How dare Lena Dunham appear so often in the nude. How dare she be Vogue’s February cover girl. How dare she, such an average looking young woman, with a pear shape and thighs that touch, indulge in a weekend of hot fictional sex with a man as close to the platonic ideal as one Patrick Wilson.
Monday mornings, as I read through the endless commentary surrounding the previous night’s Girls episode, I’m saddened by all the naked vitriol I find leveled at someone I find to be a talented, honest, and very funny young woman. In this Internet-run culture we live in everyone who has ever had an opinion now has a platform on which to share it. We have an abundance of free speech, and that’s great. It’s unfortunate, though, that such speech is so often laced with mindless judgement and flat out contempt.
I can think of no other explanation than the fact that Ms. Dunham is young, a woman, and not an acceptable size 2 woman at that. Would Girls be on the receiving end of so much hate had Lena Dunham not cast herself a the main character, but rather had the actress Alison Williams - tall and athletic, model-thin with long shiny hair and big blue eyes - be the axis around which the three other girls turned? Is Dunham’s greatest overstep the fact not that she not only writes, produces, and directs, her own television show, but that she stars in it too and gets naked frequently, her love handles and fleshy, tattoo-covered back on full display? These are all questions I don’t necessarily have answers to, but ones I think, as a culture, we should be thinking about. Not why Lena Dunham thinks she has the right to such displays, but why they bother us so deeply.
Such debate reminds me of those studies which detail how the more power women obtain in our culture the more weight they lose - their bodies literally shrinking to make the growth of their newfound power more palatable. And then there's Lena Dunham. She has great creative power while looking completely normal, like one of us. And unlike so many stars of the big and small screen, once she entered the public lexicon she did not start losing weight, did not conform to the ideal. There weren't suddenly tabloid photos of her going to the gym and drinking kale smoothies, photos intimating that she is better than you. Instead she chopped off her hair, wore a canary yellow dress to an awards show that most young starlets wouldn't be caught dead in, and sat naked on a toilet for an opening sketch on the Emmys telecast. Being funny, as well as very much herself, has remained her top priority. One might even call this her very own personalized brand. But as branding goes it is surely a much healthier example for young women to follow than that of so many others out there.
While she and current It actress, Jennifer Lawrence, occupy opposite spectrums of such debate - Ms. Lawrence being witty and outspoken, but still more traditionally pretty and glamorous, leading lady ready - it is interesting how there has been a recent backlash to Ms. Lawrence as well. Articles proclaiming we are being punk'd, that Ms. Lawrence's honesty and "realness," those very things we applauded one year before, are actually part of her act. That she has overtaken the mantle from last year's most hated actress, Anne Hathaway, in her too carefully orchestrated awards acceptance speeches and red carpet appearances. Really, all these three entertainers have in common is that they are females in the spotlight. Meanwhile, Justin Bieber can drink and drive, take police on a wild car chase, but hey it's all good - boys will be boys, right? But please Lena, Jennifer, stop being so real. It's making us uneasy. And really, how dare you.
