GRAPHIC: Banele Makhanya
THE term ‘stan’ was popularised by everyone’s favourite caucasian rapper, Eminem.
The famous rapper’s 2000 hit, ‘Stan’ follows the journey of an obsessed Eminem fan who constantly writes his favourite rapper letters. The overzealous and obsessed fan, who’s name is Stan – isolates his family and vigorously follows his idol to dangerous extremes.
Watch the video to get the full idea, Stan the fan is really creepy.
The word, ‘Stan’ was listed in the Oxford dictionary two years ago and is listed as both a noun and a verb. In a sentence, as a noun, this is how it’s used: “I’m a Rihanna stan.” As a verb, it basically means being incredibly obsessed with a particular celebrity, so it’s; “I stan Rihanna,” or “I stan for Rihanna.”
So now that you have a clear idea of what the word means and it’s origin, let’s get to the unpacking!
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On social media, Stan culture thrives on Twitter. On this platform, you get a lot of communities and Stan Twitter is arguably the loudest of them all.
Stan Twitter is the epitome of toxic celebrity worship. You dare make a comment or criticize a celebrity with a cult following like Pop culture icon, Beyoncè Knowles and her Beyhive (The name of her weird fan base) and you’ll be in for some serious cyber-bullying.
Just ask Pearl Thusi and Sarah Langa. These two local celebrities had different opinions about Queen Bey and the hive rounded up like a group of killer bees to attack these public personalities.
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Sarah Langa was attacked recently when she said, Ayanda Thabethe is prettier than Beyoncè.
Local Twitter users were calling her to be dragged (criticised) by the American Twitter public and other bullies called her a gold-digger for marrying an older man and all kinds of horrible things.
Sarah later responded to the abuse by tweeting: “Thank you to everyone that responded and took part of my academic research. So blessed to have such a large sample size. Here’s to a healthy and growing knowledge economy.”
Whether or not Sarah was using the Beyhive as research or trying to save face and take the high road, no one deserves that level of abuse. Especially over an opinion. My biggest problem with Stan culture is the undying and almost religious worship over a human being who probably doesn’t think about you.
As absurd as it is, we all love and admire celebrities and athletes etc, but I don’t ever see myself asking another human being to kill themselves because their opinion of my favourite celebrity is different to mine.
This community always regards themselves as allies of mental illness and mental heath but they’re the first to attack like vultures when someone disagrees with them about their ‘god’. It’s weird to me. We can all love anything that has to do with pop culture, without being abusive and toxic about it.
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