If the inability to experience live music any time soon is seriously bumming you out, too, I highly recommend Hannah Ewens’ book Fangirls: Scenes From Modern Music Culture, which came out earlier this summer and is especially guaranteed to send any kid who grew up in the Myspace band era down a deep memory wormhole. In a quest to reclaim the “fangirl” label from its most dismissive detractors, the book zeroes in on some of the biggest and most devoted followings on earth, including the Beyhive, the One Directioners, the Little Monsters, and of course — most relevantly to this newsletter — the Arianators (for newbies to the newsletter, the joke is just that i just……….really love her).
I’m doing a q&a with Hannah on the book tomorrow, but the kind folks at her publisher were chill with Deez Links publishing an excerpt from — what else? — the Ariana chapter, Dangerous Women and Political Fun, which focuses on the aftermath of the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, particularly through the perspective of her youngest fans:
Ariana Grande began her career the way many American pop princesses do: as a heart-faced Nickelodeon sweetheart. Except, as the usual narrative goes, those sweet babies come of age, good girls go bad.
Dangerous Woman, the album she was touring at that time, is a collection of fifteen songs basically about sex. When sung in Ariana’s breathy four-octave voice, I’m so into you / I can barely breathe is surely one of the sexiest lines committed to record. She might’ve once said, “I don’t see myself ever becoming a sex symbol,” but here she was, on her third album, with her famously long ponytail, tiny mini-skirts and absolutely having (reportedly very good) sex before marriage.
Even worse to a misogynist than a woman singing about “bad decisions” in cat ears, Ariana has conviction. She shows her anger at bad interviewers who ask her about her dating life instead of her music. Where other pop stars shy away from being overtly political in order not to alienate right-wing American fans, Grande is pro-gun reform, has aligned herself with Black Lives Matter and had been anti-Trump since well before the election. She’s consciously made efforts to be viewed as someone here to empower all fans, especially young women. In late 2016, Ariana complained that a man approached her and the late singer Mac Miller to congratulate him on “scoring” her. “Ariana is sexy as hell, man,” he said. “I see you, I see you hitting that!” In response, she said online that she was “not a piece of meat that a man gets to utilize for his pleasure.” Many of her devoted fans are, and certainly were at the time of the attack, tweens and teen girls who had followed her since her days on a children’s programme on Nickelodeon; they had seen her as a cool older sister, and growing up just ahead of them. To go against what she was originally marketed as, and push sex positivity to very young women, even to girls who are only beginning to have an understanding of her message, is provocative. To do that and become one of the world’s biggest pop stars, hugely successful, with one of the most loyal and vocal fan bases, is not insignificant.
At the Manchester show, as at every show on that tour, a video played clips of Ariana posing seductively with messages stamped over them. “Wild” was one, “free” another, “soulful,” “willful” and pointedly, politically, “not asking for it.” All markers of womanhood, as Ariana sees it. ISIS aside, this sexual freedom has been seen as something toxic by the right-wing press: after the Manchester attack, one prominent journalist asked of the fans and their parents: “Should they have been there? Was it appropriate?” This was not a space for them, a concert of a “woman singing about sex and little else.”
As Nazir Afzal says, to ISIS, all of this would be beyond unacceptable; to them, even the idea of female musicians is a disgrace, when famously one of the first things ISIS did was to outlaw music entirely. “Ariana is very outspoken in the lifestyle that she wants to lead and wants other women and girls to have,” Azfal told me. “These people who want to harm girls are against it; they don’t want it with the women in their own families but they certainly don’t want it in the wider community either. It’s always very much a message on their part.” It’s why Afzal calls the attack gender terrorism – terrorism reinforcing gender stereotypes and aimed at keeping women in their place. “His target wasn’t any of those individual women and girls that he killed, but he wanted to send a message out to the wider community of women and girls in this country.”
Afzal was Chief Executive of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners in 2017. He pushed to have the Manchester attack acknowledged and described as gender terrorism. His board rejected this suggestion. He resigned because he wasn’t allowed to speak out to the press properly on the broader issues related to the attack, and has since articulated how he feels about its gendered nature on social media.
