by Joy Press
“Did Girls romanticize a rapist?” asked Ms. magazine’s media blog, echoing the alarm of some viewers. The situation, sex that drifts into a coercive and degrading gray zone, was probably recognizable to many women. “This one incident on Girls is so universal and so unspoken and so prevalent, that seeing it on television was incredible and revolutionary,” Rae Alexandra blogged in SF Weekly. That the perpetrator, Adam, was a troubled but basically good-hearted character only underlined the horror of the scenario.
“When people started saying, ‘Is that scene rape?’ I never thought that, not for one second,” says Konner. “It was an upsetting scene,” she says, one intended to ambiguously probe ideas of consent, “but we have a lot of upsetting scenes.” Like many earlier Girls episodes, it also seemed to highlight how much the Internet’s pornucopia of instant-access, ultragraphic, and grotesquely unrealistic sexual imagery has warped male expectations of sex. Dunham later told a reporter, “In some ways, all the sex on the show is a rebuke to porn . . . My entire sex life has been against that backdrop.”
The day they shot that scene “was a solemn day on set,” Konner recalls. “Shiri and Adam were incredibly kind with each other when it wasn’t shooting, and it was a really safe space.”
Dunham, who directed the episode, says the secret is that she always films “with the female gaze in mind,” a term that bounces off feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s concept of the “male gaze.” Her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” describes how a camera becomes a stand-in for the masculine eye, presenting women as objects of male sexual desire in movies (as well as art, literature, TV, etc.). “If there is a perspective in the scene, it is a woman’s perspective,” Dunham continues. “If there is a sense that somebody is experiencing something, it’s usually the woman’s experience—even if it’s her [feeling of] distance from the act.”
Ironically, the other controversial episode of that season revolved around sex so sweetly consensual and fulfilling that some viewers found it unrealistic to the point of absurdity. “One Man’s Trash” unfurls like a luminous indie film in which Hannah embarks on a whirlwind fling with a debonair forty-two-year-old doctor. They meet when Joshua (Patrick Wilson) comes into the coffee shop where Hannah works to complain that someone is dumping trash in the cans outside his brownstone. She goes to his house to confess, and a casual encounter turns into a tryst. For once, Hannah seems totally at ease: she looks sensual and lovely as she wakes up in his expensive white sheets, joyful as they play Ping-Pong topless in his stylish sunroom. It’s as if Hannah has stepped through the looking glass and, as she notes in the episode, into a Nancy Meyers movie (Meyers being a writer/director known for high-end rom-coms such as It’s Complicated and The Intern set in beautifully chic houses). They have mutually satisfying sex, one of the few times this ever happens on Girls. Hannah actually asks him to make her come, and the camera stays on their faces as he touches her.
“She has a good orgasm, which we had never shown before,” Konner proclaims. “Every other time, she is pretending!” Eventually, though, Hannah’s anxiety intrudes, and she drains the fun out of this fantasy. As a woman who prides herself on shunning materialism in favor of experience, she feels ashamed at how much she enjoys his comfortable life. She ultimately overshares until she has broken the spell. When Hannah leaves his apartment, she throws out his trash—and never mentions the affair to anyone.
Some viewers and male recappers responded to the episode with disbelief: why would this gorgeous man want to have sex with someone who looks like Lena Dunham? Peter Martin at Esquire even suggested the whole story line had to be a dream sequence. No matter that there is a grand tradition in TV and movies of male nerds pairing themselves with conventionally attractive women.
A lyrical interlude, “One Man’s Trash” served as a riposte to all the body shaming that surrounded the show. “I think people expected Hannah to hate her body more,” Dunham says now. “Hannah has a lot of problems, but being fat isn’t one of them. She always considered herself sexually desirable; she always hit on people. All that stuff about ‘Could Patrick Wilson ever sleep with Hannah?’ was such a boring conversation!” she continues, her voice accelerating with annoyance. “Of course he would. One of the sexiest things is having a positive relationship to your own body. How many women do we all know who barely eat food and are constantly working toward a better appearance who can’t find a boyfriend? And how many women do we know who subsist on Big Macs and are in constant relationships?”
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Over the six years that Girls was on the air, Dunham got very good at apologizing—not for Hannah’s behavior but for her own. She had talked about her characters sensing “no clear boundary anymore between public and private”; she mirrored that off-screen by casually dropping her thoughts on the Internet as if she were just another twenty-six-year-old woman with dozens of social media followers rather than millions. There was the time she tweeted (and later deleted) “a not so great molestation joke,” and the podcast about reproductive rights in which she quipped, “I still haven’t had an abortion, but I wish I had.” Then there was her decision to defend one of Girls’s writers, Murray Miller, from a serious sexual assault accusation in the wake of Harvey Weinstein’s downfall; after outcry on social media, Dunham quickly apologized for undermining Miller’s accuser, noting in part, “As feminists, we live and die by our politics, and believing women is the first choice we make every single day when we wake up.”
“Sometimes I do just want to cradle Lena in my bosom,” Konner says tenderly. “There was one time two years ago when she started this Twitter war, and she would just not stop. So I took a taxi to her house and literally made her put her phone down. Part of why people respond to her is she says what she feels and what she means. So you don’t want her to lose that part of herself and check every single thing she wants to say, because that is the opposite of who Lena is.”
