Imagine the most offensive phrase a 30-something journalist could use to describe a tween girl. Whatever you’re thinking couldn’t possibly be worse than “knicker wetting banshee” because a term worse than “knicker wetting banshee” doesn’t exist. But this is what British GQ thinks of One Direction fans—who, we should remember, are a bunch of little girls.
While much has been written about the vicious Twitter war instigated by British GQ’s cover story on the reigning kings of tween pop, the coverage mostly treats their young fans as, at best, insipid fools and, at worst, dangerous, high-pitched estrogen zombies. No one asks whether all this screaming has a purpose. No one asks if the ritual of pop idolatry may actually be important for these young girls. And they should because it actually is. I know this because I was once a 13-year-old girl. And I was an intense fan. And even a pack of smug GQ editors couldn’t have ripped that Leonardo DiCaprio calendar out of my cold, dead hands.
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