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Professional Lust and Girl Crushes
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Who are the women in media other women admire and secretly want to be? Doree Shafrir on worshipping in the workplace and how it fuels female ambition.
As the oldest of three children, I never had a cool older sister to worship. Instead, I looked to camp counselors, Sassy magazine, the dressing room attendants at the Urban Outfitters in Harvard Square, a girl named Sunshine—Sunshine!—who was two grades ahead of me and had perfectly straight long hair and Nike Airs before everyone else, my babysitter who'd been in a car accident and had a glass eye, my other babysitter who told me how many times she and her high-school boyfriend had had sex. ("Over 2,000," she told me confidently. I was 7.)
Inherent in all ladycrushes is the sense that the crushee’s life is one that is not too many degrees removed from the crusher.
But as we grow older, finding women to look up to becomes, like everything else, a trickier minefield to navigate. As a journalist in New York City, I've found that media is an especially fraught industry for these kinds of relationships. Looking for a formal "mentor" seems forced; worshiping someone from afar, creepy; deciding one of your friends or co-workers is really cool and doing everything she does, single white female-y. And frenemies and backstabbers lurk behind every door. The intern you thought was interested in learning the ropes from you is actually just interested in taking your job.
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Or is she? In fact, the ladycrush—even among the notoriously backstabby New York set—is alive and well. (Or maybe the women I know who work in media just happen to be really, really well adjusted.) I recently developed one on the Vogue editor Sally Singer, who lives with her husband, Netherland author Joseph O'Neill, in the Chelsea Hotel with their three sons. Singer not only radiates cool, but as one acquaintance of mine, a 29-year-old reporter, put it, "She works at a place like Vogue, which is easy to brush off, but then you talk to her and realize she's a genius. Plus, her pieces in the magazine are always the best ones. And she never seems like she took a long time to get ready or is overly concerned with how she looks."
"It's pretty much any woman who is funny and smart and talented and successful and pretty," said New York attorney Jasmine Moy, 28. "Crushes are the things you get if you're not the 'I'm jealous, therefore I hate them' kind of person."
"It's not jealousy," said a 33-year-old Brooklyn woman who works in publishing, and who named the Farrar, Straus & Giroux editor Sarah Crichton as her ladycrush. "Partly I'm not jealous of her because she's a generation ahead of me, so I don't think of her as a peer in that way—she's someone to admire, not to view as a threat."
Recently, Singer posed for a photo portfolio on Todd Selby's photography Web site The Selby. There she was, posing barefoot in a turquoise, vintage-looking dress in the doorway of her apartment; there were the skateboards belonging to her sons; there was her shoe collection. Even her tea kettle, perched as it was on her old gas stove, seemed alluring.
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Doree Shafrir has contributed to The New York Observer, The New Yorker, Slate, and The Awl, and is the co-author of Love, Mom. She is a former editor at Gawker. Her website is www.doreeshafrir.com.
"She works at a place like Vogue, which is easy to brush off, but then you talk to her and realize she's a genius. ..."
Genius is a word that is thrown around a lot. It is not like she is attempting to get tritium off of the moon or something..
And on it goes dabbling into a couple media types, but mostly it's an all about me, me, me article. Don't media people know people outside of media?
"... attempting to get tritium off of the moon ..." Genni2002, you're no dummie yourself. Did some radiation analysis of the creation of tritium for NASA. Most people would have no clue what you're talking about.
ugh...another vapid piece on Women_in_Media_Jobs. As if 9/10 of the female population are in these positions or want to be. I can't think of a more superficial, vulgar, industry if I tried. How about women in health care, law, or business? "Girl Crushes"..."Frenemies"?? ACK! Nooooooooooooo! 7th Grade patois has taken over enough. There's nothing wrong with asking a woman or a man at work if he/she'd show you the ropes and be a mentor -- try it sometime. If the women you work with are Queen Bee's who won't give you the time of day, screw them and go elsewhere when you can. Strive to be the person who lifts the junior members up instead of pissing and clawing to maintain position.
I will never understand women. I'm content & fortunate to simply cherish women. BTW, if there is a god, she is black.
We were all, male and female created in the image of God.
@Larry I'm a woman and I don't understand us either.
I'm very thankful I get to date men, you guys are really pretty simple.
I don't think this piece is vapid at all, but rather has heart and is particularly relevant to a generation of women today. All too often women are portrayed as threatened by other women. I have found though, that many times women can be your best allies in business because they understand the struggle women go through on the way to success. I am not saying that men don't struggle, but women, inherently are different from men, and therefore so are our experiences. Given those differences, I believe the author is trying to say that younger women often admire (even hero worship) women who have "made it" using her own profession, the media, as a way of conveying that point. Our generation is different from our mother's generation where they may not have had these strong figures to look toward for inspiration, or even as a reference point, a how-to manual, if you will.
Futhermore, there is nothing wrong with a calling a woman at Vogue a "genius." I suspect that the reason the person used the word was to hold its reference in the highest regard--to be poignant, to catch your attention (it did, btw).
My girl crush is Katherine Graham. I think someone once called her a "great dame." To me it's not just about what she accomplished, but rather HOW she accomplished it--her character and her grace.
It's a breath of fresh air: a piece about women admiring other women.
@aacb27: agree this a sweet article -- it demonstrates true admiration and I'd love to see more of that from women about other women. There are so many out there worthy of admiration and yet we rarely get to see articles that focus on non-celebrities (although in their own orbit, these women are well known).
So often the admiration is saved for obits.
Btw, I worked with a man who helped write Katherine Graham's autobiography and he promised she was amazing in real life too. He was left after the job with an intense crush on a woman who was his gram's age.
Thank you for this piece. It was fun to read and quite insightful. All of us have encountered backstabbing and jealousy before but, I for one, find many more supportive people out there than catty climbers. I suspect our tendency toward "girl crushes" (or "bromances") comes from the hope we can garner from seeing that someone you relate to has attained many of your dreams, so you can do it too. I also think that it can be a lonely world, especially in a big city like NYC, and identifying with someone you admire can ease that lonliness.
"but then you talk to her and realize she's a genius. ..." A genius? I mean, what the ....?
The dreaded patriarchy (ie Brokaw's "Greatest Generation", you know, the guys that brought you Vietnam and 58,000 dead young American men) fell asleep in more ways than one in, say, 1963, and this nonsense is another of their legacies.
Still, that word "genius" has me thinking. Maybe, I'll watch Girl Interrupted tonight, to get in touch with the feminine side of that concept.
My mother-in-law is worthy of admiration. She raised my husband who is one of the kindest, sweetest people in the world.
Great story -- funny we have to use the word crush, coz it doesn't sound so much like a love interest as professional interest. We'd like to be them--which is different from when you're attracted to someone in a lovin' way, right?
Thank you.
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