Five posts about *that* One Direction fan documentary. Part 5: having some class

One of the overwhelming things about the girls in Crazy About One Direction was that these were the sort of girls who don’t get to talk to television much. Not middle-or-upper-class students, not ambitious professionals. Not saying that that’s not what they might go on to be or that that’s definitely not what they’re doing the rest of the time but there was a good seam of girls who don’t normally get to talk on Channel 4, here. Young carers who look after their disabled parents, struggling for cash, young people whose parents would like to give them disposable income for concert tickets but can’t. Girls from council estates talking about their lives beyond that, about their interests and how they like to engage with them. People from unprivileged backgrounds talking about their lives beyond not being privileged; this is actually quite rare.

I thought one girl in particular, Natasha, was enormously brave and honest and terrific. From the way she acknowledged some of her own more extreme fan behaviour (getting braces as a fashion thing, partly because Niall had them) to discussing how important she finds Zayn, as a representation for British-born Asians, to talking about how, when she’s despairing about how hard it can be to be her mother’s carer and take care of her little brother, she sometimes fantasises about marrying Zayn and getting a maid. And the fact the lyrics to One Direction’s songs made her feel more confident, like someone was telling her she was worthwhile when she maybe hadn’t had too many people admire her before.

(If you want to see a really good, moving documentary about pop music and being a young carer then Tulisa did an absolutely terrific one a few years ago for BBC 3, which is probably still around. You will need tissues.)

To me, One Direction’s first hit, What Makes You Beautiful, is a little lyrically creepy. It reminds me of dudes ‘negging’ on me, of shit chat up lines. And their Ed Sheeran-penned recent single, Little Things, is even more that way. To me. I can’t emphasise enough that I’m talking about my own reaction, here. I’m a generally fairly confident adult, who doesn’t have body issues and who is at the happy point of not really caring what I look like because I generally think I look pretty awesome. I have pretty good validation set ups for being told I’m cool, if I get insecure.

Was that me when I was younger? Dear fuck, no. Would teenage me have associated those lyrics with creepy dudes? No, of course not, teenage me would’ve first had to find a creepy dude willing to hit on me, first. And if they’d said anything as nice as 'you’re fit but you don’t know it’ then that would have been a bonus.There’s nothing wrong with girls finding One Direction’s lyrics reassuring- you might want to raise objections to the societal implications of girls feeling empowered by boys calling them beautiful but that’s not a 1D thing, that’s not a boyband thing, that’s endemic to loads of media, from films to music to literature and much of it indie.

One Direction’s lyrics do place a reasonable amount of importance on 'you,’ on 'you’ as a person, who they’re talking to. If you’re a teenage girl and no one acknowledges you and even documentaries talking to you are barely listening to what you say, of COURSE a band of charming, funny boys who talk directly to you, saying they care about you and that you’re important is going to be something you could enjoy. That’s a fuck of a lot less exploitative than a film maker asking a fourteen-year-old to talk about those feelings and then branding them crazy for having them.

Back to Natasha, who had the most fabulously confident, neon fashion sense; it was clear that her fandom was one of the ways she liked to represent herself in the world. That’s cool- I’ve got a bunch of piercings because I was into punk when I was younger and expressing myself a certain way externally made me feel connected to and empowered by the things I found important.

The difference was, when I was a teenage girl I looked like Wednesday Addams. People knew what I was, I was in all the literature about kooky girls who are interesting; maybe not enormously well portrayed and I’ve written before that I was horrified to find myself turning into a trope but I was a sort of well-read, serious-looking young woman who was at least represented to some degree in media.

How many young, British-Asian teenage carers do you see in the media? How many of them wearing awesome neon tights? I don’t remember seeing any, previously, definitely not so many as to have the privilege of turning into a trope. The thing that Crazy About One Direction did do right was finding these girls who don’t get to talk about their fandom very much. The thing is did wrong was to immediately position them as 'weird,’ insane, even.

'Strong women’ in the media, women considered worthy of respect and of people having an interest in them, are measured by degrees of classiness. From Beyonce-level goddesses to smart business suits to educated, calm voices the merit by which a woman is considered worth representing is still very much based on style and class. You get 'blokes’ but even the most working class female comedian must put on a smart (and conservative) dress to be considered worth watching.

Which is why people were shocked to see non-media-trained, ungroomed (in the sense of not having been taught how to talk cautiously, which is something that is very class driven, as part of debates and social formalities) and enthusiastic girls were excitedly chatting, unguarded, to someone who told them she was interested in them. What you were seeing was just teenage girls chatting, it’s just you’ve probably got an idea of what a classy, ambitious teenage girl looks and sounds like and not all of these girls fit that.

(Some absolutely did, the two Larry shippers spring to mind but they were also a little older than a lot of these girls; there’s a big difference between 14 and 18)

I was really moved by the cheeriness with which Natasha approached the fact that, due to the generally fairly grim-seeming reality she dealt with on a regular basis, she couldn’t even consider trying to get tickets to One Direction’s tour, so gleefully went to Madame Tussaud’s and had her photo taken with the waxworks instead. She was thrilled- she’d had a fan experience, she’d got some photos and although there’s no doubt she was disappointed not to be able to go to the tour, she’d found an alternate way to cheer herself up and enjoy her fandom.

