The Fetishisation of Male Celebrities in the Age of Online Fangirling

According to TikTok, being a teenage girl in 2026 means posting edits of older, mediocre white men and turning niche photos of them into a meme. Social media has allowed fangirls to gain access to the more private elements of people’s lives, and whilst Beatlemania didn’t restrict anyone from doing this back in the ’60s, the internet has for sure normalised the act of extreme fangirling. Rather than camping outside band members’ hotel rooms in the hopes of getting an autograph, we’ve reached new heights of parasocial behaviour, that being, through turning our favourite celebrities into a meme.

The infantilisation of male celebrities has become an integral part of fangirl culture over the years. Through TikTok edits, Tumblr ‘imagine’ posts, and the phenomenon of Korean aegyo, it’s easy to view your favourite boy band members through a purified lens. With media training becoming more mandatory than ever, celebrities are under higher pressure to conform to fans’ expectations and not say anything which might get them cancelled. Fans yearn for chalant interactions with interviewers — but most importantly, they want humour.

If you have spent any time on social media this week, the name Skyler Gisondo should ring a bell, and if you don’t affiliate the name with trampoline tricks or Nerf guns, something’s up. Upon the release of A24’s new thriller ‘Primetime’, in which he stars alongside Robert Pattinson, Gisondo has gained an unlikely following of young girls, taken in by this one meme which has been circulating through social media. It’s a close-up of the actor on a red carpet, reposted with a different caption each time, never failing to make an accurate assumption about his character. Examples include “the guy you’d have a crush on for a week at the Disney cruise”, “he would buy a Guinness World Records book at the book fair”, or my personal favourite, “the kid you make at school before you realise that girls and boys are different”.

Despite a couple of decades of big-budget projects, all it took was one meme for Skyler Gisondo to gain a devoted following. Now, despite the silly and almost patronising nature of these memes, he’s beginning to reach White Boy of the Month status. This is where we see edits with hazy filters, clips of said celebrity doing basically anything which the fans may find attractive, usually accompanied by a mildly inappropriate pop song, such as ‘Bed Chem’ by Sabrina Carpenter. He’s the newest ‘hear me out’, alongside Euphoria’s Austin Abrams, who featured alongside Gisondo in a now-viral episode of the A24 podcast. But why has it taken one viral photo for people to give Gisondo his flowers?

This isn’t a rare occurrence — Willem Dafoe, Josh Hutcherson, and Elijah Wood are just a few examples of celebrities who have become victims of infantilisation through memes. It’s ironic because these celebrities are often not on social media, so their obliviousness to these memes only amuses their fanbase more. By turning a reserved personality into a viral meme, it builds a level of idealisation around that person. People love to create a morally pure version of their favourite celebrities in their heads, and memefying them is certainly one way to do it. It almost removes any sense of humanity from them and ultimately infantilises them.

This rarely happens with female celebrities. I believe it’s because the memes go way beyond humour, and it’s more a way of coddling that person without appearing as though you have a parasocial relationship with them. Young girls have viewed ‘silly’ guys through rose-tinted glasses for as long as fangirl culture has thrived through social media. Think Role Model or Niko B, with their sarcastic Instagram stories, or Joe Jonas, who has gained an entirely new fanbase of young girls just by reposting relatable videos on TikTok. When they make it look as though they don’t take themselves too seriously, it’s actually an intentionally clever way of establishing a brand. Young girls are the biggest consumers, so why wouldn’t they want us on their side?

I don’t think that making a meme of a male celebrity is creepy, but when these photos take on a new lease of life online, it’s concerning how much people use this as a way to ‘babygirlify’ these grown men. Taking rogue images from the deep depths of the internet and circulating them is essentially dramatising a candid moment, or something which had no intention of providing entertainment. It proves just how desperate people are for content to consume when it’s a man they find endearing. I’m not saying that the Willem Dafoe memes appeared due to a growing number of young girls falling in love with him, but I find it interesting how fangirls are so charmed by bizarre images or videos of male celebrities. Are these men seen for their talent, or for their charm? Can you even call it charm when all context is removed from the original content?

When One Direction first gained popularity following their formation on The X Factor, young girls would act paternally towards the boys, excusing any wrongdoings and treating them like they were innocent young boys. I think this was the first example we have of the parasocial nature of fangirl culture within social media, and how male celebrities had become an object of infantilisation. Older heartthrobs such as James Dean, George Michael or Tom Cruise were admired for the fact that they were mature and generationally talented, not for their natural moments of childishness. I think having more access to these stars and being able to see more of their personalities has made people take that humanisation and objectify them. Candid moments are being used for our own amusement, and because we are able to see more of people’s personalities on social media, we forget that they aren’t a product. It’s almost commodifying them in a sense because we consume so much of their content as a result of trying to reveal their personalities.

Celebrities are real people, and the desire to uncover their playfulness by resurfacing old interview clips has caused people to forget that these men are, in fact, grown. I believe fangirl culture is what keeps the world spinning, but it’s alarming to see these men receive different treatment from female celebrities because we’re giving them the benefit of the doubt. Why are we searching for ways to sanctify them? To elaborate on my earlier point about ‘babygirlifying’ these men, I think it’s a way of protecting them from outside criticism. But women don’t get to experience that. Everything women say is taken literally, but even blunt men such as Hugh Grant are misinterpreted by occasional moments of cheeriness — in his case, clips of him dancing in Paddington 2.

I think the epidemic of ‘he’s so babygirl’ culture just feels like propaganda for average-looking men. Women are so traumatised by Hinge and dating in the digital age that finding a genuine man feels like an impossible task. I’m not surprised that young girls are so desperate to seek humour in the men they admire, because it allows them to be viewed through a tainted lens. Cancel culture is so rife that sometimes you just want to fangirl without the fear of controversy. But treating a 45-year-old Elijah Wood like he’s just a baby isn’t the way forward.