Katya’s Reviews > Swoon: Fangirls, Their Idols and the Counterculture of Female Lust – From Byron to the Beatles > Status Update

it wasn't just teenage girls losing their minds anymore.(...)at concerts, in multiple countries, respectable, seemingly sane adults had started wheeling sick or disabled children into their dressing rooms, asking the Beatles to bless and cure them, as if they were saints or something.

If you had walked into an Elvis show in 1955, you would have seen it and heard it immediately: his body, their voices. The screaming was so loud that his band used to joke that they had to watch Elvis's ass just to keep time with the music.

He described a steady stream of girls coming out of Elvis's room 'in tears or hysterical that he didn't love them'. He'd try to reassure them as he ushered them out. I'd say, "No, that's not true. He'll call you again." Of course, he almost never did. But with some of the younger ones, he'd be like the tooth fairy, slipping hundred-dollar bills in their schoolbooks.

[O título é Swoon ou Buffoon?]

'It is a frightening thing for a man to watch his women debase themselves,' said the Vancouver Sun.'If any daughter of mine broke out of the woodshed tonight to see Elvis Presley(.),I'd kick her teeth in'.(.)'We might suggest a gift for these fourteen thousand Miami girls who, as if it were a fetish, are vocally and mentally genuflecting to Elvis Presley:A SOLID SLAP ACROSS THE MOUTH.'

[Adorável.]

Frankie's publicist(.)branded him Frank Swoonatra & announced that more than 1,000 Frank Sinatra fan clubs with names like the Moonlit Sinatra Club, the Slaves of Sinatra, the Flatbush Girls Who Would Lay Down Their Lives for Frank Sinatra & the Frank Sinatra Mahjong Club were now springing up across the country.

Frank [Sinatra] was twenty-three that summer but looked younger. At 5ft 7.5in., his slight figure and baby-blue eyes gave him a boyishness and frailty that was as disarming as it was strangely attractive, especially to women. A year earlier, he'd been arrested on a charge of seduction (sleeping with a woman under the false promise of marriage).

30,000 fans flooded the streets outside Campbell's Funeral Home on Madison Avenue where [Rudolph] Valentino's body was lying in state.(.)Windows were smashed, a car overturned and at least a hundred people, many of them women and children, were injured (.) By the end of the day, a makeshift emergency room had to be erected in the reception of the funeral home. The scene was a war zone.

the most famous theatre riot of the 19th century, the Astor Place Riot of 1849,began as a dispute between die-hard Edwin Forrest fans, the infamous Bowery B'hoys, and fans of British actor-on-tour William Charles Macready over which actor was better at being Macbeth. By the end of the night, 22 people had been killed, 141 injured (including 50 policemen) and the identity of the best Macbeth was still open for debate.

The doctor's rambling discourse on 'magnetism, galvanism, electricity, contagion...hysterical epilepsy, and the phenomenon of titillation', was more sexual innuendo than medical diagnosis. With references to aphrodisiacs and ancient women's fertility rites, the doctor was basically saying what everyone already knew but couldn't quite say out loud: Liszt was sexy as hell, and everyone was feeling it.

"The increase of novels', said a 1792 pamphlet entitled The Evils of Prostitution and Adultery, 'will help to account for the increase of prostitution and for the numerous adulteries and elopements that we hear of in the different parts of the kingdom.'