That’s not fucking crazy, that’s an amazing level of autonomous cheerily-getting-on-with-things for a teenage girl. This was the total fucking opposite of someone throwing a tantrum because they want to see a boyband they like- the fans aren’t self-entitled or greedy, they’re just excited and enthusiastic. Why they fuck shouldn’t they be? Do they have to immediately pass into cynical defeatism?

Of course, there are some massively negative sides to fandom; the segment where the film maker asked the girls who talk about how much they hated Taylor Swift for having been rumored to go out with and dump Harry Styles was evidence that exuberance can quickly turn into aggressive militancy. But in a world where they’re given magazines teaching them how to hate Caroline Flack, created by cynical marketers or where publishing enormogiant Emap (killer of Smash Hits, relevantly) sells hundreds of thousands of magazines a week by calling female celebrities skanks on the brink of breakdowns it doesn’t *excuse* the behaviour of teenage girls, not at all but it does maybe mean it’s not ok to specifically whip up and pinpoint them for it.

We have a lot of problems in fandom, as fandoms, as fans. As I’ve said before, I’m not in the 1D fandom and in my slightly-older-age I try to avoid any fandoms that don’t have positive representations of women, because I get tired and wound up at that stuff and I fucking deplore fans hating on female characters, girlfriends, whatever.

But if you’re a teenage girl who lives on a Glasgow council estate thinking 'god, Taylor Swift is such a fucking skank’ -this doesn’t make you reasonable, it doesn’t make you nice (and I don’t think the girls do think the way they were talking about Swift is per se right) but it is a thought that punches upwards. And if you’re a documentary maker who’s getting them to say what they think of Swift on film to make them look psychotic then you’re punching downwards. And that’s a real fucking dick move.

No, it’s not “classy” to cover your room in boyband posters and then talk about wanting to punch a lady popstar because she might have dumped your favourite boy popstar. Maybe it would be “classier” to cover your room in vinyl from “important” bands and then talk about how you want to punch whichever one of the Libertines you think caused the break up. Maybe it’d be even classier to be super into literature and then say that anyone who doesn’t appreciate Kerouac should be punched in the head.

Violent language is a cultural currency- not just in gossip rags or teenage vitriol. Mark Lamarr could get a good laugh from a studio audience by saying he wanted to put a boyband through a blender, Frankie Boyle could get away with saying people should be set fire to- they’re men in positions of power who are saying it “for funnies” so that is ok, you see. That means *they’re* validly allowed to use that language.

Obviously, that’s never going to excuse teenage girls sending gross stuff to people on Twitter. It’s never going to excuse them, in particular, sending gross stuff to each other on Twitter. All of this stuff is super gross. But snobbishly picking on a teenager for not having an enormously developed verbal filter, while you’re letting them burble on without interruption except to prompt them to say more things you can tacitly laugh at, is fucking gross.

Teenagers do stupid shit. Yeah. Teenagers do some stuff we don’t consider mature and awesome, that’s nasty, that’s damaging. You’ve seen Skins, right? But you can talk about that by looking at fandom as an organism, at the anatomy of a hashtag, by quantifying tweets. You don’t need to egg young girls on to say things, to make them look stupid. That was just so the film could really tear a strip off them, make sure it was clear that these girls were not classy girls, that they were not the sort of acceptably media-prepped young lady we consider 'proper.'

And fuck that. Yes, some One Direction fans behave badly on Twitter. So do football fans, jazz fans, politicians, you name it. The difference is, if David Cameron sent Taylor Swift a tweet saying that she was a skank and I blogged about it, I’d be punching upwards- he’s the prime minister and I’m some goof off. But if I went to a teenage girl’s house and provoked her into saying some nasty things about Taylor Swift and then put it in a documentary that I got paid to put on telly without ever showing my own face in it then yeah, I would be punching downwards. And deliberately, snobbishly exposing children and young people to that is the fucking definition of having no class.

[Total sidenote: I think fandoms need to deal with the way that fans react within fandoms, it’s a fandom problem and it’s something we need to self-interrogate or interrogate and address within the contexts of media that’s much, much more than a cursory, hour-long documentary. I’ve been writing occasionally about how damaging a lot of fan behaviour is for years and I don’t want to sound like I’m vindicating a lot of negative stuff here, cus I’m not. I regularly have a go at fans for hateful behaviour.

However, a lot of the worst hive-mind behaviour is swept up by media and thunderclaps and things- if fandoms are encouraged to act as a big, scary unit in social media (and they are because it is a really amazing form of marketing) then funnily enough, they do. And yes, it’s psychotic, en masse- a fandom as a thing is very unstable and often menacing but that doesn’t necessarily make any of the people who make up the constituent parts that way and we need to be careful about the way we judge fans on a personal level.]

More on this story:

Part one: “crazy” Part two: “funny” Part three: pseudicides (TRIGGER WARNING: suicide) Part four: “real”

