Culture 

Teenage girls anointed the Beatles. But you already knew that.

Teenage girls looked at that pack of floppy-haired Brits crooning in perfect harmony about hand-holding and holding on tight, and they thought, yes. They screamed and wept and pulled at their hair and fainted, because the band was perfect, the most perfect thing they’d ever seen, and they were overcome by the perfection.

Teen girls were the ones who loved the Beatles first, when the rest of the world didn’t get it. “Those who flock round the Beatles, who scream themselves into hysteria, whose vacant faces flicker over the TV screen, are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the failures,” wrote Paul Johnson in an infamous New Statesman article in 1963. Adults called those Beatlemaniac teen girls oversexed and hysterical — until, eventually, they saw the perfection, too.