Manufacturing Cougar Bait
Positioning teen boys for adult desire: from Bieber to One Direction and beyond
There is a misconception that the so-called teen heartthrobs’ marketing demographic consists exclusively of tweens, kids, and contemporaries, which ignores the very pointed marketing towards older women. It's kind of a shortcut to retain relevance, as teen frenzy is infamous for being fickle.
I get it: unless you're paying absurdly close attention, you probably don't notice the way teenage boys are being packaged as cougar bait and sexualized. It's not the most comfortable thing to notice, either.
A while back, I came across a comment on Substack that illustrated this perceived wisdom, “[Boy bands] make a contract with Pop Culture that they will appeal to 13-year-old girls.” This ignores the modern phenomenon of these teenagers being outright marketed towards adults. It’s easy to see the tween/teen girls constantly referenced and assume they make up the entire market.
There is a parallel economy of adult women that are being courted and catered to with sexualized teen content. As someone who has been an adult for quite some time, I find this inexplicable. Even in my early twenties, I would not see an 18-year-old boy as a viable sexual partner in any way whatsoever, even if he were famous. Yet, boys of that age and younger were often packaged and presented as if their sexual viability were a given.
Sinead O'Connor called this out in a radio interview in 2014, mentioning Justin Bieber specifically. This led to backlash against her and reporting that she was “attacking” Bieber when she did nothing of the sort. She clarified on her official website, saying, “What was discussed was the fact there are elements within the entertainment industry engaged in the conscious sexualization of minors.” On her comments being misconstrued, she added this was,
“Part of the culture which tacitly supports the sexualization of minors by the entertainment industry, the media distort the words and voices of those who draw attention to the matter.”
What she had a problem with was the way the industry was treating these boys: this is what I'm interested in as well. The way this has been promoted, encouraged, and continued long into adulthood. I'm not interested in the way some of these boys leaned into their sexual commodification as they became men—something we frequently see with female teen stars, too. Their adult acceptance doesn't retroactively justify the way they were packaged for consumption as youths/teenagers.
Bieber is a great example, as there have since been edits/compilations of awkward moments when female interviewers groped him, or he was asked uncomfortable questions about sex. He later on also expressed a desire to “protect” Billie Eilish, “I don't want her to go through anything I went through. I don't wish that upon anybody.”
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Twilight’s Taylor Lautner was contemporary to Bieber and experienced the cougar thirst firsthand. As someone who was not into Twilight and avoided the fandom, I was aware of the “twimoms” phenomenon, wherein 30-to 40-something women went hard for the series, but I always assumed Robert Pattinson was the target. He was in his early 20s at the time, so as much as I might’ve rolled my eyes, I didn’t really think about it. But it was 16-year-old Lautner who was catnip to the adult fans.
Lautner was tasked with bulking up for the Twilight sequel and certainly delivered, but it seems he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the attention that came with it, telling Us Weekly, “It's actually quite uncomfortable knowing so many people are seeing that!”
One of the stories Lautner told on Jay Leno’s show in 2009 was about a 40-something mom meeting him with her daughter in tow and asking him to sign the underwear she was wearing at the time. It was played for a laugh, of course, but looking at it with distance, it’s beyond fucked up.
Coverage of things such as Lautner’s Rolling Stone cover was couched as giving “tween girls their first ‘funny feeling’ downstairs” without acknowledging the adult demographic that this spoke to directly. This is what happens, consistently. Say you’re asking these questions for the young fan girls, when it’s actually feeding into another demographic. Use the guise of shepherding teenagers towards an inevitable sexual awakening, fulfilling their wants, while actually being wildly inappropriate.
This is something we saw a lot of in One Direction’s coverage, clear successors to the teen heartthrob titles. In their case, it was supercharged, to the point that I cannot include everything in one post, lest Substack cut me off.
It was fairly common for interviewers to pry unnecessarily under the guise of catering to the fans’ curiousity. One of the most egregious examples is the 2013 British GQ cover story, in which Harry Styles is hounded for the number of sexual partners he’d had:
The fan backlash to this interview was so massive that GQ themselves retitled the piece, “This One Direction interview got us death threats” when reposting it in 2015. While the extreme reaction and lashing out was unacceptable, it serves as a great cover to dismiss legitimate criticism of this type of behaviour. This type of questioning only happens because there is a perceived demand for it—and I certainly assume the interviewer was expecting a much different answer but still managed to frame his hounding as Styles “getting into his stride,” which is bizarre. There was also significant backlash after Ellen DeGeneres set up a skit with Rebel Wilson accosting Styles on-air.
In 2014, while doing a Today Show interview, the crowd protested when a question was attributed to them. Another female interviewer asked about them liking older women, which was met with silence and questioning of whether she “had to ask,” as she claimed. Styles outright left the stage when an interviewer tried to salsa with him. On KiddNation in 2015, a fan asked if they were ready for break, and the interviewer declared the fan actually wanted to know who was the sexiest in the morning. In the case below, an interviewer asked for kisses “on behalf of the directioners.” She is not the only interviewer who outright asked to be kissed.
