Zooey Deschanel’s latest video with She & Him, I Could’ve Been Your Girl, landed on YouTube this week and according to the credits on the site, it was directed by the sitcom star herself. So that’s actress, musician and, now, director.  

Deschanel is one of a tribe of girls that traverse various vocations – from acting to writing to directing to music to visual art and beyond – picking up cosmetics and fashion contracts along the way, pausing occasionally to walk the red carpet in Saint Laurent, while inspiring the rest of us to think, ‘Hey, maybe I should write a TV show chronicling the heartbreaking and hilarious japes my friends get into – how hard could it be?’

There’s Greta Gerwig, the actress who has written the upcoming film Frances Ha and is the new face of Band of Outsiders. There’s Zoe Kazan, the Yale-educated Broadway star you might recognise from the mainstream movies Revolutionary Road and It’s Complicated, who wrote the indie romantic comedy Ruby Sparks last year. There’s Jemima Kirke, who is a painter when she’s not playing the precociously free-spirited Jessa in sitcom phenomenon Girls or modelling her mother’s clothing line or raising her two children. There’s Audrey Gelman, who plays Charlie’s mustard-making new girlfriend in Girls on down days from her real-life job as a press secretary for the Manhattan borough president. Then, of course, there is Lena Dunham: creator, director and star of Girls, soon to have a book published, already with a movie under her belt, voice of her generation, seer of the 20-somethings and all-round Renaissance woman.

As well as humanities degrees, glossy hair and a privileged political/arty background (most of their parents have Wikipedia entries), these women – who have, of late, become our fantasy best friends, our nerd crushes, our sartorial muses – share a nationality: they are all American.

And when we begin to look for women to crush on closer to home, we draw a blank. Where are all the smart slashies in Britain? The writer/director/models? The singer/sculptor/vegan bakers? The artist/actress/editors? We can’t find any. 

Of course, there are women to admire – we have women who do one thing well: the writer Zadie Smith, the artist Tracy Emin and the double TV Bafta winner Olivia Coleman; we have smart female journalists, like Caitlin Moran, who writes bestselling books about gender inequality as well as cracking us up on Twitter.
 
What we don’t have though are 20-somethings who are willing to experiment with art forms and expose themselves across platforms, picking at the scabs of sex gone awry and love lost and faded friendships the way the current generation of women across the pond does. 

A natural English reticence would seem to have something to do with our shortage of slashies. Lena Dunham is drawing on her personal experience to create her work, following a well-worn tradition of American writer-performers, including Woody Allen and Larry David, whose (excruciatingly neurotic, screwed-up and cringe-making) onscreen characters are almost indistinguishable from the real-life versions. Here in the UK, performers generally tend to be more at arm’s length from their material, which has been written for them by a team of writers. That creates good comedy – it is (was?) something that the UK is famous for – but it doesn’t create the intimacy that you glean from Girls. 

If you work in the fashion industry, you’ll smile in recognition at a scene from Ab Fab – editorial meetings can be just like the one in the famous Hospital episode – but it’s unlikely you’ll curl up in a ball in of embarrassing self-recognition the way you do when you see Marnie singing Kanye in Girls or watch Greta Gerwig struggle with 20-something friendship in Frances Ha. The US slashies are creating such honest work that we feel like we know them. Hell, we feel like we are their best friends.  

We can be a bit sneery about people wanting to diversify over here, too. We allow our comedians to write and perform – within reason. There are some brilliant female writer-performers, following exemplars like Victoria Wood and Jennifer Saunders, women like Ruth Jones and Miranda Hart, but the media here still feels suspicious of young women who want it all. God forbid you’re a woman under 30 who wears designer clothes and appears on the covers of magazines and also wants to create interesting cinema and music and literature and art. No thank you dearie, back in your box, please.

America is a culture built on self-realisation, a nation predicated on the Manifest Destiny, a place where you’re allowed to be whoever you want to be. And that has given us a female writers and performers and musicians who are unafraid to experiment across art forms. Creators who are smart and funny and silly and stylish, no matter what medium they’re using and how honest they’re being. Slashies who aren’t afraid of naysayers, who want to be glamorous and stylish while making an imprint on the art and entertainment industries. Lucille Ball was the ultimate multi-hypenate, a comedian-model-writer-actress-TV executive, and that was way back in 1940s Hollywood.  

We need to catch up here in Britain – I want a new girl crush and I want one from this side of the Atlantic.