“And why did girls love [The Beatles] so much? Because the Beatles loved girls. The Beatles were saturated in girl culture - they loved black American girl groups; they had dandy outfits and uncomfortable pointy shoes, like girls. They went out of their way to write about girls in their songs - ‘She Loves You’ is the Beatles siding with a girl in love…They grew their hair long - like girls: an act of alliance in a time when femininity was implicitly inferior. All the teasing they got…but they wanted their hair to look like girls hair.
At a time when the difference between genders was never more rigidly enforced, they rebelled into soft, clannish, sly, joyful femininity. Never combatative…their weapons were the weapons of girls: humour, sexiness, slyness, flirty wit…
…the joy of the Beatles…is that rather than becoming men by killing their fathers, they became their dead mothers. John and Paul…married single mothers; wrote songs about dead mothers and their living mother-wives; left the maelstrom of the Beatles to live the lives of wives: buying farms, making bread, raising children. They rioted into their femininity.”
- How To Be Famous by Caitlin Moran (pg. 265)