A year on, we knew more – it was confirmed that the vast majority of the 14,000 there that night were girls and very young women aged between eight and twenty years old, and that many were there at their long-awaited first or second pop concert. Yet to say that it was an attack on them remains controversial. Even with this information, only one writer, Anna Leszkiewicz for the New Statesman, outlined it in an anniversary piece, and though the proliferation of online outlets means they usually copy each other for quick clicks, it did not happen with her feature. Twitter users were not discussing it. Afzal was the only other voice, in the same publication, echoing what he’d said a year before. “Extremism is not confined to so-called caliphates,” he wrote in a New Statesman column on the 23rd May 2018. “It is found everywhere and anywhere you look. Gender terrorism pervades every society – although men never call it that, because it would then need a national and international response.”
This acknowledgement is unquestionably owed to the injured and the survivors, many of whom believe that this act of violence was the result of such regressive misogynistic beliefs. “It was an attack on teenage girls and women for expressing love for music and who they were and their femininity,” said Carys. “They were expressing anger at how women have become something over the years, and how we can celebrate that through music. When you come to an Ariana concert to celebrate her music, she shows that women are strong.” When Millie came out of hospital, she and her mum discussed how people like the bomber don’t want girls like her to be free, but rather to be scared. “Mum said to me that there was a concert the night before and it was Take That and it was probably busier at Take That than Ariana but they chose her and us. They wanted to turn the night into a horrible thing that happened, something they’d want to stop.”
“We live in a patriarchal society,” Afzal said when I asked why he thought people had been reluctant to support his views. “You know that, I know that. We’re always trying to minimise the impact on women. We want to suggest that there is a bigger picture here, which means, of course, an attack on all men and all society.” One comment I saw online, criticising a feminist publication for considering the gendered aspects of what had happened, summarised this: This isn’t a gender-biased crime. It’s an atrocity against humanity crime. Afzal tweeted, “In the aftermath of Manchester Terror Attack, I was approached by many wealthy individuals saying they wanted to do something. Few weeks later when I went back to them with proposals for youth and women engagement, it no longer fits their business plans! Should I Name & Shame them?”
To many living comparatively comfortably in Britain, even those who are not extremist or outwardly misogynistic in their views, Ariana and her fans are tiny, dangerous girls. How do dangerous girls respond to such an incident? They don’t sit in silence that settles.
Millie was saved from the building that night. Four paramedics came and carried her friend Lucy off, while she was left with Lucy’s phone. She tried to unlock it so she could tell her mum not to come near in case there was another bomb. She wondered why she couldn’t unlock the phone and realised it was because of her fingers. Charged with adrenaline, she touched the visible bone. “Why doesn’t it hurt?” she asked herself. Her hair was burnt, and there were shrapnel injuries on her face and leg.
“I remember saying ‘Please don’t let me lose my fingers’ to the paramedic bandaging up my hand. A girl called Stacey called my mum with Lucy’s phone and she guided my mum through the crowd and was telling Mum what she was wearing so she could find us.” Millie’s mum had to flick pieces of other people’s bodies off her: it was determined soon afterwards that Millie had been only six feet away from the bomber. She would be diagnosed with PTSD and referred to specialist trauma therapy, and had to drop out of college owing to the frequency of her hospital and counselling appointments.
Six weeks later and finally out of the wheelchair, Millie is standing in front of her mirror at her mum’s house in Wigan, hair up in a messy bun, doing her make-up. When she rubs moisturiser into her skin she sometimes finds pieces of shrapnel in her face. Even months later, tiny flecks of metal rise to the surface. That night is the first thing she sees when she looks at her reflection.
When the world hurts you like this, what does it look like when you continue to be a fan? When the world is hurtful, you have to be a fan still – or can you?
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Excerpted from Fangirls: Scenes from Modern Music Culture by Hannah Ewens, © 2020, published with permission from the University of Texas Press
Wow, i had chills reading this entire piece. I spent hours on twitter after the Manchester attack, but didn't come across this take on gender terrorism. This is so true though, in a patriarchal society, women existing and being their most authentic self is considered a radical act. Can't wait to read this book, and share it with my feminist friends.