Lena Dunham and the abuse we don’t want to talk about
My one-way relationship with Lena Dunham is very complicated. I really want to like her, but she makes it so damn hard sometimes.
When Girls first came out, I got on my feminist high horse and defended her until I was blue in the face, and I stand by many things I said at the time. She was showcasing a side of twenty-something female behaviour that I hadn’t seen portrayed on television before, but I sure as hell recognized it from personal experiences. She was also putting herself on display, gleefully and rebelliously, and I loved it. I am a proud, card-carrying member of Team Chunk and I am always happy to see a heavier looking girl on television who isn’t perpetuating that ‘fat person fall down and go boom’ schtick. She was exposing a side of women that is eccentric, neurotic and not pretty, and I related to that a lot.
Then … things started getting icky. I started to loathe the show due to its treatment of Adam Driver’s character as a romantic character after (spoiler alert) he came all over his girlfriend without her consent. Then there is the lack of minority characters in the show— this has been dissected and discussed by people far smarter and more informed than I, so I won’t go into that much here.
Now, Lena is facing accusations of sexual abuse over her new memoir. I have read as much as I possibly can in regards to what she wrote in her new autobiography Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned”, and in my own admittedly unprofessional opinion, the behaviour she details sounds a lot like sexual abuse.
As with the controversy over the lack of minority characters in Girls, I’ll leave the in-depth analysis to the professionals. That said, you don’t need a psych degree to realize that if a few of the passages about Lena’s relationship with her six-years-younger sister had been written by a man, they would have provoked a wholly different reaction from a lot of Dunham’s supporters.
For example:
“As she (Grace, Lena’s sister) grew, I took to bribing her time and affection: one dollar in quarters if I could do her makeup like a “motorcycle chick.” Three pieces of candy if I could kiss her on the lips for five seconds. Whatever she wanted to watch on TV if she would just “relax on me.” Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl, I was trying.”
“She was afraid to sleep alone and would begin asking me around 5:00 P.M. every day whether she could sleep with me. I put on a big show of saying no, taking pleasure in watching her beg and sulk, but eventually I always relented. Her sticky, muscly little body thrashed beside me every night as I read Anne Sexton, watched reruns of SNL, sometimes even as I slipped my hand into my underwear to figure some stuff out.”
If, say, Channing Tatum had written the above, I don’t think Jezebel would be rushing to publish defensive articles, leaving out the most damning quotes— I think they would be baying for blood and writing about the abuse of power imbalances and the romanticizing of sexual exploitation. The behaviour Dunham describes is not acceptable. There is nothing wrong with childhood sexual exploration in general; it’s natural. Bribing for physical favours like kisses and ‘relaxing on her’ is not normal though; it’s predatory. We need to stop and reflect why we have a knee-jerk reaction to justify such behaviour when it is a woman who admits to doing such things.
For me, all of this illustrates that the disturbing world of child sex abuse is larger and far more complicated than we commonly think. It’s not always a sleazy adult male inviting kids to sit on his lap, sometimes it’s a trusted older sister who is manipulating her considerably younger sibling for her own pleasure.
Sometimes people aren’t aware that they are sexualizing a child, but it is still happening – and still hurting – just the same. I’m not saying Lena Dunham is a full-on child molester, but she is guilty of some serious, potentially damaging behaviour. Brushing this aside as innocent childhood exploration, and willfully turning a blind eye to the legitimately concerning aspects of the behaviour is not the progressive thing to do. I hope that if anything, this controversy opens up a dialogue about the many ways a child can be sexualized – greater awareness might help us identify such behaviour in situations that we aren’t conditioned to expect it.
As for me and Lena, I’m sad to say our relationship is pretty much dunzo.
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