Devotion may be a given, but it has always taken a kind of fearlessness to love boy bands. From Beatlemania on, fans have been dismissed as silly hormonal twits with terrible taste in music. These days, feminist fourth-wave writers and fans like Maria Sherman, author of Larger than Life: A History of Boy Bands from NKOTB to BTS, are recognizing the power, positivity, and community of boy band stans. “One thing the chauvinists fail to recognize or respect,” she writes, “is the baseline self-determination that liking a boy band introduces within its predominantly female audience.”
Harry Styles is on board. In April 2017, he told Rolling Stone, “How can you say young girls don’t get it? They’re our future. Our future doctors, lawyers, mothers, presidents, they kind of keep the…
