In Defense Of The Girl Crush

When Ruby Rose joined the cast of Orange is the New Black, I saw a few of my straight female friends posting, or heard them saying, things about her along the lines of “I have a girl crush on her.” A girl crush being: when one woman has a crush on another which is, of course, totally platonic. A lot of women in the LGBT community snapped back saying that this term is flippant and heterocentric in that it implies that a woman can only have a non-sexual crush on another woman. It ignores the fact that there are lots of non-straight women out there who do in fact have actual romantic “crushes” on other women. While heterocentrism is not quite as appalling as homophobia, it’s still not good enough. I’m not going to be happy to be ignored just because it means I’m not getting abused. Lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, and all other non-straight women deserve to participate and be acknowledged in the conversation.

But I also feel the need to defend these straight women and their girl crushes on Ruby Rose. First of all, Ruby Rose is stunning. I don’t understand how anyone could possibly not have a crush on her. I adore her answer to Piper asking if she considers herself a woman. She says, “I do, but only because my options are limited.” Her character is a beautiful, androgynous, gender-fluid marvel. And for a lot of people, she’s a new sort of person.

I am gay, or maybe somewhere in the middle. It depends on which day you ask me. I’m, honestly, not entirely sure where I fall on the Kinsey scale, or even if the Kinsey scale is a good measure of the myriad of sexual orientations that exist. But it took me until I was 25 to understand that about myself and even longer than that to find the most accurate, not to mention politically correct, way to express that. And I don’t mean I was in the closet until I was 25. I mean I thought I was straight until I was 25. I was raised in a home and community where being gay was something bad that we whispered about. I didn’t know very many LGBT people. When I went to college, I met gay people who, unlike what I had been taught to expect, were lovely and caring and, well, normal. It was a culture shock; cognitive dissonance. I had to adjust my understanding of what it meant to be gay. But, even then, I still thought I was straight. Almost all my friends were straight. It was just my norm. During my last year of graduate school I became a part of a community where it wasn’t just okay to be gay, it was the norm. I was exposed to people who were gay, bi, trans, gender-fluid and all the other letters of our alphabet soup. In this context, I met the woman who is now my wife and had my own light bulb moment. I finally understood who I was. Looking back, I realized that I’d had real crushes and romantic feelings for women in the past. I was just so blinded by my heterocentric worldview that I didn’t call them that. You know what I called them? Girl crushes.

Maybe when someone says they have a “girl crush,” they are being rude and obnoxious and purposefully excluding the LGBT community, but I doubt it. It could be that there’s just a lost lesbian (or bisexual woman, or queer woman, or pansexual woman) wandering around inside them who doesn’t know how to say what they’re feeling. Perhaps we, as allies or LGBT people, can give ladies the benefit of the doubt. Instead of attacking, explain why that phrase is problematic or why it bothers you. Encourage them to find a better way to articulate what they’re feeling. Or maybe the ladies using this phrase aren’t entirely straight and are actually expressing attraction. Maybe you (or I) are making assumptions about them as well.

Precision of language is important. What we say matters, because it shapes our reality. And I want to move forward by shaping one that includes us all. So what are we supposed to do with this phrase? Hell if I should know. I’m just one person. All I know is that I want to include us all in the conversation. My suggestion is that we redefine “Girl Crush.” We can remove the implication that a “girl crush” is platonic by definition thus removing the heterocentric stink. Let’s use “girl crush” to express admiration for amazing women and the awesome femininity and uniquely female struggle that makes them vastly more badass than their male counterparts. Let’s make it mean, “Hey, girl. I see you over there absolutely killing it in your chosen field and effortlessly smashing the patriarchy at the same time. You excel, not in spite of being a woman, but because of it. The badass bitch in me recognizes the badass bitch in you.”