"I think, if anything, the books like Devil Wears Prada and Because She Can have made things worse for assistants, because now bosses are less willing to let you work on important things, at least in New York. They’re paranoid. They think, ‘What could my assistant rat out about me?'" That's Save The Assistants founder and "industry help" godmother Lilit Marcus in today's Observer, bouncing off the newspeg of Jennifer Hudson starring as Carrie's assistant in the Sex and the City movie. These underpaid ladder climbers are rewarded not with cash or prestige, but with their boss' Rolodex and the chance to network their way into a better job every night. And while it's no secret this corps of hired help is so often abused, many, such as the twentysomethings holding these jobs, continue to wonder, "Why?"

But the assistant-boss relationship is often more complicated than it first appears, and those assistants who perform personal tasks for their bosses (hello, Louise from St. Louis!) soon find themselves relied upon in a way that necessarily blurs the line between professional and personal lives. (Even in The Devil Wears Prada, Miranda Priestly eventually finds herself confiding in, and heavily reliant upon, her assistant Andrea Sachs.) It’s a double-edged sword, though, as one former assistant to a literary agent told me: “My first boss told me she loved me, which was incongruous with the way she treated me—I was both her best friend and slave.”

A 20-something former magazine editor said that it can be just as uncomfortable for the boss. “The assistants were so close to my age that it seemed very natural to be friendly with them. One night I’m getting drinks with them, the next day I’m asking them to book me a car. It was awkward as all hell.”

Another young former fashion magazine editor admitted being horrified at her behavior with her assistants, who were, after all, only a few years younger than she was. “I think back on things that I did when I was first a boss and I’m sort of appalled at how mean I could be,” she said. “That was the culture. You’ve got 21-year-old girls being hazed by their 25-year-old bosses, and the assistants have college students that they’re totally hazing. It’s just like a learned behavior.”

We knew there was something very Patty Hearst about all of this.

[NYO]