BTS, stanning men, growing up

disclaimer: I wrote most of this, including the BTS parts, over a year ago. that's why if you're army you'll notice their anniversary and this publishing date don't add up. sorry!

 I went to a picnic on Saturday for the 10th anniversary of BTS. I met nice people and hopefully made some new friends. What was funny to me was how many stans had gone through un-stanning phases only to return back to BTS years later. That concerned me. my obsessions usually only last about 3 years. I’m almost at 3 years with BTS, but I’ve gone through several breakups with them already. First when I learned about all their former scandals, then when I heard about the collab songwriter credited on filter who raped his girlfriend, then when J-Hope collaborated with and seemed to support Crush’s anti-Blackness. I unfollowed Hobi on insta for that one, and he has the best Instagram. I also can’t listen to filter now without wanting to vomit.

I’m quite aware that they all have flirted with their own instances of misogyny and racism. In part I feel I may have excused some of their early behavior because many of them were still teens. I don't think people really change in fundamental ways (usually) and I also don’t think its ok to excuse this behavior ever, because while they may have been young and learning still, there were also young teen girls who were contending with the full force of socialized and institutional sexism since they hit puberty, if not since birth. The same for people who grow up Black. Boys and girls have different childhoods, even if you want to raise them the same, as much as I wish you could, the cynic in me doesn't believe that's possible.

A friend once asked me why I hated Hamilton. I glared at him. He was serious. I said, simply, that Toni Morrison hated Hamilton and that was enough reason for me - anyone who can write a book like Beloved should have their opinion worshiped as truth. 

This is a predicament I find myself in a lot. How to enjoy things that are flawed because of their racism, sexism, ableism. I used to try and tell myself that good art is inherently pure, that the quality of art could be controlled by how intellectually principled it was. This was back when I was a lesbian, when I thought love was a moralistic quandary. 

so why do I listen to BTS?

erm. they’re cute. and their music is good.

I don’t have a better answer! sorry.

Maybe this answer beguiles more of myself than I'd care to admit. Maybe I'm still just mad at men for not loving me. If men can't love me in the ways I want to be loved, then we demote them to pretty faces. And I like how this feel subversive because we do not have the social encodings to talk about men as pretty little Things. Somewhere in the archive I have an essay about objectifying men. 

I think for a while, in my lesbian phase, I was jealous of how women loved men. I wanted to be loved like that. I didn’t think men could love me like that. It is both a silly and profound anxiety. I believe it reflects the type of relationships I saw growing up, that I never saw relationships I felt were truly emotionally intimate. It's silly, and sad, because I told my guy friend* this once and he didn’t really understand what I was saying. That's maybe the only time I’ve ever seen him remotely flustered. I told him I was jealous of how girls loved him so much. This memory still makes me cringe. I think this was my really convoluted way of trying to say I admired him, or that I was in love with him and jealous of the girls who loved him. I don’t know. It was a confusing time for me. I was going to therapy and learning how to feel my feelings, which was new and harder than I had anticipated.

My professor in college told me that everything can be critiqued. Everything should be critiqued. And I like to think of this world, forthcoming in all its imperfection. If we lived culturally in a world that accepted critique instead of shunned it, if we embraced cancel culture as a true movement of the people. If people learned that to critique something is to love something, to see it accurately and want it to be better. Like physical training. It's going to hurt just a little, as it always should. That's how you build muscle. 

* this former lesbian doesn't exactly socialize well with men, so yes, this is the same guy friend from before. There aren't many men who can survive my friendship.