A woman on Girls

Girls is back for its fourth season and I couldn't be happier about that. In fact, last week when Episode 1 premiered, I did a little lady-squirt.

For those of you who know me intimately, you will know that at first I rejected Dunham's visual manifesto of what it means to be twenty-something and living in New York. In case you didn't know...I did that once and I'll be happy as fuck to bore you all about it later. So at first I felt this weird ownership over that young, NYC experience, and if what I was watching didn't accurately reflect that very specific experience then I rejected it, and proclaimed loudly and obnoxiously that it was shit.

My poor friend tried with all his heart to get me to love that first season. But all he got were screams at the TV 'YOU DON'T JUST WALK OUT ON A JOB IN NEW YORK CITY! THEY'RE SO HARD TO GET!' or 'HOW THE FUCK WILL YOU AFFORD YOUR RENT IF YOU KICK OUT YOUR ROOMMATE?!' I was all superior eye-rolls and teeth-kissing. What the fuck was my problem? I'll tell you.

For a woman who makes a pretty big point of being kind and supportive to other women I was doing exactly the opposite. Sure, these women were characters on TV, but I hated them in a very real way, a visceral way that's just fucking weird. I was crazy-jealous of these women for the pure fact that they were not women. They were and are, as the show is aptly titled, Girls.

These girls that Dunham created are just trying to find their way in the world, and me, a grown-ass woman resented them for that. I thought their choices were all wrong, their wardrobes were a mess and their sex-lives were both tragic and enviable. But that's what it is to be in your 20's and I forgot that. I now have a tiny idea of what it might feel like to be a mother watching their daughter make the same stupid mistakes that she did, unable to stop her.

Luckily by Season 2 I got my shit together and joined the party. I realized that these girls are created for entertainment purposes only and that they simply can't represent everyone's experience. What Lena Dunham has done so well is to create characters that you empathize with so entirely that you think that they are yours and that they owe you something, but they don't.

When the outrage began about how there weren't enough minority characters on the show, that was a symptom of this same disease. Not everyone legitimately has a multicultural group of friends. No one brought this shit up with Seinfeld. However, Lena has created a circle of friends that includes a Jew, a Brit and someone with a cleft palate. They might all be white, but that's more diverse than a lot of friendship circles I know of.

The reality is this: Lena Dunham is damn good at her job. So damn good that we think these characters that she birthed are anything to do with us. If someone says to you 'you're such a Marnie' it doesn't mean you're actually Marnie and that if she then does something stupid in the next episode you need to feel responsible or that you should feel like Dunham's somehow betrayed you. She hasn't. Get over it.

Lena Dunham cannot be responsible for being the collective voice for a whole generation of very different girls. It's simply not possible, practical or fair. Get over it.

It's only a fucking TV show, people. It just happens to be exceptionally good.