ON Pleasure
By: Lauren R. O'Connor
Tags: Army, Bts Army, Bts, Kpop, Personal Essay

There is a difference between contentment and joy. This difference is simultaneously subtle enough to let days or years pass by in the former with little complaint, and yet vast enough to fundamentally alter your life when you realize what the latter feels like. I recognize that I am far from alone in experiencing uninhibited joy upon getting into BTS, but I did not realize until that happened that I had been carefully and intentionally denying myself pleasure for decades.

When I was eight years old, I saw the movie Back to the Future for the first time, and I fell in love. All I wanted to think and talk about was Back to the Future. I dreamt about Back to the Future at night. I rode my bike down the steepest hill in my neighborhood and pretended I was flying, approaching 88 mph, about to zap myself back in time. I was ecstatic.

And then my mother told me to stop talking about Back to the Future. “Other people are going to think it’s weird,” she said.

I learned three things from this interaction: one, it is bad to be really interested in things; two, if I was really interested in something, I should therefore hide it; and three, my mother cared more about me being normal than about me being happy.

This essay isn’t therapy, so I will not be unpacking that third lesson here, but I want to address the first two and how BTS freed me to find pleasure and actually let myself experience it for the sole reason that it feels good.

After the Back to the Future incident, I worked hard to essentially “be chill.” I am not a chill person by nature. My nature is to be enthusiastic about a lot of popular culture, evangelistic about that which I love most. But even as I discovered things like Lord of the Rings, superhero comics, and Harry Potter, creations that did indeed inspire massive fan activity, I would always stop myself short of becoming infatuated. One summer I accidentally fell hard for this goofy Canadian monster-of-the-week show called “Big Wolf on Campus” and even wrote some fan fiction about it — but I felt immense guilt and shame, and I always deleted everything I had written before closing the Microsoft Word document on my family’s desktop computer.

Although I think my mother was just trying to protect me from the harsher elements of childhood and adolescence, I had internalized the notion that if I got really into something, I would eventually be ostracized, alone, unlovable. Who would want to be with someone who couldn’t keep a lid on it? Pleasure and joy became linked with shame in my mind. I thought that if I really loved something, then I should also be ashamed of it, because experiencing that kind of all-encompassing joy is “weird.”

So I defied my nature, policed my personality. As I grew into myself a bit more, I realized that I had pruned the part of me that could embrace art with passion almost to the point of atrophy. I knew by young adulthood that there was, in fact, nothing all that weird about being really into any pop culture artifact. I knew about cosplay and cons, and I knew and appreciated people who participated in fan culture. I met and married my spouse, so I also knew that I was in fact not unlovable.

Yet I had resisted revealing all of myself to everyone, including me, for so long that I had a hard time determining if the carefully crafted persona I put on had actually just become me. Was that person who could love a movie or book so much they dreamt about it every night even still alive in me? Did I still have the capacity for that kind of joy? I thought not.

I first heard of BTS sometime in 2017, but I filed it away under “look into at some point.” (It’s barely hyperbole to say this delay is one of the biggest regrets of my life.) I turned 30 that year; two years later I finished my PhD in American Culture Studies (an extremely clever cover for spending lots of time with pop culture artifacts I really like, if I do say so myself — no shame in “research,” right?). Shortly thereafter, the pandemic hit.

It wasn’t until November of 2020 that I finally decided to check out BTS. I’d heard “Dynamite” on the radio and enjoyed it, but I also moved over the summer, took on a new online teaching job, and grew deeply depressed about the pandemic. Anything unfamiliar felt like a trial. At the tail end of September I restarted therapy after a while off, and I slowly got the hang of my new gig. As I was grading a couple days after Thanksgiving, I decided to give BTS a real listen. Although BE had just been released, I wanted something longer, so I put on Map of the Soul: 7.

By the fourth track, I felt myself once again on that precipice of uninhibited adoration — but instead of stepping back, I made a remarkably conscious decision to lean into it. As “Black Swan” played, I literally threw my hands up and surrendered any pretense of actually getting work done that day. I felt my heart beating in my throat during “ON,” cried happy tears during “Moon,” and told my spouse, “Look, you do not have to take this journey with me, but I am going to do it. I am going to get really into BTS. I am going to join ARMY. It’s already done.” Wonderful partner that he is, he said “Let’s do it — what do you want to start with?” I played MOTS:7 again while we were cooking; the next day we both finished up our work early, cracked a few beers, and started watching performances and videos.

It’s not at all hyperbole to say that I had never been as happy in my life as I was after discovering BTS. I thought my capacity for joy was shrunken, starved into smallness, left to rot while I worked to fit others’ expectations of me; I was wrong. BTS breathed new life into this part of myself, and in so doing caused me to reconsider my entire approach to pleasure.

Consuming BTS content is a pleasurable experience for me. For most of my life, I would have limited myself in seeking it out. I would have smothered my desire with thoughts like “It’s not productive,” or “don’t get obsessed.” I would have enjoyed it, but only to some arbitrary extent I deemed societally “appropriate.” Knowing I had done this many times before in my life, I actively chose not to. I indulged in the pleasurable sensation of watching and listening to BTS. I pursued the feeling of joy their content brought me. Best of all, I found affirmation for these choices within BTS’s music, when they told me to be myself and love myself, that imperfection is beautiful, that there is a whole galaxy worth exploring inside me, that regular people could, collectively, save each other.

I also found affirmation for these choices in ARMY. I’m a pop culture scholar, so I had known about ARMY for a while. They (now “we”) are a big deal in fandom studies, and rightfully so. The day after my first video binge, I googled “How to join ARMY” — and got lots of links about military recruitment. But I also learned about VLive and Weverse and finally caved and got on Twitter (I’d been resisting for, again, the completely arbitrary reason that it would be “bad” for me). Within weeks, I had started chatting with people in my hometown, across the country, and around the globe about loving BTS. I joined up with other academic ARMYs and got excited about doing research again for the first time in months. I started writing essays like this, relatively creative works about myself and my experiences, something I had always wanted to do but never knew how to start.

The idea that seeking pleasure simply because it is pleasurable now seems like such a trivial and painfully obvious notion; how could I have lived for so long without understanding this? I think about my mother, encouraging me to tone myself down. I think about her mother, who likely did the same to her. I think about all the ways in which most of our popular culture rewards sameness, conformity, obedience to the status quo. Then I think about the ways in which BTS challenges all of that with their music, their empathetic love for each other, their resistance to telling us that it will all be ok in favor of telling us the truth, and then helping us work through our feelings instead of flattening them.

Slowly, with Bangtan as my guides, I am learning to replace shame and guilt with joy and gratitude. I am allowing myself to seek pleasure for the sake of pleasure. I am experiencing euphoria; strangely, or perhaps not, it feels a lot like flying downhill on a bike.