As the popular show, and one of my personal favorites, Girls, is wrapping up filming its sixth and final season, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the show runner, creator and writer, Lena Dunham. She embodies everything I have always wanted career wise and I have always, and continue to, admire her ability to tell a story. I began to realize, though, that the vast majority of people did not hold my opinion. In fact, there are a lot of people out there who truly believe that she is a toxic role model for the generation.
This viewpoint was compounded by a recent event that took place in an interview she did with Amy Schumer for her online publication, Lenny Letter. In it, she made comments directed towards Odell Beckham Jr. after being seated next to each other at the Met Gala in May. “I was sitting next to Odell Beckham Jr., and it was so amazing because it was like he looked at me and he determined I was not the shape of a woman by his standards. He was like, ‘That’s a marshmallow. That’s a child. That’s a dog.’ It wasn’t mean — he just seemed confused,” she said in the interview. “The vibe was very much like, ‘Do I want to f*** it? Is it wearing a … yep, it’s wearing a tuxedo. I’m going to go back to my cell phone.’ It was like we were forced to be together, and he literally was scrolling Instagram rather than have to look at a woman in a bow tie.”
Many took to twitter and other social media to lash out against Dunham. She often describes herself as a feminist who accepts, appreciates and advocates for many social issues regarding women’s rights, LGBTQ rights and for the equality of all no matter your color, gender, body type or sexuality. However, many don’t buy it, claiming her as a racist, as homophobic and even as the antithesis of what feminism should be. “It is absurd and frankly racist that the literary world’s axis is now set to spin based on whatever utterances are made by a 20-something white woman who grew up in wealth, likes to get naked and have sex on TV and call it feminism, and who is almost entirely exclusionary on the subject of race,” according to an article by Gawker. They are not necessarily wrong and the comments made in the interview with Amy Schumer proved she does not understand the experiences of others and so she should not comment about them. Furthermore, if she is a feminist, then why would she be upset that a man was not sexualizing her?
Roxane Gay, a feminist writer, professor of English at Purdue University and contributing opinion writer at The New York Times commented about matter, putting it into perspective—a perspective that Dunham does not and cannot understand. “’When you are a woman who doesn’t fit the traditional beauty ideal you know that look men, mostly give you. It’s painful. And constant,’ Gay tweeted. ‘Dunham was clearly projecting and speaking from a place of knowing what it’s like to receive that look, to be seen but unseen, [but] to use a black man and to name him is such a mess. Her point could have been made without him.’ She added, ‘But it wasn’t. And it contributes, intentionally or not, to really damaging ideas about black men and sexuality. Dude was just trying to live his life and now this? Ugh. The response to that interview isn’t mindless outrage. And once more we see why feminism has to be intersectional, that we have to think about the lived experiences of different bodies,’” according to an article by Variety.
This point touches on something about Dunham that many people do not see. I’m not totally convinced that she is actively seeking out to be any of the things people love to claim that she is. Gay comments on the idea that feminism needs to be intersectional, which means it has to incorporate the experiences of others who have been systematically marginalized. This does not make Dunham the source of this evil; it means that, like most of us, she does not necessarily understand all the ins and outs of feministic thoughts and practices, which she claims to live by. This is where things get complicated and sometimes problematic. I also think this is where the disconnect many people have with Dunham lies.
Maybe my ideas and thoughts about Lena Dunham come from my pure jealously and blind obsession with her job titles, but I truly do not believe she is a practiced racist or misogynist. What I do think is this: hating her isn’t helping the problem. Despite our thoughts on Dunham, she is perpetuating some sort of voice for our generation through her television series, books, online publication and slew of other written and verbal influences. Those who have that kind of leverage should educate themselves about the issues they claim to advocate for, but hating and bashing her is not about educating, it’s about belittling; doing that just brings us all back to square one anyway, right?