In news that anyone above the age of 19 might not have been privy to, famous YouTube vlogger Bethany Mota flew here to Manila last week for the YouTube FanFest, along with Kurt Hugo Schneider, AJ Rafael, Macy Kate, Joe Sugg, Caspar Lee, and Lloyd Cafe Cadena.
To be honest, when I received the exclusive invite to do a one-on-one with her, I wasn’t interested because I had never heard of her, and her market was a little young for the readers of Preen. I confirmed for the interview just the day before, and on the morning of, I nearly decided to skip it because of a sore throat.
When I finally made it, nothing could have prepared me for the hysterics that awaited me at Newport Mall, where a meet-and-greet with Bethany would take place before the interview. A long line of girls aged nine to 19 snaked in front of a stage—some of them had been there since 5 a.m.
I had read about fangirls before—usually in reference to Brit boy band One Direction—but I had never encountered them in real life.
When Bethany finally steps out, the audience is transported. She wears a blue button-down, tied at the waist, and a pair of black leggings as pants, showing off an ample bottom. She is joined by a tall, muscular Singaporean host who has his work cut out for him just trying to get his audience to listen. When she holds the mic to speak, it doesn’t matter what she says. Any sound she makes is drowned out by the sound of primal screams. Every girl there is beside herself, heaving with sobs, desperately crying out, “Bethany!” in unison, hoping their idol might cast her gaze in their direction, wave, acknowledge that she knew they existed.
One looked like she was about to collapse, gripping the set of a photo wall so tightly, as if she knew she would faceplant without it. Her cheeks glistened with tears as she hyperventilated and let out huge, heaving belly sobs. She cried so hard, she barely move.
Seeing the raw, uninhibited emotion those girls exhibited during the meet-and-greet with Bethany, my initial reaction was to cast myself as calm, collected. While the girls around me collectively lost their shit, I, the only person who would get to exchange a 15-minute conversation with Bethany that day, didn’t give one.
Fangirl, interrupted
Part of the reason I was reluctant to interview Bethany was that I wouldn’t get to ask any questions of my own. Before the one-on-one was set up, a list of questions had already been pre-approved by her team in L.A. I attempted to send a list of my own, about eight questions for Bethany, and 10 for her father Tony, who quit his job as an electrical engineer to manage his daughter’s career full-time. A week later, there was still no response from either, and her agent from L.A. still hadn’t approved any of the photos taken at the meet-and-greet.
I worried about what kind of insight I would get by asking questions like, “What song do you like to sing in the shower?” or “What’s your makeup guilty pleasure?” I tried to put myself in the shoes of a fan and wondered if I would still be excited to know the answers to these questions, given that Bethany has shared so much about her life over the course of six years as a YouTube phenomenon.
Having achieved great success at just 19, she would have been very interesting to profile. She started her YouTube channel at 13 as an escape from being bullied at school. She was one of the medium’s early “haulers”—going shopping at the mall, and showing of her haul to her viewers. To date, she’s been on the cover of magazines like Seventeen and Fast Company, and profiled by Teen Vogue, Business Insider, and the The Fader. She has over seven million subscribers to her channel (compare that to Lady Gaga’s paltry 715,843 subscribers), and more followers on Instagram than Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire, Glamour, and Cosmopolitan combined—a statistic that’s been repeated many times by different publications.
More recently, she’s broken into the mainstream by designing her own line of apparel and home furnishings for tween retailer Aeropostale, and even finished in fourth place last year in Dancing with the Stars. She’s interviewed President Obama and has a dance track that rose to number 3 on the iTunes charts on the week of its release.
In person, she is polite and reserved, but it was clear that she more comfortable with making eye contact with the camera. During the interview, her answers were measured—rehearsed, even—but above it all, her on-cam personality shone through: light, bubbly, incredibly enthusiastic and friendly. Up close, she could pass for a Kylie Jenner doppelgänger, minus the super-sized lips. Both are biracial beauties (Kylie is half-Armenian, while Bethany is half-Mexican and half-Portugese), sporting long, flowing hair, doe eyes, caramel skin, strong jaws, and perfectly white—almost translucent—teeth.
