What I learned from (hot chick on Wired magazine cover) Julia Allison

July 21, 2008 · Filed Under Feminism, Internet Media, Psychology · Comment 

What kind of ambition drives a woman to appear in a glamour shot on the cover of a nerd magazine under the caption, “Become Internet famous (even if you’re nobody)…Julia Allison and the secrets of self-promotion.” Did you all see the recent Wired cover with Julia Allison? Women on Wired are rare enough, and I read the piece with curiosity after ripping it away from my husband. Turns out, Allison is the Paris Hilton of the Internet. Through Twitter and constant blogging of her sexy twentysomething life, she’s famous. I was half jealous and half disgusted. When I was a moderately sexy twentysomething, it never would have occurred to me to make hay from my exploits. Who would take you seriously? And how could your ambition be that naked? Then I read the follow up email Julia sent to Wired editor Chris Anderson. Explaining her path to celebrity, Allison writes,

“The true goal was never “fame” at all. I wanted two things: 1) editors to publish my work, 2) people to read my work. I wanted to be like Nora Ephron - able to exist creatively with an audience and relative financial freedom…”

Ah-ha: classic female tactic. Allison claims her ambition is driven by a larger purpose and to fulfill a larger more socially acceptable role. She doesn’t want to be famous for nothing- she wants to be a writer. But still, I have to give the girl credit for creativity. It’s really hard to break through to that editorial page (84% of op-eds are written by men). If Julia Allison can get her body of work quickly noticed by using the virtues of other body parts, well, then I have to consider that. It’s not often you hear a woman so baldly cop to wanting to get ahead. Recently, I have heard many young women leaders at Harvard Business School protest their ambition. At the BlogHer conference, with hundreds of super-successful women in deep discussion, I didn’t hear the talk turn to personal ambition (even in the “Blog to Book” seminar, whose premise was that the hundreds of folks in the room had enough ambition to want to publish a book). Yesterday, a friend who is senior executive at a large company described herself as wanting to physically “shield herself’ from the naked ambition of another colleague when the two women were granted face time with the multinational corporation’s big boss. My own ambition seems to have gone on summer vacation, and I can’t reach her no matter how hard I try.

Psychiatrist and author Anna Fels notes that women have a difficult time copping to desiring personal recognition, and accepting it when it comes. Not the affirmation that comes with fulfilling a role, such as being a doctor or lawyer, and not the affirmation that comes with being part of a mission or larger being that is important. No, the “highly individualized” recognition that comes from just being you. Is Julia Allison an aberration or is this a generational thing?

I went to a panel at BlogHer that featured fantastic women executives in the new/old media space. Stacy Morrison, the editor in chief of Redbook magazine, also wears her ambition on her sleeve. I’ve seen her speak twice now, and it’s remarkable. Her language manages to be both collaborative and baldly ambitious at the same time. She regularly peppers he speech with phrases like, “I knew I wanted to take over the magazine when…” and refers to “her magazine” with the emphasis often reserved for one’s children. But Morrison also said her job is to be “the professional empath” for the 10 million women who read Redbook. This woman is clear, and her ambition, too, is couched in her role as (I’m imagining how she’d paraphrase it here) interpreter of the hopes and dreams of her readers.

I asked Morrison about her phrasing- I said I had literally never heard a woman speak so ambitiously before. She explained it’s because of her clarity of purpose. She’s known what she wants to do with her life since she was a little girl. This “luxury” of clarity means she is unambivalent about being ambitious. She doesn’t need to apologize for it, or temper her language, because she is doing exactly what she has to do, and that is the way it must be.

A major light bulb went on when I heard this. Do I feel less ambitious because I am conflicted about what I am meant to do, to be, on this earth? If I were less ambivalent, and if I knew how I fit in a larger puzzle, would I be ok with saying, “I want to be rich, have a book and maybe a radio show and be a damn good mother”?

cross posted from BlogHer.com

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