Do I, Like, Love Lena Dunham

Yesterday, while I was making lasagna, I felt this overwhelming gratitude for the fact that I'm a 20 something year old girl living her fun free life. Just before bed I walked past my roommate's room and she was blaring party music and doing her makeup like she was going to a rave or something, and she turned to me and said, "omg I just love doing my makeup alone when I'm drunk." This was following a potluck dinner with a bunch of girls I'd describe as 'fun and hot', with red wine and garlic bread, in this large house we made and call our own.

I've been watching a lot of Girls lately, which Binge describes as '4 girls in their early 20's figuring out life in New York' or something like that. Following the theme of personal essayists, the show is definitely a mirror of Lena Dunham's life as she saw it. I mean, in the first episode the protagonist, Hannah, asks her parents "What if I'm the voice of my generation?" which interprets as both a sardonic and accurate representation of a girl who literally wrote a tv show about her own life. The show received a lot of criticism regarding its lack of diverse representation and the nepotism involved in getting picked up by HBO (they say she came to them with a general idea and half-baked script - so basically 'the worst pitch ever'). However, I do believe the show was created with the utmost earnest intentions, being that Lena, her narcissistic self, wanted to accurately represent her life as a white privileged 20-something year old because she believed it meant something.

And to be honest, she did it well. The show won Golden Globes, the Peabody Award and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best New Series in 2013. Sure, nepotism and privilege can get you a certain distance, but at some point there needs to be some actual work put in, some actual merit. Besides, her parents are painters and sculptors who probably just gave her inspiration growing up in the New York art scene (romanticise that shit). It's not like they owned HBO or had anything to do with television whatsoever. As for the whole lack of diversity issue, like, I don't know about you but I don't want some privileged white Jewish girl writing from an Asian perspective. That would be weird and wrong in so many ways. I do understand that I probably like her work because I am a privileged girl in her 20's who is financially supported by her parents, and therefore very much resonate with shows about self-involved emotional women, but hey, here I am resonating. People need to stop being so goddam PC. Like, isn't the artist's goal at the end of the day to use their voice? Surely someone else can be hired to write about their marginalised experience. Although, that takes us back to the nepotism and privilege thing, and injustice is really not what I'm here to write about. Neither is Lena, clearly.

A lot of people find Lena excessively annoying and problematic, probably because she is. Sometimes I don't enjoy watching Hannah strip in every public place ever or eat a bagel in a bathtub or whatever. I mean, it's cathartic on the same level as watching Phoebe Waller-Bridge masturbate to Obama's speech in FleaBag, but there's only so ratchet a girl can be before you're like CONTROL YOURSELF AND PUT SOME GODDAM CLOTHES ON. Lena Dunham is also known for saying stuff like, "I wish I had an abortion for the experience" or defending a co-worker and friend against rape allegations, but to be honest, I feel this all runs along the same white privileged girl theme of someone who is kind of self-involved and can't see past her own experience. As in, it's wrong, but it's all done in earnest, so I don't hate her for it. 

Perhaps I both like and dislike Lena for her too-open honesty. I remember reading her book Not That Kind of Girl when I was 18, and within the first chapter she described losing her virginity to some guy and lying about being a virgin, and then like, dissociating out of her body. My young innocent self took the whole thing as a universal experience when clearly it's not. At that point I wondered, what was the point of writing that? Did you just feel like sending all these details into the void when nobody asked? It feels kind of graceless and narcissistic. Every single one of Lena Dunham's personal essays seem to revolve around boys and sex and marriage and hysterectomies. As a young woman, I really do eat that shit up because I wish more girls would write as openly and shamelessly as she does, but at the same time I get kind of annoyed that it's literally all she thinks about.

While you'd think that a writer who obsesses over everything that makes up traditional female gender roles would make me spiral into a desperate mess of stressing over male validation, watching Girls has done quite the opposite. I guess this is what happens when a female writer focuses on a bunch of complex female characters. The male characters play supporting roles. They are simply tools for self-discovery, to figure out how to be loved, to love, and whether one needs to be loved at all. When discussing their distrust of their daughter and her seemingly terrible life decisions and coping mechanisms, Hannah's mother quips, "She does what she wants, has her fun, then goes home and writes in her diary and thinks about her fun." 

Girls shifts the focus to the trajectory of these girls' lives - the nitty gritty desire for validation and companionship. I think of Hannah oversharing to the man who's dumpster she wrongly uses to dump trash: "When I was young I decided that I wanted to experience everything, just so I could soak up all the experiences and tell everyone about it. But I'm so exhausted. I just want to be happy." There's scenes with one girl depressed in one room while the other is writing a novel across the hallway, doing well; with one girl crying in the bathtub while the other tells her to stop blowing her snot through the bubbles. It's messy, it's real, and it makes me love my girl friends.

I think about our potluck where we pass pieces of lasagna and salad across the table, as somebody yells, "Who wants margaritas!" Two girls talk about their online dates this Saturday, about sitting in the jacuzzi and raising their body counts. Across the table, girls yell about mental illness, therapy, long-term relationships, boredom and past heartaches. I realise that we are never going to experience this again. We are never going to be this hot or intelligent or have this much room for chaos and unpredictability in our lives. 

Love,

M

Ps. God, why do I feel like I wrote this in Shoshanna's voice? Sometimes I think I have Shoshanna's voice. F*ck she's so annoying though.

Pps. This was literally me oversharing my opinion about something I kind of know nothing about, and then making it about me, which is honestly so Lena Dunham I can't.