In this day and age people party a lot. Every weekend is a blur of shows, dance floors, grimy green rooms, afterparties, and sunrise cab rides. However contrary to popular belief, backstage at your average event venue isn’t very glamorous. It’s usually tired, sweaty artists pounding whiskey and catching up with their friends. There’s some sketchy food left over and a lot of gossiping. The talent is usually charming, attractive, in possession of extremely sexy accents and right by their side are the groupies. The proud groupies of yesteryear have been replaced by hockey, football, and basketball WAGs: women who are admired for looking glamorous and pretty in the bleachers as opposed to side of stage, but there still exists plenty of modern versions of a groupie blueprint.

“Groupies” are different from “fan girls”. Fan girls buy merchandise, scream when they see the artist, and want an autograph. A groupie just wants “the D”, and the bragging rights. The word “groupie,” once a pejorative—implying, at its worst, a kind of mindless, sycophantic allegiance to famous men but in general “one who sleeps with the famous simply because they are famous” and despite what Almost Famous would have you think, being a groupie isn’t cool.

DJS

Theres a rumor that all the big international DJs have a shared Google Doc of girls in every city not to sleep with. A groupie list, essentially. Is this gross and horrible? Yes. Can you really blame them? No. Nobody wants to sleep with someone and realize afterward that it wasn’t because you really hit it off, it was so she could add you to a list and brag about it at brunch. Touring, if you aren’t in a band or a big enough star to have a retinue, is an intensely lonely experience. So these guys try to minimize the emotional damage that might result from sleeping with a girl and then realizing she didn’t actually like you.

For the women dating or married to a DJ, the relationship can be tricky. For whatever reason, DJs are just so damn sexy in the eyes of female clubbers and looks have nothing to do with it. He is the DJ and therefore noticeable. Night after night, all of those women in their skimpy outfits will lurk around the DJ and try to secretly slip him their phone numbers. One ex girlfriend of a DJ said that hordes of his “old friends” would touch him, hug him and still seem shocked at the fact that he is in a relationship. Enduring all of this disrespectful behavior, the significant other will have to try to keep her mouth shut because being friendly to people is part of his job.

A Reddit insider interview by Elite Daily said of DJ Markus Shulz :

“Yes his wife actually USED to travel with him to his gigs – these days not so much anymore since they’ve been having marital problems lately. Heather (his wife) is actually the one who’s busy running Schulz Music Group and a majority of the Coldharbour Label so while he’s traveling for gigs, she’s back home in Miami doing all that. He’s a sexual beast alright! Him and Heather have an open marriage – so basically he’s allowed to mess around while she’s away and vice versa. It clearly works for them since they’ve been together for almost 25 years now.”

WRESTLERS

In the indy and pro-wrestling world, the insider term for groupies “Ring Rats” has been used for years to reference women that sleep with the wrestlers. These women attend wrestling events, sometimes skipping the show entirely and waiting in allies and parking lots of venues to go in for the kill. Though the term “rat”, seems harsh because of the nasty, low class, connotation, the knowledge that it is what they are labeled by the very men they’re servicing does nothing to deter them. They don’t care if the men are married, in a relationship, want to go two or more at a time, or are on their knees behind a dumpster in broad daylight. In the eyes of a rat; she’s just a wrestler groupie, since she isn’t paid for sex and follow wrestlers instead of bands.

In reality a ring rat is substandard to a regular groupie, especially if it’s a small independent promotion because the man using her is often just a regular guy with a regular job by day, paying more to perform than he receives and only whips out the tights and baby oil at night. The wrestlers gossip laugh at these types of encounters, and have little to no respect for these women. The “rats” are extremely jealous of the female wrestlers, calling them “diva rats” (as in WWE divas).

One rat said of the women wrestlers:

“There are a few that can be nastier than the slutty rats. It’s annoying really and pathetic. We are talking about women who travel and work every day with these guys. If they aren’t dating you already; they aren’t interested.”

BANDS

In the 60s and 70s, rock and roll music was at an all time high. Many groupies were brought along for the ride, they enjoyed all the perks of the lavish, free wheeling lifestyle that musicians led. Lodging at fancy hotels, free alcohol, drugs, attending concerts, going on the road, meals, it was all part of the rock and roll scene and came as second nature to the bands that were constantly touring and enduring life on the road, always going to the next gig to play the show. Some groupies served even  as muses for songs that would be written on tour and recorded for the next album.

Today the fact that so many of the girls are reluctant to admit they are groupies implies that it’s no longer perceived to be the glamorous job option it once was. Following a band around nowadays seems like an unfulfilling thing for a woman to do.  Given the terminology that bands fling around in reference to groupies, such as “pussy passes” (the tickets tour managers hand out to potential groupies loitering around a venue), it’s no wonder some girls want to distance themselves from such degrading behaviour.

Why do these women do it? Power. Women have evolved to be attracted to power as a way to gain protection for themselves and their children. These women can sense the masculine power in men and this is a huge turn-on for them. That’s why some of these men who aren’t particularly rich or handsome still have the women literally chasing them. They know how to bring out this masculine power.

Though sexual expression and freedom is generally healthy, researchers have looked at the links between casual sex and depression, sexual victimisation and sexually transmitted diseases and found that women who have these types of casual flings are more likely to suffer from depression than people in ‘romantic’ relationships. They are also more likely to be victims of sex crimes and to suffer from sexually transmitted diseases. Sex in the context of romantic relationships was not correlated with depression. There are several reasons why hooking up, but not romantic sex, may be associated with poor mental health among women. These include; unfavourable attitudes toward sex outside of committed relationships, risk of acquiring a negative reputation, failure for the hook-up to transition to a romantic relationship , sexually unsatisfying hook-ups, and peer pressure or verbal coercion from partners to go further sexually than they want.

Name-dropping privileges is never a good reason for having sex with people. It’s pretty grim. Of course there people who sleep with musicians, DJs, wrestlers, and athletes because they meet them and have a genuine human connection with them but banging someone just because they’re on stage is, highly questionable.