Early this week, a video leaked on the internet featuring two of the British boy band OneDirection members acting like idiots. Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik made a video of themselves driving in Peru during their tour.
Now a lot of the backlash for this video has come from the fact that they’re smoking weed. But technically speaking what they were doing was legal. Under Peruvian law, if you have eight grams or less of marijuana to be used for immediate personal consumption, you’re not breaking the law. There’s the chance that the boys had more in the car than that, but based on the video, there’s no reason to assume that. From that standpoint, what they did was entirely legal, especially given that both boys are technically of age, even in the United States.
Now obviously it’s not the best impression for their young fans, but it’s not really that different than a video of them enjoying a couple of drinks at the bar. Their fans are free to do the same thing when they are of age and in a jurisdiction where marijuana is legal.
No, what’s much more upsetting than their weed use is the language used by the two boys. You can hear Louis, the one recording and narrating the video say the word “n**,” a shortened form of the n-word. At another point in the video, the boys go on to use “gay” as a derogatory term, using it to describe their dislike of the cover of one of the OneDirection books.
Now they’ve gotten some backlash from fans regarding both the drug use and the language. But not nearly enough. In an attempt to figure out how fans really felt about the video, I went into an incredibly scary part of the internet…OneDirection fans’ Twitter accounts.
Anyone else in the office can testify that this was my face.
No, for real. It’s terrifying. These teenage girls take their OneDirection seriously. We’re talking diehard fans here. And what I was interested to find is that pretty much all the chatter is about whether or not it was wrong of them to smoke weed. They used some existing hashtags, like #zouis, and came up with new ones, my personal favorite being #zouisyoulightupthatbluntlikenobodyelse — a reference to one of their early songs. The diehard fans harassed anyone who was leaving the “fandom” because of the boys’ actions, and reaffirmed their love and devotion to the British boy band. The hashtag #cutforzouis was also apparently trending for a while, but there’s no indication that anyone actually engaged in self-harm based on the scandal. There’s also the hashtag #skinfor1D that encourages young girls (and a few boys) to post nude photos of themselves to support the band members. Which is just so creepy on so many levels and really NSFW and I think I need to be done with the internet for today.
But in the hour or so I spent scrolling through these tweets and scarring myself for life, I found maybe a handful of mentions of the casual racism and homophobia present in the video. Most of the fans don’t seem to care about that fact, either because they didn’t notice, or because they don’t care. Either of those two possibilities is harmful in its own way — because it means that they are too oblivious to such language to think it warrants attention, or because they’re so desensitized to it that they don’t care.
And OneDirection, specifically, has been accused of racism before. Apparently OneDirection fans don’t like New Zealand artist Lorde, for reasons that I can’t seem to ascertain other than that she may have at one point said she didn’t like the band. When pictures surfaced of her and her boyfriend, who is of Asian descent, self-proclaimed OneDirection fans took to Twitter to say pretty vile racist stuff about the guy.
Now this isn’t attempt to pick on the teenagers who worship OneDirection, at least that’s not my main point. Fans of other pop stars, especially young fans, have tweeted out equally horrible crap. It’s more a reflection on the latest incident I’ve noticed in a string of pop stars who are supposed to be role models getting away with offensive language or cultural appropriation or just general insensitiveness because they can. It’s offensive, it’s wrong, and it’s not getting nearly the attention it deserves. Because someone has to actually start holding kids like the OneDirection members accountable for the language they’re using, otherwise their young fans will keep standing by them, and they’ll get the impression that such language is acceptable.
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Anneliese Mahoney (@AMahoney8672) is Lead Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.
Featured image courtesy of [Eva Rinaldi via Flickr]