Lena Dunham: a name guaranteed to start a heated debate among almost any group of people. The mere mention of her name in passing triggers a cascade of critical comments — and a large portion of that flak comes from libertarians and on the comment sections of websites such as Heat Street.
But is it merited? I think not. As a conservative, I think she’s more like us than you think — or maybe I should say: She’s more like us than you want to admit.
On the face of it, you can watch a couple of episodes of Girls (for goodness’ sake don’t download it — you don’t want to give the woman the satisfaction of paying for that!), and determine immediately that what you’ve got before you is an obnoxious, self-indulgent Lefty, with an over-blown sense of her own importance.
You read in the press that she’s talked about sexual assault, her struggle with endometriosis, her strong support for same-sex marriage, and her refusal to allow magazines to Photoshop pictures of her.
But why are these things so disproportionately enraging to so many people? What is it about Lena Dunham the person that means that these things — which are not actually that incendiary when taken individually, or out of context — rile people up so very much when they come from her?
I’m going to tell you. But you’re not going to like the answer… she’s one of us. And it kills us.
Let me explain. We’re used to hearing outspoken, liberal, contrarian, feminist opinions. We even hear them from women. But those voices usually belong to someone we’re comfortable associating them with: people of any ethnicity other than Caucasian, members of the LGBT community, individuals who have been born into and struggled to overcome disadvantaged backgrounds.
In short we feel that they’ve earned the right to be “difficult” by the fact that they’ve not had it easy. Lena Dunham, ladies and gentlemen, has had it easy.
She’s white. She’s privileged. She feels familiar. She’s dangerously like someone you could have been friends with at college. Yet she has the audacity to not only refuse to conform to the norms that the rest of us — whether willingly or unwillingly, consciously or unconsciously — conform to, but she actively rebels against them. And it smarts. It really, really does.
Take the question of female sexuality as an example. Most of us raised in conservative homes learn not to discuss it: Menstruation doesn’t exist. Nice girls don’t have sexual urges. Yet here we have a woman who talks openly about her struggles with the painful uterine condition endometriosis, who writes about her characters masturbating, and who thinks sexual assault should be talked about openly. I can see my grandmother clutching her pearls.
But the irony is that Lena Dunham is, in fact, not being provocative. Or difficult. Or trying to shock you. This is not Jackass NYC: The Lena Dunham Version. Her writing isn’t trying to offend you, or gross you out. It’s simply being honest and the very fact that an honest dialogue about matters so basic and fundamental to the human experience is so utterly enraging and apparently offensive to the senses is the biggest argument for why Lena Dunham should be applauded by the rest of us conservatives.
In a country where there are still — in 2016 — public schools that refuse to teach pupils about contraception, and instead focus their resources on abstinence programs, and girls (and adult women) who don’t realize they’re pregnant until several months into their pregnancy due to a fundamental lack of knowledge of how their own bodies work, surely any normalizing of the discussion of these issues should be welcomed?
On a more individual level, I think that, like a tiny grain of sand in a shoe that just rubs and rubs, many of us may feel a degree of resentment toward her for the fact that she has betrayed her roots — and by extension, us. The resentment isn’t actually toward the betrayal, it’s toward the fact that she had the nerve and strength to do everything she’s done — which includes releasing Tiny Furniture the movie she wrote and directed at the age of 23 — while the rest of us just conformed.
I’m the wrong side of 35. I spent almost a decade at university. I can speak three languages, I sing in several choirs, and can write a paper on the epidemiology of viral hemorrhagic fevers at the drop of a hat. But because of my social conditioning, alongside all of this, I also cry almost daily about the fact that I’m almost 30lbs overweight, think that I’m an utter failure because I’m single, I’ve never been married, and have no kids.
I try not to talk too much in case guys think I’m too nerdy. I worry that I look too feminine to be taken seriously at work, but not feminine enough to be attractive to men. I really, really loathe that those things bother me. I know that I have a great number of female friends in exactly the same position.
Lena Dunham, on the other hand? She’s intelligent. She’s opinionated. She’s talented. She’s not a size zero and she DOES NOT CARE. Is Endometriosis making her feel dreadful and confining her to bed? She’ll tell you. Has she made some dubious romantic choices? She’s not ashamed to admit it. Does she think she sometimes gets a little bit full of herself? Yup — she even writes a TV show about it, where the main character has all her worst traits and failings, magnified tenfold. You should check it out—– it’s called Girls.
Far from being the poster child for Social Justice Warriors, Girls isn’t afraid of poking fun at the seemingly infinite, ever-evolving conventions governing today’s world. Take the scene satirizing political correctness in the second episode of season five when Ray (Alex Karpovsky) finds himself in a heated exchange in a coffee shop when he starts questioning the lids policy. After Ray addresses a barista (played by Lena Dunham’s sister Grace Dunham) as ‘Sir’ rather than ‘They,’ she pleases her black barista co-worker by shouting “white man” at him, forcing him to leave the shop. No one watching that mortifying interaction could have interpreted that as a PSA for this months’ hot topic social awareness campaign. It’s pure mockery.
What it comes down to is this: Lena Dunham, a white, privileged woman, has had the nerve, nay, insolence to not just follow the path laid out before her by society. She has seen it — she has undoubtedly gained advantages from it, which she freely admits — but then she has opted to ignore it.
The fact that, as a result, she clearly isn’t carrying around the Shame Monkey on her back that so many of us carry, is something that we all should be aspiring to.