I had the opportunity to interview Kylie myself a few years back, and the experience was almost the same, except Kylie had a bigger team surrounding her, and she seemed either bored or jet lagged. While I did get to ask my own questions, they also had to be pre-approved, and a few of them had been struck from the list. As we spoke, a team of publicists stood on the side, ready to interrupt should I decide to go rogue. When I asked Kylie about the YA novel she wrote with her sister Kendall, she shot her agent a look—a request for clearance—before giving a response I had read in a previous interview she gave.
First things first, is she the realest?
Before the interview, I got to chat with Jasper Donat, the CEO of Branded and one of the producers of the YouTube FanFest. Their visit to the Philippines, he revealed was a last-minute decision after the hashtag #BringYouTubersToManila trended at number one worldwide. They had four weeks to organize the event, and tickets sold-out in just four minutes. Over three thousand fans showed up to the meet-and-greet at the Marriott Manila.
“I think what’s amazing to us every time we see it is the relationship between the YouTuber and the fans. It’s much more like a YouTuber and their friend. Bethany today met eight hundred friends and every person [she] met today came away knowing that Bethany was their best friend and feeling like they had just met their best friend,” he tells me.
I found it odd that he put it in that way, but it also made sense. How many girls become best friends from the moment they meet? It just so happens that about seven million girls in this world share Bethany as theirs. I could go down a rabbit hole of thought about how the Internet has created this pervasive sense of loneliness and isolation that teenagers form bonds with someone they only know through a screen. But I also know what it’s like to be a lonely child growing up, and I’m almost certain that if YouTube existed back then, I might have instantly been drawn to Bethany, relating to her tale of rising above mean girls at school, reveling in cheap finds from the mall.
“I mean, Bethany is not One Direction, but you got this beautiful mania for people who vlog about lifestyle and comedy and hair and makeup and it’s the whole new Hollywood. Kids are doing it because they can interact with these stars and if they can’t interact with a star, they’ll go find another one,” Jasper continues.
YouTube is a democratic path to stardom in the sense that viewers decide who gets to be famous. “There’s no secret sauce. There’s no ingredient. What I’ve seen and what I’ve been listening to them saying is it’s about being regular and about being constant, true to yourself, and again being authentic,” Jasper explains.
Signing out, for now
Before we begin the on-cam interview, I am told by her handler that Bethany only has 15 minutes. We go through the all the questions quite quickly as Bethany barely needs a second take for her answers. We finish with seven minutes left to spare.
Before she leaves, Jasper records a video of Bethany giving a message to his nine-year-old daughter on his iPhone. (It’ll buy him two more weeks of “cool,” he says.) Before she leaves, Tasha Santos, who handles social media marketing for Benefit Cosmetics, which sponsored Bethany’s solo meet-and-greet, presents her with a few gifts from the company. As she takes stock of loot, which would later be sent up to her father’s room, she loosens up a bit.
We find out that she’s headed back home to LA later that night and that she needs she still needs to pack. In the two minutes that they chat about makeup, I find out more about Bethany than in the eight minutes I spent interviewing her earlier. I learn that she’s finally moving out of her parents’ house in North California to a posh apartment in Hollywood. In truth, she doesn’t really want to move there (“I don’t like the area at all”), but it’s one of the few buildings that offers 24-hour security and valet. She talks a little more about her plans for the interiors, and about eventually wanting to buy a house.
I catch a glimpse of Bethany’s real personality while she speaks candidly, except I still can’t relate to her. Buying my own property and being concerned about 24-hour security is a plane of reality I can’t fathom on a personal level. And before I can even contemplate my own life choices, she has to leave.
When I go home to process the entire experience, I still can’t claim to understand just what makes Bethany so special in a sea of other YouTube personalities, but I do know why girls all over the world fawn over her.
At a time when fangirls have never been mocked more, when writer Sandra Song has to write a piece entitled “In Defense of Fangirls,” for Pitchfork, having someone like Bethany who is willing to take 15 minutes of her her day answering questions about makeup, who can stand onstage, greet, and take a photo with 40 girls an hour, and will spend her downtime responding to comments on YouTube page, is comforting. Teenage girls feel validated when they talk to Bethany about the things that interest them and she answers right back. They feel understood and worthy of someone’s time.
And looking back, that’s something my 13-year-old self would have responded to.
Art by Dorothy Guya
