On Lena Dunham and All That
I have been asked about my thoughts on Lena Dunham, so here they are. I am rambling and disjointed here because I am still thinking through all this. I am only speaking for myself and many people are going to disagree with my point of view and that’s okay. We’re not always going to agree but I do hope we’re always going to try and respect where we are each coming from.
One of the things that makes me most uncomfortable about memoir is how, through the writer’s choice to expose certain parts of themselves, we are inherently invited to judge those lives. I feel like I read memoirs with one eye open, like I’m afraid to learn too much about a person.
Judgment is part of the human experience. We encounter others and have opinions. I am a particularly judgmental person though I try to overcome this. I try to be as accepting as possible and when I cannot accept someone’s choices, I try to empathize with the circumstances that have led them to make choices with which I disagree. This attitude has come with age because I am OLD and because I used to just be so narrow-minded and full of conviction and I did nothing to create any good or change in the world, so I decided to try and change.
And there is a part of me that is uncomfortable with judging but I also think that if we judge nothing, we create an atmosphere where anything is acceptable and that is simply not the case. I have no interest in anarchy.
When GIRLS debuted, I wrote an essay that was critical of the show’s lack of diversity while also acknowledging that a lack of diversity is a Hollywood problem so we shouldn’t lay all the responsibility for the show’s diversity problem at Lena Dunham’s feet.
What was most disappointing about the show’s first season is that Dunham is young so I expected that this was someone who would “get it,” without needing the lesson of critical outcry. Alas. We always want everything all at once because we have been denied so fucking much.
I don’t watch GIRLS anymore. I saw the first two seasons but as I’ve written elsewhere, the show isn’t for me. I recognize why the show is popular among its fans, though and I think Dunham is very talented. I believe that in future artistic endeavors Dunham will do better when it comes to diversity because I believe she has taken the criticism to heart. And frankly, I am not so curious about what Dunham is doing now artistically, I am really curious to see what she does in ten or twelve years.
Full disclosure: Dunham is a good friend of one of my best friends, I reviewed her memoir, Not That Kind of Girl for Time (and I stand by that review), and I interviewed her for Vulture where we had an awesome conversation. We’ve exchanged e-mails. We’re definitely good acquaintances at this point but anything I write here is not borne of nepotism. This is not “caping up,” a phrase I hate. This is me, saying something in defense of another human being I think is being unfairly attacked. I recognize what she does well and her faults and fallibility and still I want to say something.
I am afraid to say anything about this topic because the response I’ve seen over the past few days has stunned me with it’s tone and frenzy. I can’t say nothing. I just can’t. Because if I say nothing, then I’m not being clear on what I think about all this and why. If I say nothing, I will be very disappointed in myself and people might assume I feel differently than I do.
I read Not That Kind of Girl and found it to be a great book. I was surprised by how much I liked it because in general, I have not loved celebrity memoirs, especially by “funny” people.
I read the passage about Dunham inspecting her younger sister Grace’s vagina when she was seven and her sister was one. I found this disturbing and utterly bizarre (seriously, what???) but well within the realm of things children do as they explore their bodies and the world around them. I didn’t even make particular note of this passage because within the context of the entire book, the disclosure made sense. The memoir, composed of essays, is really about coming of age and this experience, that clearly oversteps boundaries, was one of the experiences that led to Dunham becoming the woman she is.
Grace, at least via public disclosures, doesn’t identify as a victim, though people keep trying to thrust that narrative upon her. I am not going to speculate or use arm chair psychology to decide that she’s in some deep denial. I am going to trust that she is able to reconcile her own experiences.
I have two younger brothers. I am the oldest, then the next youngest is three years younger, and the baby, who will always be the baby, is eight years younger. My middle brother and I did some horrible shit to the baby growing up. We put him in a clothes basket and pushed him down the wooden stairs into our unfinished basement. He was not even crawling yet, and thought it was a fun ride. We thought it was funny because he was tiny and he fit in a tiny object. Our mom, who was there, ran down the stairs because she had looked away for like FIVE SECONDS and we had gotten up to no good. We tormented him with a vacuum. We put rubber spiders in his diaper. I mean, it was all ridiculous and mean but we loved him. We weren’t trying to abuse him. We were kids and we didn’t really know that the baby wasn’t an extension of us. That’s basically how we saw him and honestly that’s kind of how we still see him even though he is grown, married, with a baby of his own. Middle brother and I still hold forth on the baby’s life like he is about 10. We try to control his decisions. We boss him around. We love him fiercely and unconditionally and would do anything for him. My brothers are everything to me.
To compare my relationship with my brothrers to what Dunham wrote about in her book would be a false equivalence but we’ve seen a lot of that over the past few days. My point is, sibling relationships are intense, intimate and unknowable to the outside world. You will never understand my brothers and I and I won’t understand you and your siblings. We can try to see where we’re all coming from, I hope. We do share common ground.
There was also an off-color language choice where Dunham referred to her techniques to get her sister’s affection as those used by a sexual predator. It was clearly written as a joke but not all jokes work or are appropriate. That language didn’t bother me but I understand why that language choice troubles so many people. I also understand why the disclosure has triggered people. I don’t want to overlook those reactions even though I don’t share them.
People I respect view Dunham’s disclosures as abuse and so I have taken the time to read their thoughts. I have earnestly tried to understand that point of view because when so many people hold a similar viewpoint, there must be something there. I have tried but I still don’t see any of this as abuse. I am trying to be as respectful as I can of that point of view and of the ways in which some people have been triggered.
