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Colling adds that these patriarchal values often make it difficult for straight men to express themselves freely. If it’s from a female perspective, it’s seen as a female perspective.”Įssentially, it’s no wonder that there are so few visible straight fanboys when fangirls themselves are shamed and ridiculed for enjoying supposedly frivolous, ‘feminine’ forms of culture. “In culture, in general, if it's from a male perspective, it’s seen as human. “This isn’t always the case, but with contemporary artists like Dua Lipa, the topics that they sing about – like romance, love, sex, whatever it might be – are seen as ‘feminine’ topics, or they're from a female perspective,” she continues. So for a man to enjoy those trivial feminine things is laughable for that reason,” she says. “Femininity is considered to be insubstantial made up of frivolous things. “It’s insane for teen girls to sit outside a hotel to see someone they like or cry at a concert, but grown men go to sports matches and have season tickets and swear at each other, and we are ridiculed,” Ewens writes.ĭr Samantha Colling, senior lecturer in film and media at Manchester Metropolitan University and author of The Aesthetic Pleasures of Girl Teen Film, explains further. “But there is a sort of gendered notion, I guess, about what a man should be a fan of, and what a woman should be a fan of.” It’s certainly true that straight men have no qualms about getting ‘emotional’ at football – where they unabashedly shout, chant, cry, and even stick flares up their asses – even though they might sneer at pop music fangirls. “There are as many female as male fans,” she says. Professor Hilde Van den Bulck is a professor at Drexel University and a research scholar in media policy, digitization, and celebrity culture. “A lot of straight guys do enjoy pop, they really love pop, but laddish culture kind of prevents them from ‘speaking out’” – Ross A lot of straight guys do enjoy pop, they really love pop, but laddish culture kind of prevents them from ‘speaking out’.” “It’s a sad thing but I do think pop, at the minute, in our culture is just more of a ‘girls and gay men’ thing,” Ross continues. “But if we were in the pub talking with a big group of men, he would never pipe up as much just because he doesn’t feel as comfortable.” “He has a poster of Charli XCX in his room,” he says. Self-professed queer fanboy Ross, 24, tells me he went to a Charli XCX concert a few weeks ago with a straight friend of his. As Alexandra Pollard puts it in the Guardian, we inhabit “a culture in which older men are the bastions of good taste, the brave protectors of real music”. A 2021 investigation by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at USC found that 86.1 per cent of CEOs, chairs, and presidents of major and independent US music companies were male, and the same percentage were white. Plus, w hen it comes to deciding what constitutes ‘good’ or ‘worthwhile’ culture, historically, the bar has been set – and then gatekept – predominantly by straight, white men. “This womb-linked ‘illness’ manifests itself in a number of symptoms: anxiety, shortness of breath, irritability, nervousness, insomnia, fainting, as well as being promiscuous or desiring sex – that is: feeling things, strongly.” “Hysteria – from the Greek word for uterus, hystera, ever the anatomical ‘source’ of problems – carries a lot of historical baggage,” she writes. I n her book Fangirls, music journalist and author Hannah Ewens links fangirls back to the historical notion of hysteria.