Feminist vigilante Lena Dunham to the rescue. Armed with her anti-systemic patriarchy X-Ray vision, the Girls heroine has uncovered what makes her feel — and should make you feel — so uneasy about Kanye West’s new controversial video “Famous”: It’s nothing but a paean to rape culture.
Calling it “sickening” and “one of the most disturbing ‘artistic’ effort in recent memory” in a long, sulky post she penned on her Facebook page, Dunham suggested the video epitomized “the aspects of our culture that make women feel unsafe even in their own beds, and their own bodies” citing three recent yet unrelated sets of events — Stanford University rapist Brock Turner’s light sentencing, comedian Bill Cosby’s ongoing legal battle, and an Ohio teenager accused of live-streaming her friend’s sexual assault — coinciding with its release.
“Now I have to see the prone, unconscious, waxy bodies of famous women, twisted like they’ve been drugged and chucked aside at a rager? It gives me such a sickening sense of dis-ease” she wrote.
Poor you Lena for having to suffer the insufferable.
Seeing her besties and inspirations “reduced to a pair of waxy breasts made by some special effects guy in the Valley,” she said, makes her feel “unsafe” and “worried” about the impression it’s leaving for “teenage girls who may not understand that grainy roving camera as the stuff of snuff films.”
For the clip, Kanye West used hyper-realistic wax figures of famous celebrities more or less related to his family clan — including Ray J, his wife Kim, Taylor Swift, Donald Trump, Anna Wintour, Rihanna, Bill Cosby, and Caitlyn Jenner — all lying on a bed naked in what looks like a post-coital sleep, while a grainy camera slowly hovers over them.
There’s no doubt the video displays many of the disturbing features of a bad sex tape. It is avowedly voyeuristic. Creepy, even. Yet, in it, one and all are exposed — equally naked, unconscious, and vulnerable — when their names are disclosed to the viewer.
As West himself made clear in a Vanity Fair interview, “Famous” was never intended as either an accolade or critique of any of the people in the video, but rather as a comment on fame. Inspired by the painting “Sleep” by Vincent Desiderio — who himself praised Kanye West’s work — the “peep-hole” effect in the video evokes the privacy invasion and unquenchable thirst for gossip and sordid dramas celebrity status brings about, our endless fascination with their bodies leaving them feeling naked — violated some would say.
West does tap into our collective fear of being peeped at at our most vulnerable, and exposed against our will. But, as often, Dunham’s reading is insufferably myopic and self-important. She’s like one of these couch feminists from the loneliest corners of the blogosphere, or that annoying girl in your seminar: always looking for the fly in the ointment just to make a damn point. The one who would tell you that it doesn’t matter if Lily Allen’s “Hard Out There” is one of funniest and wryest attacks on women’s objectification in the entertainment industry, because the way she is positioned in relation to her black dancers in the clip is problematic. The one who would tell you that it doesn’t matter if Beyonce’s success and feminism are an inspiration to millions, because she is trivializing womanhood.
For someone who — as she made sure to remind you — was raised in the art world, surrounded with her dad’s aggro scenes of sexuality and war and her mom’s naked life-sized dolls, Dunham is surprisingly oblivious to her own smug style in dictating what counts or doesn’t count as art based on her comfort level.
That’s a lot coming from someone who flashes her naked body to whomever wants to see it for no particular “artistic reason” — to quote TV critic Tim Molloy — and who’s publicly defended mentioning touching her little sister’s private parts in her memoir “Not That Kind of Girl.”
Not every image that makes Dunham feel “unsafe” is a byproduct of so-called rape culture. Brandishing the “rape” card to engage anything having to do with women and nakedness is not only lazy, but it does little to help young girls and women fight sexism. It only comforts people like Dunham in their moral high ground, while building barriers to addressing the real problem: that rape itself is caused not by cultural factors but by conscious decisions, an “obvious point,” which has “tended to get lost in recent debates” as the Rape Abuse & Incest National Network recently highlighted in a note to the White House.