The most obvious, but perhaps forgotten, strategy was framing Styles as sexually available to women in their 30s. This started in 2010, when he was 16—I recommend clicking through the link to be reminded that they all looked their age. These were boys being hounded, being visualized in gold thongs. Styles was positioned as liking older women right away and was later quoted as saying he wouldn’t date anyone older than his mother, who was 43 at the time, which still left a lot of leeway. There was reporting of women in their thirties fancying him, and X Factor Magazine started the countdown for his 18th birthday. At 17, he was paired up with 32-year-old Caroline Flack. Later on, he allegedly wrecked 32-year-old Lucy Horobin’s marriage. Dan Wootton tried to push a romance between Styles and 35-year-old Nicole Scherzinger. An Australian interview where Liam Payne was flirtatious with the 36-year-old interviewer was reported on as, “Styles's eye for older women turns to Sunrise bombshell Samantha Armytage.”
Styles was marketed very specifically to older women, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the band was spared. From receiving a “shaggers of the year” award when they were all still teenagers to being asked whether they were circumcised. An adult male interviewer asked them to take their shirts off and later on declared a man-crush and asked for hugs. This entire 2012 interview, which starts with asking about cougars/hooking up with fans’ moms and progressed to outright pressing them on how much/how often they have sex—framed as a fan question, of course. At a red carpet in 2014, they were asked who the “main fucker” of the band was.
One of the most famous interviews in fandom is the Mario Kart interview, wherein Styles and Louis Tomlinson were asked about anal sex positions under the guise of finding out who was in front and who was behind when they “played Mario Kart.” The interviewer herself later bragged on Twitter that she was actually asking about “bumming” and the interview was categorized under “sex” on their site.
Before 1D, Lautner and Bieber, there were the Jonas Brothers. They appeared on Podcrushed in July of this year and discussed their experience being sexualized in their youth. They recall interviewers threatening to say they were in a cult if they didn’t discuss their purity rings and answer questions about sex.
What surprised me in this interview was Nick Jonas’ claim that things have improved, that, “it would be like so outside of the realm of possibilities or something, someone would do to ask at that time a 14-year-old about their sex life.” Not only does what happened with 1D go against his claim, but Stranger Things’ Finn Wolfhard has been receiving the same kind of hounding as these boys have, being propositioned directly at the age of 14. His castmates have stepped in to defend him and deflect inappropriate questions repeatedly.
In general, I think this type of objectification has become more normalized and mainstream. In some cases, it’s encouraged. I’ve covered the Booktok Thirst being goaded by the NHL and its ramifications. Sexually aggressive women are a market demographic that can be catered to.
I suspect this is partly the curse of commercialization. If it leads to more attention, more sales, then it will be perpetuated despite how inappropriate it might be. And the more it occurs, the more normalized it becomes. Even the controversy, if it’s called out, can be seen as a positive and result in better ROI.
Even brands get involved, escalating the normalization. Like the HBO show Euphoria illustrating a sex scene between Tomlinson & Styles. Like Crocs responding to a tweet they weren’t addressed in to declare which of the 1D boys they would “raw,” Cinnabon referencing a song to make a sexual pun about their own product, or Pornhub joking about the 1D hiatus being a front for their porn careers. If OnlyFans were around back then, I have no doubt they’d be getting in line, suggesting they should join the site for some spare change. This is clearly not catering to an underage audience. But according to a Stubhub poll from 2013, 46% of their fans were over 35, and 15% were over 55.
The marketing and positioning worked, and the profitability has been proven. And it has continued, long into their adulthood. But unless you’re following these bands today, you wouldn’t know how they are treated or how their fan bases behave.
There is no slowing down, only escalation as the teens become adults and the exploitation can be more direct. And it’s easy to believe that things have changed or improved when you’re not following the minutiae, and not being directly courted with content. The parallel audience continues to thrive, and in some cases, outperforms the teen market.
This is absolutely something I've observed as well and have been called a misogynist for it. I wrote a post a few years ago on some of the effects of it on BTS/K-Pop fandom. There's nothing wrong with being an older fan but there's something really wrong about older women hiding behind a screen of teenage fans. I know it's not the Gen Zs and Alphas who are laundering cash to buy mp3s for the Billboard charts.
Chuckling, my old line manager wrote that GQ cover.
WRT to the general topic, though, I think it's fairly simple: there has always been an easy assumption that teenage boys are *so* horny, they can't ever be sexualised. That all and any attention must be great, for them. And teen boys certainly do perform that persona, certainly, though scratch the surface and you generally find someone much more vulnerable and less confident. Wrapped up in this is perhaps also the fact that after puberty, 90% of boys will be physically stronger than 90% of women, so there's less of a perceived vulnerability to actual predation (and maybe there is, in that sense! Though it rarely works like that). Both those points, I reckon, make it much less loaded to joke about sexualising young men in the public eye.
On a semi-related note, I think previous generations would be surprised at Harry Styles, a boy of 19ish, being quite so discreet about his sexual partners. You wouldn't be mad to assume that the average teen boy who had (I presume) shagged around a lot would love the chance to boast about his exploits.