One Direction - Little Things
Did you know that Harry Styles has four nipples? Did you know that Louis Tomlinson is the oldest member of One Direction, but Liam Payne is the one who’s sort of the dad of the group? Did you know that Zayn Malik once recorded a Youtube cover of Harry’s current ladyfriend Taylor Swift’s You Belong With Me where he changed some of the words, and I quote, “because… er…. girl lyrics”? Did you know those changes included switching out short skirts and t-shirts for Ray Bans and glasses? Did you know that Niall is a real name? Did you know that Harry, at eighteen, is the youngest member, meaning that not a single one of them is actually twelve?
My name is Isabel, and I am very angry at every member of One Direction, all the time.
***
Did you know that if you mix vodka with Tropicana lemonade, you pretty much can’t taste the alcohol at all?
***
I am too old for this. That’s the first thing, or it was. I am almost a quarter of a century old, and they are babies, fresh-faced and (ugh) dimpled and making the boy bands of my own youth look like actual men. I love pop, and I could appreciate the rush of drums exploding into the chorus of What Makes You Beautiful, but I’m also old enough that while I think of myself, still, as a girl, I bristle if someone else decides to call me that. I’d heard the critiques of that song, how it was glorifying low self-esteem — the fact that she doesn’t know she’s beautiful is what makes her beautiful, really? She would be less beautiful if she knew she was beautiful, really? Whatever, One Direction — but I won’t pretend I mustered up much genuine upset about it. Really, when it came down to it, to them as an entity as opposed to purveyors of one catchy song, it was always: I’m too old.
***
(That was before. Now I understand that if you listen to One Direction, and you believe that you understand One Direction, no matter how deeply aggravated about that you are, you know that they would never find you less beautiful. That’s kind of their thing: unconditional dopey love.)
***
Zayn Malik is definitely not twelve. Zayn Malik’s face should come with a surgeon general’s warning and require ID to purchase, because Zayn Malik is a gateway drug into a spiral that leaves your brain feeling like a fried egg, 90s PSA-style. You think: they are all twelve, but that guy is sort of cute; you think, he has very pretty eyes, but that doesn’t mean anything; you see a picture of him smoking, and smoking is not even a thing for you, Jesus, what is happening, why are his wrists the way they are, why do his shoulders even, his tattoos are so stupid, that blonde streak is frankly embarrassing and yet — and yet, no more embarrassing than everything it is doing to you. But you think: okay, it can stop there. He is not twelve, but the rest are, and also the rest don’t have cheekbones like that, and so what if Harry’s bottom lip eternally looks like he’s just finished a cherry lollipop, and so what if Louis’s eyelashes, to borrow a beloved phrase, sparkle like gilded grass, and — is that stubble? Does Louis have stubble? Fuck me with a pair of safety scissors, fuck his flawlessly arched eyebrows to hell and back.
Then you realize you know all of their names now, and splat: salt to taste, your brain is done, sunny side up.
***
Isabel, you say, isn’t this a music website? Why did you pick this song if you are only going to talk about some walking Calvin Klein ad’s hips? I’m getting there, God, have some patience. Or tell yourself this is meta: if I’ve had to suffer through the slings and arrows of falling in obsession with these grinning British doofuses, you have to suffer too. After all, we’re talking about love and hate, right? You want music, fine: I was considering, before all of this, writing about Ani Difranco’s Untouchable Face, which I’m sure many of you will agree belongs in the Songs Of Love And Hate pantheon; its exhausted bitterness still stings me, years out from my last bout with unrequited affection. Has anyone so artfully conveyed what it is to hate someone with every cell in your body for the crime of not loving you the way you could love them, given the chance? Is there a better summation of that brutal internal battle than “fuck you for existing in the first place?” That’s a perfect line.
It’s also my One Direction tag. Does that clarify matters?
***
But okay, the song. They are, nominally, a band, we are here, ostensibly, to discuss a song. I’m dancing around the song because Harry Styles is a literal life-ruiner but also because I am still struggling to process it. My narrative with this song is my 1D Experience writ small: conflicted mystification to incomprehensible fixation. When Little Things was released as a single, a common reaction was, “Way to take the worst part of What Makes You Beautiful and turn it into an entire song”: from one line, tucked into the end of the refrain, fetishizing insecurity, to an entire song wallowing in some poor girl’s self-hate. I’m not here to argue, exactly, with that reading, or to disagree that it makes One Direction seem very gross.
***
(Here’s something else very gross: — you know what, I’ll spare you the details, but when I told my gynecologist about the situation, freshman year, she asked me, point-blank, “Do you have an eating disorder?”
