absurd.

... and being part of Stan 'Twitter is much more fun than logging on just to frown at politicians or congratulate acquaintances on their new jobs. When I'm doom-scrolling through a timeline full of terrible news and inane bickering, it's a treat to come across all-caps excitement or an ultra-niche joke. Or to wake up and find that there is a conversation going on and that I understand it, and that people are excited about something and I am too. This is the type of thing that can buoy a person for an hour or so at a time. In the same way that holidays give shape to formless years, album promotion and single releases give color to the days that line up one after another. There is a reason to stay up late. There is a reason to wake up early. There is something to do at lunch when you feel like you'd like to cry and take a nap. There are people who swear they hacked into an airport security camera, and aren't you interested to see what they saw, even if you find that totally weird and ultimately quite scary? I like Stan Twitter because it is so peculiar, even as millions of people participate in it and it should have become generic.

These people were exploiting the ultra-popular things they loved in order to become more completely themselves. “Springsteen fans’ conscious discussions of self making do not indicate that popular culture is shaping their identity but rather that they are shaping their identity with popular culture,” he wrote. “The importance of fandom for personal identity is not so much about the disorder caused by the mass media as it is about the order found in devotion.

[Fandom] should be celebrated for what it can provide in individual lives, but it should also be taken seriously for what it can do at scale - not because I like it or because being a girl is cool now, 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. We need to know what fandom can do and what it can't, and we need to figure out who might try to manipulate it and why.

It is inappropriate now to make fun of girls for screaming or boy bands for existing or anybody for liking anything. [... But] Not all women are "our future doctors, lawyers, mothers, presidents," I would love to tell Harry Styles. Not all women keep the world going! And it is not, in fact, okay to like whatever you want. Some stuff is genuinely bad, like Mark Zuckerberg or the Harry Styles song "Woman.

There have been so many calls for empathy, inspection, and nuanced understanding on behalf of the angry men the internet has raised, but there have been far fewer for the fangirls whose beliefs are far more convoluted.