Young fans of Korean bands are often dismissed as hysterical. But that’s sexist, says researcher, arguing that football fans are no different. “Hysterical” and “obsessed” are among the adjectives used to describe pop group groupies. There is also the derogatory term “groupie”. The female culture of female pop fans is often not taken seriously in society dating back to the Beatles era, says Victoria Cann, a professor at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, east England. She studies gender and identity in youth.
The widespread assumption is that girls “like the Beatles because they’re attracted to them, while boys, when they like the Beatles, it’s because of the way they play piano and guitar and because they’re good musicians,” she tells DW.
Underlying this was the belief that “young women have no sense of what is important in the world; they are just obsessed and hysterical.” It is a form of structural misogyny, according to the expert, which assumes that women are irrational compared to men.
Collecting k-pop cards ‘not cool’
Groupies feel like victims of prejudice, especially in the K-pop scene. South Koreans call female K-pop fans “bbasooni,” groupies who blindly pursue male idols, according to the Korea Times. This could be why many female fans keep it a secret that they like K-pop, according to the newspaper.
Vivien Pistor has been a K-pop groupie for years. From her native Germany, the 25-year-old travels abroad to concerts, buys every album released by her favorite band, Stray Kids, and collects and exchanges cards with pictures of different K-pop bands.
The fact that she collects cards often draws criticism. Unlike popular Pokemon cards, where collecting is respected, “it’s not cool for girls to collect k-pop cards,” she tells DW.
Pop and football: similar experiences
“Whether grouping is acceptable or not depends very much on whether the fan group is primarily male or female,” argues Victoria Cann. “Football fans are criticized but rarely ridiculed, for example. However, pop groupies are comparable to football fans: both groups spend a lot of money on their favorite team or band”, says the researcher.
They scream and sing to cheer on their idols on the field or on stage. They look forward to having a souvenir from their idols, whether it’s a football shirt or a band shirt. Football fans create impressive choreographies in the stadium, and groupies at concerts often hold lighters or cell phones singing in unison during ballads.
Where does ridicule come from
“Tietage is an expression of femininity; it’s a way for girls to explore their femininity and have fun with it,” Cann says, adding that femininity is something that isn’t particularly valued unless it’s serving the patriarchy in some way, which in which case it doesn’t necessarily happen. “That’s why this phenomenon is often ridiculed,” she adds.
Marie Feller, another K-pop fan from Germany, avoids openly admitting her passion for the genre as a teenager, as she often heard her peers make bigoted, even racist remarks about the very K-pop singers she idolizes. “It used to make me very uncomfortable. I didn’t talk about it because I wanted to keep my friends.” The 21-year-old still hasn’t mentioned her preferences to anyone.
K-pop groupies are creative and political
“There’s more to groupie life than just listening to music,” argues Vivien Pistor, who translates Korean song lyrics, allowing her to better understand South Korea’s language and culture. Marie Feller makes bracelets and hands them out at concerts. They used to try to learn the choreography to K-pop songs by themselves. “Of course, it’s a bonus that K-pop idols are good-looking,” says Marie of her favorite band, NCT Dream. “But I don’t know anyone who’s a fan just because of that.”
The groupies’ narrative is usually limited to screaming and swooning, but the young women are also politically active.
After the murder of George Floyd in the USA, fans of the successful k-pop band BTS asked for donations to the Black Lives Matter movement (black lives matter). When the hashtag “WhiteLivesMatter” trended on Twitter, K-pop fans deliberately spammed the hashtag so that right-wing slogans would be less noticeable.
Victoria Cann’s advice to young women derided as groupies is: shrug it off. “If you find pleasure in something and you’re not harming anybody – and teasing never harms anybody – then so what? So what if people don’t like it? So what if they don’t understand?”
“There’s a lot of potential in tieting,” says Cann. “It provides a community, it gives you pleasure just from listening to music, it helps you make sense of the world or feel less alone,” she says. “These things are really important.”
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