“No,” I said, “I’ve just been really busy, is all.”)
***
I’m not here to argue about One Direction at all. On the one hand, I want to believe that sunshiny moppets who confuse “bouncing” for “dancing” need not bring anyone even the suffering caused by tedious argument about music on the internet; on the other hand, God knows they’ve brought me suffering enough. God knows that if a boyfriend told me I know you still have to squeeze into your jeans, I would fucking lose my shit.
***
The thing is that if you can’t taste the alcohol you can pretend that you’re just drinking, you know, for fun (you can pretend the idea of fun holds any meaning for you right now), not to get drunk, which means you can pretend to be surprised when you find your limbs cold against the kitchen tiles, you crying about your body, its grossness, its existence. You can pretend to be surprised when your ex-boyfriend takes you upstairs and tells you you’re beautiful. You can even pretend that when he kisses you, it’s just to prove it.
(When you kiss him back, though — at that point you kind of have to admit that the jig is up.)
***
The thing is it’s true: I’ve never loved my stomach or my thighs. I didn’t even know we were allowed to cop to hating the dimples in the back at the bottom of our spines — that line really fucked with me, the first time I heard it, because who told you that? Did she say it, or did you read it in the way she bit her lip when she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror on your door, hooking her bra back on after sex? And who gave you the right to broadcast that to the world? That is so hurtful.
And yet. The thing is that I would lose my shit if Harry Styles looked up through his disgustingly glossy curls and said that thing to me, about squeezing into my jeans, but I would also lose my shit if he lied to me and said I didn’t. Because if he lied I could never trust him (you can always trust One Direction, One Direction would never lie to you), because if he lied it would mean I needed not to squeeze into my jeans. Because if he lied he would be admitting that squeezing into my jeans is a problem, it would mean there was something that could make me unacceptable, but if he could see me squeezing into my jeans and not look away, and want to keep looking, maybe I could pretend I was safe. Because nothing he could say could gross me out the way my own body did, constantly, in those days, except, sometimes, with him.
***
Like, remember in ninth grade, the girl who wound up being like a sister, with all the loving and hating that implies, told you when she met you she thought your voice was so annoying, too high, and you scooped up at the end of your sentences, and you said like too much? Like, remember how you cried about that, and how ever since, you’ve never liked the sound of your voice on tape? (Remember how he saved your voicemails, the ones he thought were cute?) Too, like, girly: when I said I was too old for this, that’s part of what I meant.
***
Like, do you know how humiliating it is that I’m getting all this from a ballad? I hate ballads. Fuck you, One Direction.
***
Like, I believe now that they’re not twelve, but I’m still not convinced they are of mankind born; I still sort of suspect they were manifested into corporeal existence by the collective untapped will of a million t(w)eenage girls (and some boys). And, like, because of that, I feel confident in saying One Direction would never think you’re too girly. One Direction thinks however girly you are is the perfect amount of girly, no matter how much that is or isn’t.
***
And fine, you shouldn’t need permission (from a boy, no less) to be girly or not, to speak with the voice you have and exist at peace with the body you are. And permission will never be enough as long as you’re never enough. And if you’ve never craved it nonetheless, I salute you. If you hear you’ll never love yourself half as much as I love you as smug instead of too familiar, I’m happy for you; I wish I could agree.
***
I’m trying to talk about the song, but I can’t untangle it from all these little things: from being so drunk I didn’t notice I was falling until I was on the ground, from soft boy smiles across a bed while I’m putting on my jeans, from the literally cruel crinkles in Louis’s eyes when he smiles, from the way they are, I swear, always touching each other, because this is part of the daydream too — boys who can be vulnerable with more than one person, gentle with people they’re not sleeping with — from being girly meaning too excited, too obsessive, too much, from not knowing, still, if I was lying when I told the doctor no, from Niall’s gravely upsetting tank tops and their song about how they want to give you infinity orgasms, from wanting less to be beautiful or even wanted and more simply to be seen: the whole of me, the little things added up, the pieces I dissected obsessively in mirrors made finally to cohere. It’s too real and the perfect fantasy, those contradictions reinforcing each other, colliding at the precise unbearable intersection of love and self-hate, where it’s all too much and never enough, and I’m so mad about it, and it’s become so important to me.
***
He wasn’t in love with me anymore, but he still loved me more than I did. I wasn’t in love with him, either, but I don’t think I knew it until he told me — until he gave me permission to let go. That was that night: not that he called me beautiful, but that he said I would always be. No matter what. Unconditional.
— Isabel Cole
Isabel previously wrote about Liz Phair for OWOB. Read up on that week in case you’ve missed it so far; it’s one of our best entries.
