Actress Lena Dunham is repeating her controversial claim that she was raped in college. In a new post, published on her feminist blog, Dunham talks about her struggles confronting the trauma of the alleged sexual assault, and claims it caused her to lose her ability to “fantasize”.
Last year, the Girls actress made headlines at the Democratic National Convention for claiming to be a “sexual assault survivor”. Dunham was referring to an incident described in her 2014 bestseller, Not That Kind of Girl, in which she recounted, in comedic terms, a sexual encounter with a “mustachioed college Republican” named Barry at prestigious Oberlin College, before turning the story on its head by framing it as a rape.
In that recounting of the drunken hookup, Dunham was a fully consenting participant in the “terribly aggressive” sexual encounter (for which she admits providing verbal encouragement). Both she and her sexual partner were drunk and high on illegal drugs at the time. However, with the help of some writers on her TV show years later, she came to believe that she was raped.
In the same book, Dunham described another aggressive hookup with a man named Joaquin, which (as writer Cathy Young argues) can be framed as rape just as easily, but Dunham refuses to label Joaquin a rapist simply because she found him more exciting and attractive than the Republican.
Dunham is now doubling down on her rape allegation, and begins her new blog post by lamenting her struggles as a sexual assault survivor.
“A therapist once told me that a hallmark of trauma is losing the ability to fantasize,” writes Dunham. “The space where possibility was is now filled to the brim with disruptive and painful reality. She told me that when you’ve been raped — which I was, early in my life as a sexually active woman — your sense of a sensual self shrinks and often recedes.”
Dunham goes into lurid detail about writing erotic fantasy as a teenager and her sexual experiences prior to the alleged assault, which she says caused her to lose her ability to fantasize.
“After my assault, all I could imagine when I thought about sex was not being injured or, when I really didn’t like myself, being very injured,” she writes. “That’s all there was room for.”
“And I never got good at fantasizing again. I got good at performing: back arched, hair flying, assuming attitudes I thought were desirable to a partner who watched either porn or foreign films. I got good at making small, meaningless sounds. I got good at those sounds that made my partner think I was having ideas. But, whereas in every other area of my life I was exhausted by my own litany of ideas, sex left me blank and needy.
For a few years I had an on-again, off-again partner I valued mostly because he supplied the concepts I lacked. Quiet and morose in everyday life, in a sexual context he came alive with scenarios and maneuvers so complex that I was left with no job whatsoever except to consent. It didn’t matter to me then that many of the fantasies he summoned mimicked the circumstances under which I’d been assaulted — lost drunk girl with questionable self-worth finds herself in the wrong set of hands — but I’d never told him what had happened to me, and he had never asked. I wondered whether I exuded something, a kind of flickering neon brokenness, and started to question whether in fact I’d been asking for this all along. But it felt so good to be engulfed, to disappear from myself, albeit briefly, that I stopped questioning.
After that ended, and during the dry spells when he disappeared, I was forced to return to the world of the living, and only once was I really caught red-handed in the lie that was my sexual persona.”
What Dunham doesn’t admit to in her new blog post is that she had to amend new printings of Not that Kind of Girl after a former Oberlin college Republican named Barry threatened to sue her for falsely accusing him of rape. Furthermore, upon publication of her memoir, journalists scrupulously investigated her rape claim, which, they argued “collapsed under scrutiny.”
The new blog posting reads like the fantasy (for someone supposedly incapable of fantasizing) of someone who wants to spice up their life by carrying the unenviable mantle of “sexual assault survivor.” Rape is no joke, and it’s disturbing to see Dunham reframe consensual (if rough) sex as violent rape for the sake of relevancy and victimhood.
Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken media critic. You can reach him through social media at @stillgray on Twitter and on Facebook.
