Fifteen, seventy-six pounds of glitter and mace, I hear "What Makes You Beautiful" for the first time. Hidden behind the books on rainy Saturdays, I celebrate the ubiquity of being unbeautiful in bobby socks and a training bra. I look eleven on a good day, and I only listen to Radiohead and My Chemical Romance. The boy I write letters to on the cardboard backs of my spiral notebooks doesn't know me beyond my name in indigo ink on a couple of club sign-up sheets.
The lyrics of "What Makes You Beautiful" don't ring with poetic texture, but as much as I and my avant-garde group of girlfriends laugh behind our hands at the kind of music that makes top forty, I listen to One Direction every time I'm home alone and not reading Nietzsche. "Little Things" loops in my frontal cortex after rough medical appointments. I have always been a serious little person; straight As and straight teeth, an overachieving anorexic with low self-esteem, yet I cannot stop screeching, "everyone else in the room can see it, everyone else but youuuuu," when I wash my hair.
The stigma against boy bands is in no way benign; even the most pretentious people enjoy some facet of bubblegum pop when there's a long way home, a thousand mornings of anointing one's hair with heat, humming along to Katy Perry's latest ode to teen outrage. Consider the most common offensives against One Direction and its ilk; they "can't sing," (I'd like to see the people saying this do better. One Direction performs when they are ill. Harry Styles once ran off stage to be sick and immediately came back to finish his performance so nobody would be disappointed), they don't make "real music" (what constitutes music as real? Music, by definition, is a varied as United States gas prices), they're only popular because they appeal to young girls with tousled hair and hearts replaced with bottle rockets.
Maybe One Direction does owe much or even most of their global notoriety to teenage girls; who they, without fail, perpetually show interest in and appreciation for. The first words out of the group's mouths at any gig are expressions of gratitude to their supportive fan base. The modern market capitalizes on young girl's all the time: pink acne wash, pricey purple razors for all the hair they have been conditioned to remove from their bodies, even waterproof mascara for the gal on the go. These things are all okay if it's what a young woman chooses herself, but I have to ask: Why is it only okay to make money off the interests of young girls if it keeps them insecure?
