Girls, Girls, Girls...

I must have been around 12 years old when it happened for the first time. Kat - a family friend some 25 years older than me - was sitting at our kitchen table smoking a cigarette and drinking black coffee, her Ziggy Stardust hairdo all mussed up and traces of last night’s make up still evident around her eyes. She looked like the sort of person I’d seen in the backdrop of photos of Berlin-era Iggy, or linking arms with Debbie Harry after a night out in Studio 54. But Kat wasn’t a photo; she was real. And in our house. And smoking. And that was the moment my first Girl Crush got a grip. Fast forward some 30+ years, and I’m standing in Bristol’s Colston Hall fixated by a tousle-haired cello player swigging beer straight from the bottle as her glossy red stilettos stamp out an unruly rhythm to accompany my pitter-patter heart. Am I in lurve? No: just saturated in joyful, innocent GC lust for one night only.

Aaron Peckham’s Urban Dictionary (www.urbandictionary.com) defines the Girl Crush as “a feeling of admiration and adoration which a girl/woman has for another girl/woman; a nonsexual attraction, usually based on veneration at some level”. When I had my first GC experience, I had no idea that such a state would eventually be acknowledged as a rite-of-passage phenomenon so commonplace that, three decades on, discussion of similar infatuations would become common currency in women’s magazines and chat shows, or a hot topic debate on any given girl’s night out. But neither did I ever suspect that my crush on Kat indicated inclinations or tendencies any more profound than the fact I wanted to be like her when I grew up. Today, I recognise aspects of Kat in the Me I eventually became (and my mum holds her solely responsible for my Marlboro Light habit). While my fascination with Pamela Anderson can only be blamed on not being given a Barbie doll in my formative years, I’m hoping that certain qualities and attributes inherent in my current crushes on Cheryl Cole, Mariella Frostrup and BBC news anchor Kate Middleton can be similarly absorbed into my psyche without sacrificing anything of my authentic self.

But over on Planet Boy, the inflexible male ego often dictates that a man who expresses any kind of admiration of - or empathy with - another man beyond referring to them as some sort of ‘hero’ (sport; war; whatever) must surely be a ‘poof’, while any woman who articulates related themes as I’ve done here is similarly categorised in equally obnoxious terms (or subjected to that self-conscious, knee jerk rejoinder, “can I watch?”). But Team Mars could learn a lot from the contrary Venusians sitting next to them on the settee. Most heterosexual men I know fit into three categories on the Jez-o-meter: they’re either a Clarkson, a Paxman or an Irons. But what they all fail to understand is that if they publicly acknowledged the appeal of their favourite Jeremy (or indeed, what it is that makes Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp or George Clooney such perennial objects of desire), they themselves would automatically become far more attractive than fellow team mates who blindly cling to their ‘macho’ insensibilities. Admiration is a far more attractive sentiment than envy, and few men I know wouldn’t benefit from absorbing a pinch of Parkinson, a frosting of Firth or a light sprinkling of (Jon) Snow - and I reckon they know it, too. But while many men would view formal acknowledgment of this fact akin to being caught writing a love letter to David Beckham, same-sex crush aficionados know that the aim isn’t to shag the object of your affections, just be a little bit like them; choose your crush wisely, and that can only be a positive thing - except, that is, if your first one was a chain-smoker.