Boybands — How The Young Female Brain Is “Tricked” Into Obsession

How To Profit Wildly From Female Psychology

Putting up a poster of a handsome boyband member in your room and daydreaming about becoming his girlfriend seems like a normal adolescent experience for teenage girls. But is it normal?

Enormous crowds of teenage girls and young women show up to boyband concerts; screaming and crying as if they were watching a family member perform.

They rewatch their favourite boyband stars, whether it be Harry Styles, Zayn Malik or whoever else, over and over again on Youtube. Some fans become utterly obsessed; learning every single detail of the private life of their crush, and following them around the country as they go on tour.

Have you ever taken a step back to consider how utterly bizarre this all is?

After all, for all of human history until 1964, boybands didn’t exist. For millions of years, the only other boys that teenage girls knew about were the boys in their immediate circle.

Today, it’s seen as completely normal for women to crush and obsess over a boy they’ve never had a real conversation with. And the boy she’s crushing over doesn’t even know that she exists.

The Parasocial Relationship

As we go through puberty at a young age, our brain is befuddled and rewired in strange and often damaging ways by the media we see on our electronic screens; one such way is the formation of unnatural parasocial relationships.

A parasocial relationship is a one-sided relationship where a person develops a sense of connection and familiarity with a media figure or celebrity. And they’re an extremely common modern day phenomenon.

To put it simply, it’s a relationship created through an electronic screen. You feel like you know a celebrity, but they don’t know you exist.

They don’t know you exist.

Sure, we’ve always had one-sided, parasocial figures with literary figures in books and tales, but it’s only been since the invention of the television in 1927 that parasocial relationships have become a part of our daily lives.

Many people feel like celebrities are always “there” for them. This of course, couldn’t be further from the truth. They aren’t “there” at all. It’s just you and your smartphone screen.

So why do we form deep relationships with people we’ve never met? And why do teen girls spend so much time obsessing over boybands who don’t know that they exist?

It’s because the young female brain is “tricked” by the electronic screen or their smartphone and laptop.

The female brain is the product of millions of years of slow-moving evolution. Over the years, it slowly developed layer upon layer, and the “emotional” centre of the brain is one of the oldest layers of the brain.

Our emotions are controlled by a part of the brain that evolved millions of years ago. As such, this part of the brain doesn’t really understand what electronic screens are. This section of the brain is confused by screens, and doesn’t fully understand that the things we see on screens aren’t actually occurring in our immediate physical environment.

The emotional centre of the female brain is “tricked” into believing the boyband member they’ve seen so many times on screens is somebody they have a real relationship with.

While having schoolgirl crushes on celebrities seems to us a normal part of growing up, this is actually a brand new phenomena.

A few generations ago, having a crush on someone you had never met and lived thousands of miles away was completely unheard of.

More than that, it wasn’t even possible; no media technology existed that was capable of providing this to us.

Boybands — A Wildly Successful Marketing Project

Modern boybands are not centred around music, they’re centred around marketing.

Every single aspect of them, from their appearance, to the lyrics of their songs, to the way they talk during interviews is all carefully crafted to appeal to their target audience: young women from the ages of 13–25.

In the first place, they choose boys that have a naturally attractive facial bone structure, as well as a slim to muscular body type. You won’t see a boyband member with an awkwardly large nose or a strangely shaped chin.

Also, each member of the boyband is given their own “personality”. One is the “bad boy”, another is “The funny one” and another is “The sensitive one”. The marketing team behind boybands carefully crafts each of the boys to fit into their role. Having a range of crafted personalities allows the boyband to appeal to a wider range of young women.

A fashion expert will then design each of their outfits to make sure everything they wear fits their personality role.

The lyrics in their songs are designed carefully by the marketing team to make sure they appeal to a female audience. They’re always about romance, love, fun or partying. You won’t hear boybands singing about anger, revenge or any other dark themse such as these because it would drive their female audience away.

And you most certainly won’t hear a boyband sing about anything serious or political.

The songs of boybands are created by a marketing team, not by the performers themselves.

Boy band members are always presented as “safe” romantic interests who are more interested in emotional connection and romance than sexual activity.

In fact, the members of boybands are legally obligated not to break their character. Each member of the band is required to sign a contract when they join a record label. This contract often requires them to stay at a certain level of physical fitness and there are rules about how they’re allowed to behave in public.

So-called “morality clauses” in their contracts control their behaviours. Their drug-use, sexual activity, public conduct and social media posts are all completely controlled by the contract they sign.

They are also legally obligated not to talk about politics in public; doing so would risk losing large chunks of their fan base.

Everything about boybands is crafted by a marketing team in order to appeal directly to the female brain’s evolved instincts, and they make a huge amount of profit through doing so. In 2016, it was estimated that each of the members of One Direction were worth around $70million each.

In this way, the psychology of the female brain is “tricked” in order to produce a profit. It’s amazing what you can do when you appeal to the evolutionary desires of human-beings on a mass scale through media.

To put it simply, boybands are first and foremost a marketing project. Not an artistic of musical project.

Any concept of “art” takes a backseat to making sure they market themselves to their target audience. And that’s why the music of boybands is so incredibly bland, and why they never say anything of substance during their interviews.

Members of boybands are not free-roaming artists creating the music that they want. Instead, they are carefully controlled puppets who are put in front of the public in order to make money for a record label.

They don’t write their own lyrics, a marketing team does. If they did attempt to write their own lyrics, they would be heavily restricted in what they were allowed to write about.

If, for example, a member of One Direction wanted to write a song making a political point, they would be forbidden from doing so. If a member of a K-Pop group wanted to try an alternative style of music, they would be told they can’t.

The success of a boyband is a testament to the marketing department behind the musicians, and less a testament to the performers themselves.

In the modern world, we spend huge amount of times living outside of reality, having parasocial relationships with celebrities who don’t know we exist and consuming things that have been heavily edited by a marketing team. In other words, we waste a lot of our time.

Is any of this to say that young teen girls are stupid? Absolutely not. We all constantly have our evolutionary buttons pushed by marketing teams, and when we’re teenagers we’re especially susceptible to this.

To grow up as a teenager in the modern world is to be frequently and aggressively manipulated by marketing through media.

And teenage girls are no exception.

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