We're Going to Need More Wine - Gabrielle Union Page 0,70

said, swiveling my whole body to look at Michelle, “but who better to help her navigate that than you?”

“I’m not training the competition to do my job,” said Michelle. “Would you?”

Um, no. And I thought about my own hypocrisy: Just the night before I had attended a pre-Oscar cocktail party for women in film. There I had met a young actor named Ryan Destiny. She had appeared in the Lee Daniels series Star. I had heard that she looked like me. I saw her in person and she looks like I literally gave birth to her. Gab 2.0, only better.

“Oh my God,” she said. “I am finally meeting you. This is so amazing.”

“What are you, twelve?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Shit.”

“I admire you so much,” she said. “If you could mentor me . . .”

Bitch, fuck you, I thought. You want me to mentor you? The press is literally calling you the next Gabrielle Union . . . “except she can sing and dance!”

I smiled, and the photographers came over. They needed to document this moment of “Look who’s old!” And I get it, because I have a reputation for never aging. And God, do I love that rep. But as the flashbulbs went off, I was suddenly terrified that the ruse would be up. Dorian Gray, turning to dust as she is photographed next to someone called the next Gabrielle Union.

Looking at Michelle and Gwen, I remembered not just the fear of suddenly looking decrepit next to this young woman, but the wave of panic that if I imparted my knowledge, I would lose in some kind of way. Would I be aiding and abetting myself into forced retirement and exile by helping this drop-dead gorgeous woman? A better, hotter, more talented version of me twenty-five years ago?

To be the women my friends and I are supposed to be, we are supposed to support the women coming up behind us. It’s just hard to do that happily when you’re finally at the table, and you feel any moment someone’s going to come up, tap your shoulder, and say, “I think you’re in my seat.” It took me a long time to get that seat, goddammit. I’m not ready to move over just yet.

This fear resonates through every industry. For my friends in corporate America there’s a reasonable fear about “mentoring” young women to be their best selves if that means they could take your job. Younger women are literally dangled in front of their older peers as a you-better-act-right stick to keep older, more experienced women in line. Because we’ve all seen a pal replaced for a younger, cheaper model with lower expectations and more free time for overtime or courting clients. Modern business is set up to squeeze out women who “want it all”—which is mostly just code for demanding equal pay for equal work. But the more empowered women in the workforce, the better. The more that women mentor women, the stronger our answer is to the old-boys’ network that we’ve been left out of. We can’t afford to leave any woman behind. We need every woman on the front lines lifting each other up . . . for the good of all of us and the women who come behind us.

It’s tough to get past my own fears, so I have to remind myself that this is an experiment, to boldly go where no grown-ass woman has gone before. When we refuse to be exiled to the shadows as we mature, we get to be leaders who choose how we treat other women. If I don’t support and mentor someone like Ryan, that’s working from a place of fear. And if I put my foot on a rising star, that’s perpetuating a cycle that will keep us all weak. The actresses in the generation before mine were well aware of their expiration dates, and they furiously tried to beat the clock before Hollywood had decided their milk had gone bad. Yes, there were some supremely catty women in Hollywood who actively spread rumors about younger stars so that they could stay working longer. But there were also way more amazing women who thought big picture. They trusted that if they uplifted each other, in twenty years, there might just be more work to go around. Women like Regina King, Tichina Arnold, Tisha Campbell-Martin, and Jenifer Lewis went out of their way to mentor and educate the next generation. That empowerment is why we have Taraji P. Henson, Kerry Washington, Viola Davis,