It was a fairly minor scene in the grand theater of the Democratic National convention, but the appearance of actress, producer, and millennial feminist icon Lena Dunham raised a few eyebrows, especially when Dunham introduced herself as a “sexual assault survivor.” To quite a few people, mostly on the right, Dunham is more a perpetrator who admitted molesting her younger sister Grace in her 2014 memoir, Not That Kind of Girl.
Having read the book (strictly in the line of duty) and followed the controversy two years ago, I don’t believe Dunham is a child molester; at worst, she was a child with poor boundaries. Yes, she describes inspecting her one-year-old sister’s genitals, but she herself was seven and clearly motivated by curiosity; let’s not reinforce the appalling trend of labeling children as sex offenders. And yes, she does joke about bribing her sister for time and affection like a “sexual predator” wooing a small girl; let’s leave it to the “social justice warriors” to criminalize jokes on sensitive topics.
The real problem with Dunham’s appearance is that she’s a faux survivor. Her media-acclaimed tale of being raped by a fellow student at Oberlin equates regretted bad sex with rape and promotes a narrative harmful to both men and women — including real victims.
Dunham’s chronicling of her sex life in Not That Kind of Girl includes an incident from her college years involving a “mustachioed campus Republican” named Barry (not his real name, she specified later, after a threat of legal action from an actual Barry who had been a Republican at Oberlin). At first, she describes it as a comical drunken encounter that she ended after noticing the condom hanging off her roommate’s potted tree. Then, in the next chapter, comes the shocking twist: Dunham says that the first narrative was a lie and the incident was really a rape about which she was in denial for a long time.
The second, “true” account goes like this. Dunham runs into Barry at a party and ends up taking him home. She thinks he’s “creepy” — and a Republican! — but she’s lonely, drunk, and high, and she even rebuffs a male friend who tries to stop her. At her place, she and Barry end up on the floor, “doing all the things grown-ups do” and attempting intercourse — though Barry is, well, not quite up to it. At some point, in her “haze of warm beer, Xanax bits, and poorly administered cocaine,” Lena notices that the condom is on the floor and tells Barry to put it back on, which he does. After some more sexual activity and another attempt at intercourse, she sees the condom on the potted tree and throws Barry out.
The next day, Dunham records this in her “intimacy database” as a “terribly aggressive” sexual encounter (she is sore for days afterward). Then, a friend in whom she confides tells her she was raped. Dunham laughs it off. But later on, with help from some of the writers on her show, Girls, she comes to believe that it was indeed rape.
We can all agree that an unconscious or barely conscious person cannot consent to sex. But how exactly was Dunham’s experience with Barry nonconsensual? She admits that she was a fully active participant and even verbalized her desire for sexual activity. (She explains this away as trying to pretend to herself that she was doing this by choice.) She admits that when she chose to end the encounter by telling Barry to leave, he complied. Yes, she was drunk and high — but by her own account, Barry was so drunk that the next day he couldn’t remember with whom he had been. So why is he more responsible than she is? What makes it rape?
“At no moment did I consent to being handled that way. I never gave him permission to be rough,” writes Dunham. Yet, even after the rough handling, she actively continued the physical intimacy and gave Barry verbal encouragement. She also says she didn’t consent to sex without a condom. But even if Barry deliberately took it off rather than lose it in the midst of a drunken fumble, does that make him a rapist or just a jerk? Can a man cry rape if a woman lies about birth control?
Interestingly, in the same chapter in which she first mentions Barry, Dunham describes an encounter with another man, “Joaquin,” that could just as easily be re-framed as rape. After hanging out in a bar, Joaquin brings her back to his place and takes her to bed, where he aggressively dominates her: “Alcohol, fear and fascination cloud my memory, but I know my tights were balled up and placed in my mouth,” writes Dunham. But, in contrast to the episode with Barry, this is torrid sex rather than sordid sex: She walks out the next morning “not sure whether I’d been ruined or awoken.” (Maybe Dunham should try her hand at romance novels.) Ultimately, Dunham still decides that Joaquin is a jerk — but he doesn’t get labeled a rapist, apparently because she finds him much more attractive and exciting than Barry.
So what’s the takeaway from Dunham’s “survivor” story? Basically this: Any drunk sex, even with “enthusiastic consent,” can be rewritten as rape if one party (usually the woman) feels disgusted by it and decides that “it didn’t feel like a choice.” That’s not a good message to women or to men, and it’s not a good way to inspire confidence in anti-rape initiatives.
The DNC convention has given us a mostly positive vision of feminism rooted in female strength and accomplishment in partnership with men. Dunham champions a brand of feminist activism that infantilizes women and endangers due process for accused men (and some accused women, too). This is an issue Democrats will have to confront if they want to broaden their base and narrow the gender gap.