Even if you’ve never seen Girls, you’re probably familiar with and vaguely annoyed by Lena Dunham.
One of the most common criticisms of Dunham is that she’s fashioned herself into the poster girl for white, privileged Millennial entitlement, and she doesn’t seem to regret it.
(When a character that you created and portray refers to herself as the voice of her generation in the pilot episode of the show you executive produce, it sends a pretty unmistakable message.)
At this point, there are two different kinds of Lena Dunham controversies:
1. Those in which she dramatically overestimates how much people care about her opinion and/or attempts to create a controversy out of whole cloth to drum up the attention she seems to crave (see: griping about sushi and Jason Bourne).
2. Those in which her heart is in the right place, but she still manages to piss off both sides of a given debate. (see: somehow thinking it would be a good idea to publicly state that she wishes she’d had an abortion).
Today’s dust-up is sort of a combination of the two.
The above Glamour cover featuring Lena and her Girls co-stars debuted yesterday, and Ms. Dunham seized the opportunity to display her inflated sense of self-importance and outrage those she purports to defend at the same time.
Explaining her excitement for the cover on Instagram, Dunham wrote the following:
“What do I love most about our new Glamour Magazine cover, besides the fact that we’re all together, loving each other, I’d say that it’s the cellulite that has been revealed on my thigh. A triumph for womankind.”
Sigh.
For starters, hot pants aren’t a triumph for anything except the marketing geniuses at Forever 21, who figured out a way to charge $ 35 for one square foot of nylon.
More importantly, Lena needs to get over the idea that she and her wealthy, white friends are the trailblazers the world needs right now.
We’re about to inaugurate our most racist president since presidents literally owned slaves, and Dunham thinks she’s contributing to the national dialogue by showing some thigh on the cover of Glamour?
The worst part is, she’s currently googling herself, looking for articles like this one, so that she can put herself in the position of the victim, despite having been born squarely into the same Manhattan one-percent that gave us Donald Trump.
(Note to self: research possible genetic link between residents of the Upper East Side and chronically thin skin.)
The sad thing is, we applaud Lena’s efforts to silence body-shamers and bring attention to the importance of self-acceptance.
But this is one of those cases where even those who agree with a part of her message still find themselves put off by the messenger, as they’ve disagreed with her so many in the past that they’ve become entrenched in their anti-Lena sentiments.
Or they simply feel that her activism carries no weight, coming as it does from a place of tone-deaf entitlement.
Or they feel that she’s taken an important issue and forced her way to the center of it, so that all future conversations on the matter will also be conversations about Lena Dunham.
All of that said, some of the criticism of Dunham is unwarranted (The last season of Girls was the show’s strongest to date, and it significantly cut down on the self-important navel-gazing.), and she’s right that body-shaming trolls can all go to hell, regardless of who they’re bullyng.
The woman has talent, she just brings so many bad things to the table along with it.
Hopefully, after her show ends, she’ll disappear for a while, and come back when she’s less of a self-obsessed twenty-something.
*goes to Lena’s Wikipedia page*
Aw, she’s 30?! Crap.