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To millions of baby boomers reaching adolescence in 1964, the Beatles were the most visible, famous, and accessible icons upon which they could focus their nascent sexual feelings. As I indicated in the preceding chapter, the Beatles were not overtly sexual figures; they did not dance, sing, or present themselves in a way that could be considered sexual. However, for many teenage girls, part of the mania surrounding the Beatles was indeed fuelled by a powerful and often novel sexual attraction to the band.

A few scholars have attempted to explain the phenomenon by suggesting that the Beatles arrived in the midst of a sexual revolution, one in which outward sexual expression was becoming more acceptable for female youth. In his book,

Understanding Rock n’Roll: Popular Music in Britain 1955-1964, Dick Bradley suggests that the 1960s were a decade in which teenagers were attempting to break free of the sexual constraints that had dominated the past two decades. He explains:

It was widely perceived by the media, authors and educationalists of the 1950s and early 1960s that teenagers were heavily preoccupied with sexuality. The period between 1945 and the early 1960s was a period of particularly intense oppression of women in general, expressed in their exclusion from many sections of the national workforce.¹⁷¹

Other scholars suggest that the Beatles were the trigger for a new form of sexual expression that manifested itself as Beatlemania. In “Beatlemania: Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” feminist writer Barbara Ehrenreich argues that “to abandon control–to scream, faint, dash about in mobs–was, in form if not in conscious intent, to protest

171 Dick Bradley, Understanding Rock N' Roll: Popular Music in Britain 1955-1964 (Buckingham:

Open University Press, 1992). 101

the sexual repressiveness, the rigid double standard of female teen culture.” It was, she claims, “The first and most dramatic uprising of the women’s sexual

revolution.”¹⁷² In her essay, Ehrenreich provides a sweeping account of Beatlemania;

nonetheless, in regards to the phenomenon’s sexual component, she may be overanalyzing.

A slightly different perspective encourages us to look beyond the screaming and fainting–which was more of a behavioral phenomenon than a legitimate form of sexual expression–to a more simple reality: the Beatles happened to arrive on the international stage just as the largest boom of teenage girls in modern history was reaching puberty. The baby boomers born between 1948 and 1952, when the boom was nearing its peak, would have been between eleven and fifteen when the Beatles rose to stardom. As one such fan described, the Beatles were the first real sexual icons that “either greeted our adolescence or pushed us into it,” doing so in a way that was social, fun, and lighthearted.¹⁷³ From this perspective, it is the average age of the fans rather than the societal implications of their behavior that best explains the hysteria.

The response of these girls was not perverse; rather, it was an innocent expression of a newly discovered romantic feeling, and screaming was just a way of vocalizing those feelings in a social setting. In some ways, what these girls

experienced in the privacy of their own homes is far more revealing than what their public behavior seems to suggest. A collection of letters written to the Beatles in 1964 unmasks an endearing innocence in the way these fans explored their attraction to the

172 Lisa A. Lewis, ed. The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (London:

Routledge,1992).

173 Catone, ed. As I Write This Letter. 18

members of the band. What the girls describe in their letters is much more than an uncontrollable urge to leap on their idols and tear out their hair–which they often did in front of the cameras. Instead, the girls express a more profound desire to let the Beatles guide them through the sexual and romantic confusion of their early teens.

Because the Beatles presented themselves as blank slates, females ranging from pre-teens to teenagers could fantasize about their own, age-appropriate relationships with them.

Some girls did, indeed, use the Beatles to explore a very real sense of sexual discovery. “The effect the Beatles had on me,” one fan recalls, “was to push my already blossoming sexual awareness further along.” Another remembers that “my whole concept of love was derived from the emotions I felt as I watched them on television or saw their pictures in fan magazines. Going through puberty, we could feel our first sexual stirrings.” Occasionally, younger fans would use the letters as an excuse to mimic the more real sexual responses of their older friends and siblings. As Shirley D. of Lousiville, Kentucky, wrote to Paul McCartney, “I think you are very sexy and I don’t even know what that means.”¹⁷⁴ Shirley’s handwriting, a chicken scratch that looks like it took ages to reach the page, suggests that she was no more than ten years old when she wrote the letter.

Other girls used the letters as a way of practicing what they thought were reasonable expressions of romantic infatuation. One wrote to her “darling, sweet, sensational, sexy George” that she had “kissed this letter 3,268 times,” and though

“my lips are sore, I am still in heaven.” A few girls used their infatuation with the

174 Bill Adler, ed. Love Letters to the Beatles (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons,1964). No page numbers.

Beatles as a chance to size themselves up as romantic partners, as did one who described herself to McCartney as “very sensitive and shy.” She insists that “I know when to be quiet and when to be glad,” and that “I am just happy, fun loving, and swinging.” In a somewhat sombering case, a girl pleads to her “adorable, sweet John”

that she had lost thirty pounds just to please him. She claims that Lennon was “the inspiration for my diet and that instead of eating, I just sit and look at your picture.

Fat Phyllis is no more!”

When they were not the objects of romantic or sexual feelings, the Beatles could simply fill the role of boyfriends–or male companions–when the girls had few others to speak of. They could provide the fantasy of male company on command and, unlike a real boy, the fantasy could be melded into whatever the girl wanted it to be. When the fantasy was not sexual or romantic, it was “my dearest and best friend,”

a guide through the turbulence of adolescence. In many of the letters, the girls state that they “grew up with the Beatles.” One girl recalls, “I was in love with Paul and he was very real to me…somehow I still feel close to him. I may have lost the gee whiz teeny bopper idolization, but I still have a feeling of caring about him and a deep, deep affection.”¹⁷⁵ This kind of tender, affectionate language reveals that these girls were using the Beatles in a much more complicated way than their public hysteria might suggest.

The screaming and the fainting were merely the modes of expression that these girls used to project their emotions in a social setting. It may have been unusual, as Barbara Ehrenreich notes, for young women to have behaved this way in this particular era, but that does not necessarily mean that it was a conscious–or even

175 Catone, ed. As I Write This Letter. 4

unconscious–effort to break away from the norm and initiate a feminist movement.

Ultimately, this was just the natural reaction for millions of young girls who were reaching the complicated years of puberty and identifying four male icons that could guide them through it.