Lena Dunham. The very name conjures images of the ultimate precious snowflake – a being who thrives on a steady diet of inherited privilege, manufactured outrage, and reassurances that she’d totally be this successful even if she hadn’t been born with wealth and connections most young people would kill for.
The last time Lena held her breath and stamped her little feet until society reluctantly agreed to fork over a 16th minute of relevance, she was complaining about Kanye West’s “Famous” video.
Now, this feels a bit like the time we had to begrudgingly applaud Donald Trump’s comments about Caitlyn Jenner’s right to use the bathroom in Trump Tower, but Dunham had a point there.
Some say the Kanye video was exploitative to the point of being criminal.
Pretty much everyone agrees it was just plain damn creepy.
So we’re with Lena on that one, but yesterday she squandered whatever goodwill she might have built up with two of her most eyeroll-inducing tantrums to date.
No, she’s not protesting Justin Bieber lyrics again, but her latest pet causes might be even more ridiculous.
We’ll take these in order of least to most ridiculous so that you have time to judge for yourself if you have the constitution for Dunham’s most foolish “controversy” to date.
She kicked things off yesterday with a complaint about Jason Bourne.
Yes, she has a problem with the fictional spy portrayed by Matt Damon, and no, it’s not the fact that his new movie isn’t titled Bourne Again.
Lena reposted (then quickly deleted) an Instagram call to arms encouraging fans to deface promotional art for the new Bourne film, because some of the posters portray Matt Damon holding a gun.
“Good idea … let’s go,” Dunham wrote before dozens pointed out that such action is 100% guaranteed to have zero effect on gun violence and will at best just get some impressionable kids arrested.
And we’re talking about kids who will get arrested and go to jail, Lena, not arrested and dropped off at their brownstone for a stern lecture followed by a warm mug of fair trade “healing cocoa.”
Okay, if you endured that, you might be able to handle the truly ridiculous Lena outburst of the week.
In this one, she claims that serving sushi in a college dining hall amounts to cultural appropriation, and the kids at her alma mater should rise up in passionate protest of … California rolls. Seriously:
“There are now big conversations at Oberlin, where I went to college, about cultural appropriation and whether the dining hall sushi and banh mi disrespect certain cuisines,” Dunham said in a recent interview.
“ The press reported it as, “How crazy are Oberlin kids?” But to me, it was actually, ‘Right on."”
She continued, “I understand them. I also have entirely too much time on my hands and parents who ruined me at a young age by indulging every shrieking nonsense monster I birthed out of my mouth like Melisandre in Season 2 of Game of Thrones.”
Okay, we may have made that last quote up.