We Have Always Paid in Dignity

Olivia Rodrigo, on a British radio show this spring, talking about the front rows of her own shows: “It’s been an experience as a performer that I’ve smelled.” Fans wear adult diapers so they never have to leave the barrier — the spot they queued eight hours for — and she can smell it from the stage.

The internet did what the internet does. Decline. Degeneracy. Kids these days.

I’ll admit my first reaction was the same. Then I remembered the Blues and the Greens.

In January 532, the chariot-racing fans of Constantinople — split into colour gangs, the Blues and the Greens — stopped fighting each other, teamed up, and burned the city down. By the time the emperor’s generals had put out the fire, the historian Procopius counted more than thirty thousand dead and almost half the city gone. They did this over sport. Over which team’s fans got pardoned. Grown men killed and died in their team colours.

Hold a diaper up next to that.

The behaviour is old and the panic about it is older. Lisztomania hit Berlin in 1841; the poet Heine coined the word in 1844, watching women fight over Franz Liszt’s dropped gloves — one had his old cigar stub set in a diamond locket. Sinatra’s screaming teenagers mobbed the Paramount from his 1942 debut; by the 1944 Columbus Day Riot about thirty-five thousand of them shut down Times Square and drew seven hundred police. Beatlemania put three hundred thousand people in the streets of Adelaide in 1964, fans fainting and wetting themselves where they stood. Every time, the papers reached for the same words: hysteria, disease, decay.

So is any of this actually new?

Let me give the “yes, it’s worse now” case its due, because part of it is right. Two things really did change. Back in 1956, two researchers named the one-sided bond a fan feels with a star they will never meet — real to the fan, invisible to the star. In those days your idol was a voice on the radio. Now she posts from her kitchen at midnight and might, one time in ten thousand, actually reply. The bond feels two-way now. And the phone in your hand pays you for going to extremes: film the diaper, film the eight-hour queue, and the attention is real, countable, and worth money. The front row stopped being about hearing the music. It became proof you were there — something to post.

That part is genuinely new, and I don’t want to wave it away.

But every new medium got the same charge thrown at it. Fan magazines, radio, television — each one was going to rot the young mind. That fear has a name: juvenoia, the permanent belief that this generation’s kids are uniquely lost. Plato moaned that the young no longer obeyed their elders. The 1950s burned comic books in the street. We have always been sure the barbarians were our own teenagers.

So who actually does this? Who becomes the fan who’ll sit in a soiled diaper for a better view?

The best predictor isn’t a broken home or a small town — it’s age. The strongest devotion clusters in the teens and early twenties, exactly the years when a person is trying to work out who they are. Fandom hands them a ready-made answer: a named tribe with its own words, its own symbols, a clear us and them. That isn’t a fault. It’s a low-stakes practice run at loyalty and belonging, done before the grown-up versions show up with real costs attached.

The gender story is mostly a trick of the eye. Yes, the face of screaming fandom is the teenage girl, from the 1940s bobby-soxers to today’s Swifties. But the grown man who paints his whole chest in team colours, sleeps three days in a stadium car park, and lets a result decide his whole week is just as far gone. We just don’t call him hysterical. That word comes from the Greek for womb, and it has only ever pointed one way. The behaviour is the same in both; the insult isn’t.

Go gently with the broken-home theory, though. There’s something real in it — people who are short on belonging in real life do form stronger bonds with a distant star, because the star is safe: it can’t reject you, criticise you, or walk out. One line of research links the most intense kind of celebrity worship to more anxiety and lower wellbeing. But that’s a trend across a big group, not a verdict on the girl next to you, and plenty of the most devoted fans come from warm, steady homes and are simply having the time of their lives in a crowd. The rural-kid idea people love — bored small-town teenager pours more into a faraway star — has never really held up; a 2018 UK survey found no clear town-versus-city gap. Being cut off and being spoiled for choice seem to feed the same fire from opposite ends.

Here’s the part I can’t shake, because it turns the whole “we’re rotting” story on its head.

None of this is decay. It’s old wiring doing its job.

I felt it once myself, in a stadium of forty thousand people singing the same line back at the band. For three minutes I would have done almost anything for the strangers around me. A sociologist named Durkheim described that feeling back in 1912: a crowd gathers, locks onto one thing it treats as sacred, moves and sings as one, and leaves closer than it came. His key point was that the closeness comes from the shared focus itself, not from the thing they’re focused on. Swap the sacred thing for a stage and you’ve described a concert exactly. And it isn’t just a nice idea — Robin Dunbar’s team has shown that singing and moving in time actually raises your tolerance for pain, a chemical effect you can switch off with a drug that blocks the body’s own painkillers. Ten thousand people singing one line together are running a Stone Age bonding routine that once held a small band of humans together.

Seen that way, the diaper stops looking like the end of anything. It’s what biologists call a costly signal: pay something visible and unpleasant — your dignity, your comfort, three days of your life — and you prove a loyalty nobody can fake, which earns you standing in the group. Tribal scars, initiation rites, the rookie who sweeps the locker room: same move. The fan in the diaper isn’t civilization ending. She’s running the oldest social software we’ve got, badly fitted to a venue that won’t let you back in once you leave.

A psychologist named Cialdini caught the payoff in 1976: after the home team won, students wore the colours and said “we won”; after a loss, “they lost.” The star’s win becomes your win. You borrow a status you did nothing to earn — and for most of human history, sticking close to a high-status figure really did earn you something: protection, food, a place at the fire.

So is fan culture rotting, or are we just watching the same ancient machine run on a lit stage with a camera pointed at it? Both stories fit the diaper. The online fan armies coordinating streams and pile-ons might be a truly new creature — or they might just be the Blues and the Greens with wifi, tens of thousands strong, one chant short of the Hippodrome.

I lean toward the second. Ask me again after the next thing a teenager does makes me want to write a column about the decline of the young.