More on Lena Dunham

I'm finding the Lena Dunham controversy much more interesting than I would have thought.

The dust is settling and the opinions are forming; the majority are not in Dunham's favor.

Only a small part of the majority echo Williamson's contention that Dunham is more alien than artist. Most are satisfied to say that Dunham's ongoing manipulation and sexual play with her sister was abusive and leave it at that.

Certainly, this is more grist for the culture war mill. It shouldn't be a surprise that the women-of-color faction of feminism were quick to disown Dunham but another rift in the solidarity rose to the surface. Many feminists, it appears, found their ideology because it's the loudest voice against sexual abuse; Dunham's confessions struck a chord with them.

As for myself, I've kept an eye on Dunham over the last few years because I always pay attention when a new "genius" is introduced to the culture. As I've written about many times before, the arts and entertainment field--particularly the journalism covering it--has been dominated by progressives for years. Dunham, in particular, came to us anointed as, at least, a potential "voice of a generation." But what had she done to deserve it?

A Redditor linked this article, "Falling Down the Rabbit Hole of NYC’s Lena Dunham Obsession," published last January, before her book was published. It's a compendium of Dunham mentions in the NYC press.

Here's the thing:  It goes back to 1998. Dunham was born in 1986. Not even a teenager, here she is in Vogue (!):

Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham's eleven-year-old daughter, Lena, has a street edge that could leave even Miss Schnabel feeling momentarily inadequate. 'I tried to model this after Helmut Lang,' says Lena, showing off a shift she sewed herself. Her fashion pronouncements are something you'd expect from a woman (at least) three times her age: 'I tend not to go for trends. You can only wear them for two weeks . . . . I really like Jil Sander, but it's so expensive.... I find Calvin Klein really hard to respect because he's everywhere. I view him as a clothesmonger . . . . Manolo is really classy.'

This particular excerpt has stuck with me because it shows a real disconnect between the real world and the insulated NYC elite. Dunham here smacks of the most irritating type of precociousness, the kind in which she affects a sophistication which she couldn't possibly claim. She finds Calvin Klein "really hard to respect" because he's a "clothesmonger?"

Most adults would recognize this as creative mimicry. The child has heard this type of discussion and is more or less pretending to be an adult discussing adult things in an adult way. Kind people will listen with gentle tolerance but take very little stock in what the child is saying.

Apparently, if one is a member of the artistic-literary-publishing NYC elite, one hears a precocious heiress and decides that she must be a brilliant young thing, worthy of quoting in an international publication. Truly we must be a special breed, the thinking seems to be here, otherwise, how else would we have such remarkable children?

At fifteen, the NYT quotes her discussing a hangout that her fellow classmates frequent:  " I have a friend who's 36 who went to St. Ann's, and she used to go to U.T.B." She goes on to wax poetic about the spot, but two things are more important. One, a fifteen-year-old has a friend who is 36? Second, a fifteen-year-old making her second appearance in the international press?

When she was sixteen, the NYT sent a reporter to cover her vegan dinner party. The article points out that only she and a friend are actually vegans, though Dunham proudly decides to enforce her gustatory ideology by making everyone remove their shoes on the premise that they are probably leather. They denounce/listen-ironically to Justin Timberlake and Dunham tells the reporter, "I go to one party every five months. I watch everyone get drunk and I'm really freaked out. I enjoy it, but then I don't want to see it again for five months."

By this time we can see that Dunham's precociousness has not only gone unchallenged but encouraged. We can also see what kind of person she is becoming, using intellectual positioning and "enlightened" self-absorption as a way to assert status.

The beginning of Dunham's public profile as a creator came at 21 in the NYT for a series for Nerve Video (Remember Nerve?) in which she films herself in Spanx, has unappetizing sex and then has her partner insult her. Sound familiar?

From then on, everything Dunham did got attention from the NYC press and, thus, international exposure. She followed the Nerve series with another web series that featured well-known NYC art and fashion figures, then the film Tiny Furniture, followed by full-bloom national status and Girls.

Three things:

First, is there a better example of how the entertainment market is broken? Dunham's talent isn't even an issue here--she could be twice as talented or half as talented and have the exact same career. More importantly, her work could be entertaining, but how can one believe that her tiny and insular experience could give her anything important to say? Looking at her history, it appears that she was groomed to be a media darling.

