They view her as a hipster, a racist, an annoyingly privileged theater kid and a deranged clown. The only problem: queer people under thirty view Lena Dunham as a neoliberal white feminist equipped with all the phony-baloney talking points. It also came after she brazenly compared herself to Marilyn Monroe, a well-established queer icon, in Vogue. There’s also never been a celebrity who lobbied for queer sainthood in such a queer way. It read like a scene from Girls that was crumpled up and tossed into the trash because it was too outrageous, even for Girls, even for a show that centered on white girls being outrageous, tone-deaf and so neurotic they made Woody Allen seem like Paul Newman. “When I go,” she tweeted one afternoon in October, “I want my casket to be driven through the NYC pride parade with a plaque that reads ‘she wasn’t for everyone, but she *was* for us’ – who can arrange?” I giggled and howled, but Twitter was aghast. Is there anything queerer than this? I ask because in the nadir of her celebrity, i.e., as I write this, on the verge of (maybe) making a comeback as an indie filmmaker, Lena Dunham decided to leverage more of her shock value. Because of this, she’s often remembered as a notorious figure who trended for saying that she wished she had gotten an abortion trended for comparing the Holocaust and Bill Cosby, which required her to hire fixer Judy Smith - the inspiration for Scandal’s Olivia Pope - to manage the crisis. “Lena Dunham sparks outrage” became a permanent fixture on the bird app. In her defense, the only thing Lena Dunham ever molested was her book editor’s reputation. It led to Dunham being accused of molesting her little sister. She was later accused of “hipster racism.” At the zenith of her celebrity, Lena Dunham published her own messy, lowlife memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, which included a John Waters-flavored account of Dunham playing with her little sister’s vagina. When pressed to comment on the lack of diversity in Girls, she rejected the accusation of racism by insisting she wanted to fuck Drake - which is outrageous. The media adored her until she gave them every reason not to.ĭuring Girls’s six seasons, Lena Dunham’s oblivious, hipster-airhead persona blurred the lines between fiction and nonfiction and turned her into a lowbrow spectacle. Dunham turned HBO into a body-positive runway. Episodes of Girls were titled like a headline: “Vagina Panic” and “Female Author.” The feminist media felt like they had found their anti-sex Madonna. Dunham was nude in every episode like a hipster Lebasque painting that Camille Paglia would mock as a “pile of pudding.” Dunham is undeniably gutsy for turning her plump figure into viral thinkpieces. While I think Girls is one of the most stylish (and exquisitely curated) television shows of the past decade, it never transcended its era: millennial white girls struggling to find themselves amidst Brooklyn brownstones. It was the first show caught in the zeitgeist tornado of Twitter, a show that everyone had an opinion about and, for the first time, could share in real-time. Girls ran for six scandal-ridden seasons (2012-17). Per a recent Hollywood Reporter profile, Dunham said she self-exiled after the final season of HBO’s Girls, describing the tumultuous period as a “fifty-car pileup,” when the “pressures of churning out the hit series while being cudgeled daily on social media” nearly broke her. I like it even more than I did in 2012.įor those of you who’ve muted Dunham from your feed, let me offer an update. I tweet the video: “White girls with tote bags.” I realize that what felt relatable in 2012 now comes off like a camp-cringe spectacle that’s oblivious and dumb. They dance together like white girls on Ellen. Hannah (Lena Dunham) is tweeting in her bedroom: “My life has been a lie, my ex-boyfriend dates a guy.” She deletes this and types: “All adventurous women do.” She stands up, shakes her hair, swings her tattooed arms and dances to Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own.” I was this person once, I think to myself, as another girl (Marnie) walks into the room and laughs maniacally as the two discuss the shocking reveal that Hannah’s boyfriend, Elijah, is gay (“he seemed gay”).
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