I’ve also seen people who clearly have an agenda run wild and use intellectual dishonesty, selective reading, and magical thinking though to what end, I am not sure. Those tactics don’t help anyone or anything.
What people are construing as a pattern of abuse, I see as an older sibling just trying to get her younger sibling to love her. I totally understood the behavior, because, being 8 years older than the baby, as I got older, i wanted him to love me. I wanted him to be my friend. I don’t remember what I did to ply his love but I’m sure bribery and blackmail were involved.
What disturbed me more in the memoir was Dunham’s disclosure about telling her parents about her sister’s sexuality. That read like a violation and I took note of it and was appalled because, OMG GIRL WHAT??? WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT? but that’s the extent of it because people do appalling things. I have done appalling things that now make me cringe and that would make you cringe. I think I’m so open and hell bent on nuance now because I’m trying to atone. That’s a different story for a different day.
I do not think Lena Dunham is a child molester or abuser or anything she has been accused of. These accusations chill me to the bone because they are so very serious and have such grave consequences. They should. We, as a culture, should have no tolerance for abuse of any kind, between individuals of any gender and any age.
I also hate the idea that all survivors should feel the same way. I’m a survivor and I have my opinions and they are different from what other survivors believe and this is okay. We have experiences in common and we have different mindsets and we can still, I hope, have productive conversations about these difficult topics.
I am a black feminist. I am a survivor. These are my opinions. My opinions do not diminish my blackness, my feminism, or my past.
I know what abuse looks like between children. I am not going to get into the how and what and why here but I know and it is fucking horrible in a very particular way because you spend the rest of your life wondering, “Should I forgive these trespasses because my trespasser was also so young?” while still trying to cope with what you endured, while still trying to allow yourself to accept that yes, you endured something horrible.
Grace Dunham is now an adult and she read this book before it was published. She is managing her sister’s book tour and they are best friends. Are we really going to overlook this? Grace consented to the stories about her in the book being published. This book was also vetted by an agent, an editor, a team of lawyers at Random House. With nearly $4 million on the line, let’s be real, Random House wasn’t going to just let this book fly out into the world without rigorous vetting. The book came out and has been pretty well-received.
It took nearly a month for this controversy to rise and it came by way of Kevin Williamson, who is homophobic, racist, sexist, and transphobic, and the Truth Revolt blog. Yes, I question the messenger. Yes, they were using Dunham’s words, but they were doing so utterly without context and here, context very much matters.
People want Dunham to perform acts of contrition but I am not at all clear on what those acts of contrition should look like. I don’t feel like Dunham owes me or anyone outside of her circle of family and friends, anything. I don’t understand the assumption that Dunham published this memoir without her sister’s consent. That simply didn’t happen. If Grace is okay with these disclosures, that’s good enough for me.
There is an undercurrent of rage that seems to have very little to do with the book, its disclosures or “the good fight,” and everything to do with resenting a privileged young white woman succeeding. And you know what? Yes, it is fucked up that we don’t all benefit from the same privilege Dunham has enjoyed. Or the privilege I have enjoyed. Or the privilege any privileged person has enjoyed.
It’s fucked up that the margin of error for white women is far greater than it is for people of color, queer people, transgender people. That necessary conversation should probably be separate from the specific conversations about Lena Dunham.
There is a great distance between thinking LENA DUNHAM IS A CHILD MOLESTER and thinking, yeah, inspecting her sister’s vagina seems like an awesome choice. There are multiple places within that distance and I stand in that place where I think the shit is weird, it makes me uncomfortable, but I understand why the information was disclosed in the memoir, and it did not diminish my experience of reading the book or my opinion of Dunham as a talented but flawed young woman.
Also, she was seven and yes her sister was one, but she was seven. Their relationship, throughout the book, seems intense and very much like most sibling relationships—complicated but healthily passionate.
I’ve seen people say Dunham is entitled and that her response to this controversy (for lack of a better word) is entitled. If I were in her shoes, I would say some ignorant angry shit. Should we expect better? Perhaps, but really, in her shoes I would have lost my shit. You would have had to take my keyboard away.
If it weren’t for [Redacted] who is my voice of reason and is often texting me or e-mailing me to not engage with trolls, you would see me acting ignorant a lot more than I do, not because I’m a bad person but because I’m human and I get defensive and I get hurt so I want to lash out. I want to fight back. I want to defend myself and I lose sight of the bigger picture that thankfully, [Redacted] manages to hold onto.
I saw how Dunham responded and I thought, “Yeah, I see where that is coming from.” And in the ensuing days I thought, “There’s really nothing she can say or do that will satisfy anyone.” What a horrible fucking place to be in.
This is what it means to be in the public eye like that, I guess, that you are held to a different standard, and that you are accountable, in some form or fashion, to a wider audience. This is the responsibility you bear as a public figure and maybe Dunham needs to live up to that responsibility more effectively. I don’t really think that some of her critics would even give her a chance to try, though.
I donated to Planned Parenthood today and wrote the head of the organization voicing my support so that’s where I stand on that.
I see a young woman who is bearing the brunt of a lot of criticism, some of it coming from a truthful place and some of it coming from a dark and resentful place. I see a woman who is intelligent and talented and funny and who is also privileged and short-sighted on some of the big issues we all care about so much. I feel so sad over the accusations she has faced. Such a thing would devastate me, and maybe I am just projecting a lot but I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. I hate that this is happening at all. I don’t have anything wise to say. I just needed to think through all of this.
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