sometimes called "teenyboppers", and their behaviour was scorned by many commentators. By 1965, their fanbase included listeners who traditionally shunned youth-driven pop culture, which helped bridge divisions between folk and rock enthusiasts. During the 1960s, Beatlemania was the subject of analysis by psychologists and sociologists; a 1997 study recognised the phenomenon as an early demonstration of proto-feminist girl power. The receptions of subsequent pop acts – particularly boy bands – have drawn comparisons to Beatlemania, although none have replicated the breadth and depth of the Beatles' fandom nor its cultural impact. Interpretations and precursors In the description of author and musician Bob Stanley, the band's domestic breakthrough represented a "final liberation" for the nation's teenagers and, by coinciding with the end of National Service, the group "effectively signaled the end of World War II in Britain". During the 1840s, fans of Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt showed a level of fanaticism similar to that of the Beatles. Poet Heinrich Heine coined "Lisztomania" to describe this. Once it became an international phenomenon in 1964, Beatlemania surpassed in intensity and reach any previous examples of fan worship, including those afforded to Rudy Vallée, Frank Sinatra, and Elvis Presley. One factor in this development may have been the post–World War II baby boom, which gave the Beatles a larger audience of young fans than Sinatra and Presley had a decade earlier. Psychologists during the 1960s were especially drawn to the significance of the long hair preferred by the Beatles and the bands that emerged soon after their breakthrough. Academics proposed that the long hair signalled androgyny and thus presented a less threatening version of male sexuality to teenage girls, as well as allowing male fans to view the group in a sexual regard that they normally reserved for young females. Other concerns related to the Beatles' own sexuality; whether the haircuts were a projection of latent homosexuality or confident heterosexuality. In their 1986 book Re-making Love: The Feminization of Sex, authors Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs argued that the band's presentable suits meant that they seemed less "sleazy" than Presley to middle-class whites. In February 1964, Paul Johnson wrote an article in the New Statesman which stated that the mania was a modern incarnation of female hysteria and that the wild fans at the Beatles' concerts were "the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the failures". The