If Fangirls Were Men, We’d Call Them Legends
Fangirls built the music industry, so why don’t they get the credit?
From Elvis and The Beatles to Taylor Swift and Blackpink, fangirls have been the soul of every major pop-cultural phenomenon. While the music shifts over the decades, the dedication doesn’t. Behind every superstar is a legion of fans whose labour, buying, streaming, organising and promoting, keeps the industry not only alive, but thriving, even as their contributions are mocked or dismissed.
Until quite recently, searching online for any popular band or musician, their fans would often be described as “manic” and “hysteric” as if there was something wrong with them when they were merely passionate about the artists they loved. Fangirls weren’t trendsetters or essential to an artist’s success, they were “out of their minds” and throwing themselves at these artists because of their supposed emotional imbalance. The industry almost has a selective memory on the engine of popularity. For example, if you Google ‘Why were The Beatles so successful?”, the first results and even the AI Overview praise the “unparalleled songwriting” and “new recording techniques.”
While those elements played a part in their success, none of it would have mattered without the audience, the fans buying their music, going to their gigs and talking about the bands that they love. Fangirls are the cultural and economic backbone of the music industry, but sexism keeps them from being taken seriously.
The dismissal of fangirls is nothing new. With out-of-control, screaming teenage fans entranced by Elivs Presley’s swiveling hips and beatlemania being described as ‘sweeping the globe’ focusing the narrative on fainting fans with a plague like obsession. This pattern repeats with every generation, Michael Jackson in the 80s, Backstreet Boys in the 90s and One Direction and Justin Bieber in the 2010s. Each time the story is the same, the devotion of young girls was treated as a joke, even while they helped propel these artists into superstardom.
Music may be the only industry where the paying customer is mocked. Young women’s purchasing power has repeatedly rewritten the rules of music, from The Beatles record-breaking stadium tours to today’s billion-dollar Era’s Tour. Streaming charts are dominated by fan-driven campaigns, with fan-organised streaming parties aimed at pushing songs to number one. VIP tickets, merchandise, and album variants are all designed with fangirls in mind because executives know they are the most reliable market. Yet their spending is irrational and written off as their parents’ money because no sane person would invest their own hard-earned income on something as frivolous as pop music.
The double standard is clear: when women pay for culture, their passions are pathologised instead of respected.
The double standard becomes especially obvious when you compare fangirls to sports fans. A man who buys a season ticket for his football team is considered loyal, if they then wear that sports team’s shirt to do their food shop, they are representing their team. But when women buy tickets to multiple shows of their favourite artist’s tour, she’s bombarded with questions, “Why would you want to see the same show twice?”, “Don’t you get bored?”, “How do you afford to buy so much merch?”. Those are all questions every fangirl has heard more times than they can count, but nobody asks a football fan why they go and watch multiple matches, why they watch the games of teams they don’t even support, why they have their favourite player’s name on their back. Yet wearing a Taylor Swift crew neck is embarrassing.
Building a successful Instagram fan page is hard work; it’s oversaturated and is met with intense judgement, yet some of these accounts gain tens of thousands of followers. Only recently have record labels recognised their power. Yet still, if you tried to use your Harry Styles fan page with 15,000 followers in a portfolio, it would likely be dismissed. It will be viewed as childish and far less impressive than the same audience size for a fashion, food or lifestyle account.
The irony is that the skills are relatively identical when it comes to building a following: consistent posting, trend analysis, community building, creative direction and often graphic design or original artwork. All of that work is less than because it’s shrouded by the label “fangirl”, no matter how professional the work.
When stripped of the “fangirl” label, the skills in growing fan pages suddenly become valuable. Entire consulting firms are now monetising what fangirls have been doing for decades. Take lemontank, a Gen Z consultancy that pays young people to offer their insights into trends, aesthetics and digital culture. What are those insights based on? The exact skills it takes to run a fan page, only in these small instances, these fans are being recognised and finally rewarded. There’s still a long way to go, however as fandom has strategically been framed as ‘youth marketing’, this shift is “innovative”. The labour hasn’t changed, the perspective has.
This perception is deeply rooted in misogyny. Had women previously not had their fangirling linked to mania and hysterics, the negative connotations would not be so prominent today. Pop music has been feminised to the point that even when men do enjoy it, they risk the same ridicule, being told they are less of a man for liking Taylor Swift or Sabrina Carpenter. Even among self-proclaimed “music lovers”, being described as a fangirl is a derogatory label.
Yet the industry depends on the very people it belittles, both financially and logistically.
Fangirls have supported the music industry since the beginning, funding it with money, fuelling it with labour and sustaining it with communities.
They aren’t to be dismissed; they are the very foundation of one of the fastest-growing industries of today. Yet so many times, their contributions are erased, mocked or repackaged to seem more appealing. To dismiss along the lines of hysteria is to ignore reality.
Without fangirls, most of the world’s biggest stars would be nowhere near where they are today. Their passion isn’t an embarrassment or something to be mocked, but is a powerful force, shaping economies, politics and culture.
It’s time to stop laughing at fangirls and to start giving them the decades’ worth of credit they are owed.
