I think I've made it pretty clear that I am not a huge Lena Dunham fan. I think she's overrated and overexposed, but that's what we, the public have demanded of her. We like her trademark "oversharing" and her cringe-enducing humor that is ususally a lot more close to home than most of us would like to admit.
We cheer when she talks about sucking a kidney stone out of a man's cock. We roll around our living room floors clutching our bellies when her character in Girls takes cocaine and switches shirts in a club leaving her wearing a string vest with nothing on underneath, exposing her puffy nipples. We shield our eyes and then unshield them multiple times during a Hannah/Adam love scene. We love what Lena does. We tell her we love what she does. We shower her with awards and we keep tuning in to her show. So why, when her book reveals "too much" about Lena, are we up in arms? Why are we are disgusted?
Lena's book has been out for weeks now, so why this particular chapter is suddenly getting a lot of attention is a bit confusing. Why now? Why these words? Lena Dunham is being accused of child molestation. At the age of seven she was able to know her behavior was sexual and inappropriate and she subsequently victimized her little sister. Bullshit. And it's not bullshit because of white privilege. It's just bullshit because it is.
Sexualising this behavior is gross. Sure, we don't all go rooting around in our baby sister's vagina, but at the age of seven we all do weird shit. We eat paste, we eat boogers, we put our hands in our butt cracks and then smell them, we fuck about with our vaginas and have no idea what they are, we just know it feels nice. If I'd had a spare vagina in my house I might have looked at it. I bet Lena's mum is sure happy she did poke around in her sisters vag. She found a shitload of pebbles!
Lena's choice of words was stupid, she says she did "anything a sexual predator might do" to get her sister's attention, even buying kisses on the lips. If Hannah had told this anecdote in an episode of Girls I bet we'd have all done what we've all been doing: gasped and then dissolved into laughter. We know that Lena Dunham is not a sexual predator. She does not have a penchant for little girls, she was a curious child who did some weird shit in a family that was very open about...everything. Get your minds out of the gutter, right wing killjoys. Lena is not a danger to your children, she was not a danger to her sister.
We asked this of Lena Just like in Girls when her publishers encourage her to be more extreme with her disclosures, we have done the same. If this book had come out and been vanilla and tame we would have been pissed about that too. The girl can't win. But what makes me really angry is that there are people out there telling her sister, Grace that she has been abused. There are people out there comparing Lena Dunham to fucking Gary Glitter. Get. Real. People.
She made a joke. A joke that in today's unshockable society, probably at the time of inception, felt tame. I bet she and her family joke about how Grace never needed to worry about men in cars with candy when Lena was around. I bet this is totally normal and cute within the safe confines of their family. I bet these memories are recalled with an awkward fondness, but certainly not shame. We are shaming this young woman for sharing herself with us. But isn't that what we all fucking wanted?
They say there's no such thing as bad press, and this controversy is certainly going to help sell a lot of books, but I can't help but feel like we've set Lena up for this; and that this success will be forever bittersweet.
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