Second, like I discussed the other day, a serious, disinterested look at Dunham's public persona reveals not depth but narcissism. Her "courage" for displaying her average naked body and her willingness to look pathetic, her inability to create vehicles that don't star herself, all point to a desperate need for attention. She would have taken Paris Hilton's path if she had the looks for it. Since she didn't, she took the role of the smartest person in the room. Since the room was full of the children of editors and artists and fashion designers, they thought she was very smart, indeed--smart enough to better the world.

Finally, Kevin D. Williamson's original intention in his review of Dunham's book was buried under the "molestation or not?" controversy, but I think that he's introduced a valuable technique to our arsenal. The Dunham who comes across, in her own words, is alien. Her priorities, her experience with the difficulties of life and her coddling by the national press are all light-years away from the lives of her audience. We should be doing more of this.

Three Thoughts on Lena Dunham and Kevin D. Williamson

I

To say Kevin D. Williamson's article about Lena Dunham last week was about exposing her as a child molester--which has been the takeaway--is to miss the myriad subtleties in the piece.

I recommend reading it, if only to show how much craft can be put into something so short. Williamson takes Dunham's month-old memoirs and eviscerates her public persona. It's a worthy task because Dunham is well-versed in the Millennial tricks of making her points without having to stand her ground.

For example, he discusses how she has her character on Girls announce to her parents that she is the "voice of her generation," which she qualifies 1) by having her fictional character say it, 2) by having that character be intoxicated as she says it, and 3) by undercutting it with a joke afterwards. Yet Dunham herself is more than happy to allow others to call her that.

Dunham's artistic cowardice isn't as important as what it says about her real-life statements. She's willing to have everyone believe something she's not brave enough to say unequivocally. Williamson takes great offense to her discussion of a "rape" she experienced while at Oberlin College. Thankfully, he doesn't take the bait that the media in general did when the book was published--he doesn't fall into the argument of whether the murky incident was consensual or not.

Instead, he takes issue to Dunham's abuse of her stature in the context of her refusal to take a definable stand. As for the latter, she doesn't call the experience "rape"--she has others say that for her. As for the abuse of prominence, he points out that it took him two minutes to track down a "Barry" who was a campus Republican at Oberlin during her time there. Since Dunham tells us that this Barry also raped a woman so viciously that blood spattered the walls, she paints a very ugly picture of an identifiable man who has no comparable platform to defend himself and who was only accused indirectly.

As for the allegations of Dunham "molesting" her younger sister, framing her as an abuser doesn't seem to be Williamson's intent:

If there is such a thing as actually abusing a child through excessive generosity and overindulgence, then Lena Dunham’s parents are child abusers. Her father, Carroll Dunham, is a painter noted for his primitive brand of highbrow pornography, his canvases anchored by puffy neon-pink labia; her photographer mother filled the family home with nude pictures of herself, “legs spread defiantly.” Self-styled radicals from old money, they were not the sort of people inclined to enforce even the most lax of boundaries.

What Williamson makes a case for is that Dunham's parents, with their post-tradition liberality, created an excessively sexualized environment for their children and that the sexual interaction between Dunham and her sister comes from that. This point has been obscured as the right has pounced on the fact that Dunham's self-reported behavior could be labelled as abusive and her supporters (and Dunham herself) label it childish experimentation. Williamson's article shows that Dunham is a very disordered person, which should force us to question the value of her work.

I wonder if the controversy will have a lasting effect on Dunham's career. Even her supporters have to reckon with the emotional snapshots she's given them. Her sister is six years younger than her--the power dynamics of an older sister bribing her with candy in exchange for long kisses and employing "anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl" certainly force one to look at her as something of a manipulative bully. Williamson points out that in an episode of Girls, Dunham's character tells an employer that she will punish him for his harassment by writing an essay about him and using his real name. Rumors about her on-set behavior problems have circulated from the very beginning, mostly centering on her utter self-absorption at the expense of everyone else.

The mystique of irony and ambiguity is difficult to pull off in the long term; eventually most people figure out what is being obscured. She's beginning to come across as a woman who feels she's always justified in doing whatever she's done, no matter what others' feelings may be. Viewers might come to see that, underneath the labels of "irony" and "satire," Dunham's characters are really accurate depictions of their creator.

II

Ace of Spades asks the right question about the Dunham uproar:  "So Did the Media Miss Lena Dunham's Hair-Raising Stories About Her Sister, Or Did They Bury It?"

Ace supports the theory that the press intentionally suppressed Dunham's childhood revelations, rather than the theories that the press either didn't actually read her book or found the stories unremarkable.

Of course, it's probably a bit of all three but Ace doesn't consider that her book was published by a pillar of the media, Random House. If the media thought that what she had to say was something to be suppressed, how did it get published in the first place?

