“I think it boils down to this key question: do you want to be her? Or be with her?”
BY ELLA MCLEOD, IMAGE BY TONL
The internet is reclaiming the word “girl” and it’s fun. “Girl maths” combines a satirised justification of impulse buying, with a hyper-feminine personification of the misogynistic assumptions about women and economics. “Girl dinner” subverts social expectations that synonomise “woman” with “dinner’s on the table”.
“Girl crush” – a phrase as gauche and dated as many 00s cultural exports – speaks to a platonic obsession and somehow lacks the diverting, subversive nature of modern girl-ification. Why is it that adding the word “girl” to the word “crush” diminishes the innate yearning of a crush?
A “girl crush” others queerness in its reminder that the “standard” way for a girl to have a crush is on a man – much like saying a “male nurse” implies that only “women nurses” are normal. Unlike with social media’s “girl-ification” agenda, adding “girl” to “crush” does not satirise or crush – it takes the teeth out of its deliciousness.
But in my case… and in the case, I’m sure, of many queer women, who convinced themselves that their crushes were “just girl crushes”… the girly doth protest too much.
The majority of my “girl crushes” occurred after I came out to my friends. I went to a girls’ school, I have mostly women in my family, I was always surrounded by women. Liking girls was, typically, complicated. A thousand shades of grey. In the early days of sex feeling a little scary and attraction consisting of longing, pining and flirting over MSN, I didn’t have the words to articulate why the nauseous, anxious, self-esteem-destroying consumption of fancying boys was different to the buoyed, giddy joy of fancying girls. “Girl crush” was a reduction and simplification; where there was attraction but it felt different to what I felt for boys. I simply labelled it a “girl crush”, and didn’t look too closely.
In my world the male gaze was everything; quite beyond wanting the object of my various affections to like me back, I wanted them to look back at me. To see me and in doing so, acknowledge me as someone worth seeing. Thus is the patriarchal power as it presents itself in adolescence. And so, despite coming out to my friends at the relatively tender age of 13, I continued having “girl crushes” well into my twenties.
In my YA novel, The Map That Led To You, wallflower Maeve lives in denial of her feelings for stalwart non-conformist Reggie. Reggie, in these moments, is something of a self-insert; she knows her feelings aren’t platonic, knows that she isn’t straight, but is terrified of rejection and of losing Maeve altogether. And so, for both of them, their feelings are relegated to “just a girl crush.”
A crush decribes a coveting, a longing. A crush is finding someone hopelessly, easily interesting and amusing; a crush is wondering what their body might feel like pressed against yours.
A “girl crush”, though, is supposedly a deep admiration. The kind of obsession felt by kindred spirits. You love her hair, her clothes, her laugh. You want to go dancing with her, drinking with her, you want to talk until the wee hours.
While you – like I – may be struggling to comprehend the difference here, I think it boils down to this key question: do you want to be her? Or be with her?
Well, as a friend said to me recently, “I want people to want me, the way that I want her.” And so for her – for me, for many of us – the answer is: both.
The Map That Led To You’ by Ella McLeod, is out now from Scholastic.
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