“OK. Everybody close your eyes. I want you to raise your hand if you have ever had a girl say something bad about you behind your back. Open your eyes. Now, close your eyes again. And this time, I want you to raise your hand if you have ever said anything about a friend behind her back. Open them…”
We are all familiar with the game Ms.Norbury plays with the female students in Mean Girls to establish that some girl-on-girl crime has been committed, and while that may be a high school set movie, I think we’re all guilty of it. Whether it’s something small like complaining that your housemate hasn’t done the dishes again, or branding someone a ‘home-schooled jungle freak’, we’ve all said something behind someone’s back before.
Working in the music industry – and especially when touring with bands – I spend an awful lot of my time with men, and although I meet a lot of girls, we don’t strike up friendships because we just meet in passing, we’re not living on a bus for days at a time like I am with the guys.
Now that I’m writing books about the music industry, as much as I want to make them fun and happy and entertaining to read, I also want to make them as realistic as possible. I want to give people a proper insight into a very strange world from a very odd perspective, and I can safely say that girls in this particular field are not very nice to each other.
People often call me out on it, and sometimes they take issue with it, but it’s just the way it is.
I mean, you don’t have to take my word for it. Just pick any current male popstar, find out what his girlfriend’s name is and google it along with the words ‘death’ and ‘threat’. It is very common for female fans to bombard those who dare to date their idols with death threats and abuse. You can go on forums and find pages and pages of fans slagging off any females who are close to the stars they love.
It’s only natural people are jealous if you’re friends with their favourite band, but if they don’t blindly hate you, sometimes they will try and befriend you because they think you will be their ‘in’ to make friends with the band. Just like the boys don’t know who is only trying to sleep with them because they’re famous, the friends of the boys don’t know who is only trying to make friends with them because they think it will facilitate them sleeping with the band.
Which brings me on to groupies and kiss and tell girls. Yes, there are chicks who only want to sleep with famous people, and each to their own, but it makes it hard to tell who is genuine.
Even when I was young and just a fan, there were fan wars, with different groups of girls hating each other. Liking the same band, they had everything in common, and yet things like jealousy would result in them being enemies. I remember one time when I was a young teenager. I was feeling really ill, and my favourite band member gave me a hug at a meet-and-greet. My (now ex) friends were so jealous they left me in the middle of nowhere, in a strange city, to try and find my own way home. They all started being nice to me again when they realised I had become friends with the band, which brings me on to my next point…
I have been unfortunate enough to have my own little internet campaign against me, just for being friends with a band. I suppose these days you’d call it cyber bullying. Girls were posting horrible things about me online, posting photos and writing nasty things about me on them. Eventually they found someone else to hate on, but just because they got bored of picking on me, it doesn’t mean I’m happy they moved on to someone else.
So with everyone having a different agenda, who can you trust? Who can you be friends with?
The fans hate the girls who are ‘with the band’, the girls ‘with the band’ hate the groupies for trying to sleep with their friends to sell a story, the kiss-and-tell girls look down on the fans as unambitious for being there for the music, the girls ‘with the band’ don’t trust the fans incase they’re not being genuine… it’s a mess.
Like high school, there is a lot of prejudging, stereotyping and people just being plain mean. The important thing to remember is to give people the benefit of the doubt every now and then. If I see any fans being excluded, pushed aside for prettier, squeakier ones, or if they don’t have the confidence to come forward, I will help them out. If I hear girls slagging off other girls that I know, I will defend them. And most importantly, if I hear anything being said about me, or read anything about myself online, I ignore it and rise above it. Never let anyone make you feel anything less than awesome.
Of course, not everyone is like this, but I want my books to be a real insight into my world, and girl-on-girl crime is committed everyday.
Pink Ink 