boyband neurosis

well accepted fact: it’s pretty awful being a young girl growing up in the public eye, and the awfulness is largely sexually loaded. jailbait countdowns. the attentions of threatening older men, attentions both parasocial and real. i think we think less about the specific weirdness of being a boy growing up in the public eye, especially a boy who’s an idol to teenage girls. it makes sense to think about it less, because teenage girls are legitimately less threatening than older men, but i can’t help being morbidly fascinated by the idea of what it must be like to be the object of teenage girls’ morbid fascinations.

for example. i think that when older men fantasize about much younger famous girls/young women, the fantasies often consist of stuff that would in real life be harmful or unpleasant to the object of the fantasies (sometimes the harm/unpleasantness is an essential element of the fantasy, though more often i think they’re just not thinking about that, or else it’s part of the fantasy that the situation is pleasurable and not harmful). but when teenage girls fantasize about their boyband idols, they are much more likely than older men fantasizing about younger women, to imagine the object of their fantasies doing harm. thousands upon thousands of fanfics about the writer/reader insert being sold to one direction, to the point where it’s a meme, for a relatively tame example. it has got to be very weird to have that kind of thing projected on you over and over and over

also. the gay stuff. and the specific way that teenage girls tend to fantasize about their celebrities doing gay stuff. not just like, isolated instances of fantasy, which is probably weird enough—but thousands and thousands of teenage girls combing all of your public appearances for evidence that you’re in love with your bandmate/costar/friend. posting about it publicly, conspiring together. that can’t not put a weird edge on your public interactions

also like….just in general it’s got to be very weird to depend, for your money, on the sexual interest of an audience which is largely not of an age to be able to consent to sex with you, to make your living by drumming up sexual desire that it would largely be doing wrong *to the desirers* for you to fulfil. especially weird and tangle-inducing when you start that career when you’re pretty young yourself. and in fact i’m sure a lot of teen idols do things they should not, things which range from inadviseable to deeply wrong, and that it’s not really excused by the fact that it’s somehow related to the way they make their money.

a lot of times i’ll hear people expressing confusion over former teen boy idols, “why does he dress like that, why does he act like that.” i feel weird about citing specific examples but i will say it usually makes sense to me