What I think is that this is a matter of Dunham's mystique working in her favor. The artist's reputation precedes her, so any work that's produced is pre-qualified as Art. The problems of the work can be deemed "challenging" and mistakes are examined as if they are intentional.

Dunham came to Girls with a couple of well-received indie works but, more importantly, an of-the-moment personal package. In the incestuous world of New York media, she fit right in as a wealthy scion of a Mayflower-Jewish marriage, educated at progressive schools, with an artistic family. She spoke the same language as the media elite--how hard do you think it was for her to raise funding, cast actors and recruit a talented crew? Consider, as well, that Girls had a great deal of attention even before it premiered, despite Dunham's negligible profile.

Add to this Dunham's apparent narcissism. One trope one reads in critiques of our culture is that narcissism is, to some extent, an advantage. The self-confidence and assertiveness of a narcissist initially seems to be a positive in a competitive environment. In my own life, I've been amazed at how easily people accept others' self-aggrandizement. It's easy to imagine that Dunham's belief in her own exquisite taste convinced her more-submissive colleagues.

Dunham is also of-the-moment in the public sphere:

A great deal has been made of Lena Dunham’s weight, not least by Lena Dunham. She may be Hollywood fat, or Manhattan–below–125th Street fat, but she is in fact an utterly ordinary specimen of American womanhood, and she would not be thought of as fat in Magnolia, Ark., or Craig, Colo., or even in the less rarefied sections of Brooklyn.

Dunham's physical appearance is, in reality, an advantage. She can be pointed at as an example of a "real woman," while still having enough beauty and youth to carry off a layer or two of makeup in a fashion magazine.

For an example of how her unconventionally-conventional body has benefited her, look at last spring's attack on a low-level entertainment reporter. At a panel, he asked her to explain her frequent nudity on the show. Girls producer Judd Apatow immediately berated the man as if he had told her she wasn't attractive enough to be naked on HBO; the think-pieces published for the next week took the same tactic. However, nothing the reporter said indicated that his question was about how unattractive he thought she was; his question was about her artistic choice--specifically, one scene in which she was playing ping-pong topless for no apparent reason. (However, this was dangerous territory. Asking why she was naked on screen for no good reason might make one think that she is a narcissist who wants all the attention, any way she can get it.)

Dunham also gets a lot of mileage out of the current feminist moment. She is the actor/writer/producer of her own show. She's not a Hollywood beauty. She brags about the wide variety of sexual encounters she's had. She's willing to pontificate about whatever the female/progressive issue of the day is and always comes to a vague pro-SJW opinion about it.

All that is to say that Dunham--through inheritance and inclination--has the right package to warrant the attention of the media. She is an Important Artist.

Being an Important Artist, we are to automatically accept her expressions even if they are off-putting to our tiny minds. She is the one with the fine-tuned sensibility, not us, so we can assume that her "cute" stories about sexual shenanigans with her much younger sister are as morally-insignificant as she says they are.

I think that those critics that read her book weren't sure what to make of those confessions. Chances are, they thought their own reactions were "problematic," that they'd internalized society's sex-negativity. Dunham is anointed and no one wanted to look out of step by appearing to be confused by her statements.

There's something even more sad about the lack of coverage. Was there no single journalist in the media who at least thought he could make a name for himself by denouncing her? Is the media now so monolithic that we can't even rely on their self-interest? Say what you want about the viciousness of reporters--at least their lust for exposing people can keep you honest.

III

Finally, when Dunham is occasionally discussed on a right-leaning website, one can play an overdose-inducing drinking game by reading the comments. Take a shot for every comment in which a reader brags about not knowing who Dunham is or asks why the site is covering someone so worthless.

This tiresome pose is the reason why the right has been completely left behind culturally.

In the ongoing politicization of everything, the loss of the culture was the watershed. The right started acting as if arts and entertainment wasn't good enough to pay attention to and lost generations.

Culture, pop and otherwise, is the communal representation of what we value. By turning our backs on this fundamental part of the human experience, conservatives have lost their ability to contribute to this representation.

I've mentioned this before:  One of the struggles of the Catholic Church in modern times is that it answers questions we can no longer articulate. How can it explain the value of suffering in a world that defines people as monkeys hitting dopamine-release buttons? The reason that these questions and answers are lost is because conservatives have given up all interest in the means of understanding--our artistic culture.

Our culture has told us that Dunham is an Important Artist--at the very least, conservatives should be interested in whether she is or not. To think otherwise is to put one's head in the sand.