There’s a thread that connects the fourteen-year-old Lena who started a stand-up act by goofing on parental alcoholism with the twenty-something Lena who attracted scandal the way streetlights draw moths. Dunham’s father presciently foresaw that her disarming humor might cause problems. Before Girls was a speck on the horizon, Lena mentioned in a 2010 New Yorker profile that a joke she told friends (about sleeping in her parents’ bed) turned into a rumor in her social circle because it seemed so plausible. Her father warned that this was a cautionary tale: “It’s funny to say, ‘I sleep with my parents,’ but it’s also too close to being massively weird. And you will have to navigate this for the rest of your life.” This inability or refusal to pay attention to propriety enables her to be groundbreaking in her art. Yet this very same lack of boundaries constantly lands her in trouble in real life.
The biggest backlash came in response to unguarded disclosures in her 2014 memoir Not That Kind of Girl. Describing her childhood relationship with self-possessed younger sister Grace, Dunham recalls bribing the toddler for affection: “Three pieces of candy if I could kiss her on the lips for five seconds . . . Basically anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl, I was trying.” It is not a portrait of depravity but of a needy big sister. Then there is another scene in which the seven-year-old Dunham’s curiosity about vaginas drove her to examine Grace’s, and she found that her sister “had stuffed six or seven pebbles in there. My mother removed them patiently while Grace cackled, thrilled that her prank had been such a success.”
Right-wing media outlets grabbed these quotes and ran with them, catapulting the anecdotes into molestation accusations. Kevin Williamson at The National Review declared, “There is no non-horrific interpretation of this episode.” Truth Revolt posted an article entitled “Lena Dunham Describes Sexually Abusing Her Little Sister.” Dunham apologized on Twitter and in statements to the press for having written something that might offend or trigger abuse sufferers. Grace used the opportunity to back up Lena and throw down a challenge: “As a queer person, I�
�m committed to people narrating their own experiences, determining for themselves what has and has not been harmful. [To]day, like every other day, is a good day to think about how we police the sexualities of young women, queer, and trans people.”
Dunham’s twelve-city Not That Kind of Girl US tour showcased a politically engaged, outspokenly feminist side of Dunham that was very different from the hipster narcissist Hannah Horvath. She partnered with Emily’s List and Planned Parenthood, led writing workshops for young women, and engaged in lively conversations with fellow feminist culture icons such as Zadie Smith, Amy Schumer, and Carrie Brownstein. As she told New York Times Magazine, “I want to make clear that the utterly self-involved, politically disengaged character I play on Girls is not who I am.”
When Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2016, Dunham campaigned for her with a sense of once-in-a-generation urgency. She made a self-parodying rap video on behalf of Clinton (“Sensual Pantsuit”) and delivered stump speeches. In Iowa City, clad in a white dress emblazoned with Hillary’s name, Dunham told the crowd, “I can’t talk about Hillary Clinton without also acknowledging that she has survived horrific gendered attacks on nearly every single aspect of her character with tremendous grace and aplomb”—something that clearly resonated for the Girls creator. “The way she’s been treated by the media is just more evidence of the anger that exists toward women, particularly ambitious women, and the way we are not allowed to exist on our own merits, rather than as extensions of powerful men.” Her support for Clinton reached its zenith with a speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.
Yet the molestation chatter continued to dog Dunham’s footsteps, seemingly drifting in parallel with the cloud of aspersions looming over Hillary’s head. Twitter bubbled noxiously with rancid rancor from Trump supporters, jibes such as “As if Lena Dunham wasn’t already repulsive enough by her ‘looks’ alone, oh and yeah child molestation can’t forget that.” Milo Yiannopoulos, then a senior editor at Breitbart, even publicly offered to buy Dunham a first-class one-way ticket to Toronto after Trump was elected president.
One week after Clinton’s loss, political writer Anand Giridharadas grappled with the election results on Twitter, and with the ideological chasm that split the country in half. He named Lena Dunham as an archetypal representative of the cultural elite now being demonized by heartland populists: “We just had a contest that pitted 61 million of us against 61 million of us. But now these vast, diverse camps are being boiled down . . . Joe Sixpack vs. Lena Dunham, Coors Light versus Champagne, Cheetos vs. arugula, down-home vs. out-of-touch.” Giridharadas, who aligned himself with Dunham, argued that while the coastal progressives were “guilty of some out-of-touchness,” this so-called elite was nevertheless “in coalition with the most vulnerable people in America . . . Black and brown people, Latinos, Muslims, women, immigrants, LGBTQ folks, the very poorest, the incarcerated, refugees, and more.”
As if to make good on that description, Dunham showed up at a postelection gathering in LA organized by House of Cards creator Beau Willimon to inspire activism. Clad all in white, Dunham stood in front of the crowd and, in a high, wavering voice, advocated for groups that support LGBTQ teens and sex-trafficking survivors before introducing the regional director of Planned Parenthood.
The trick that Girls managed to pull off was allowing Dunham’s feminism to inform its fictional world without seeming overtly didactic. “Everything she writes is pushing forward feminist ideals,” Sarah Heyward suggests, “but that doesn’t mean her characters don’t sleep with someone for the wrong reasons. Because people do sleep with people for the wrong reasons! Hannah is never going to be a perfect feminist, because no one is.”
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When the series began, Girls’s heroines were in their early twenties; by season six, they were thirty years old. Dunham herself turned thirty in May 2016. The media reported excitedly on her birthday, the symbolic date on which a millennial female icon stopped being a twenty-something: People noted that Taylor Swift posted a card for her on Instagram (it paid homage to their “long talks, arts and crafts projects, and running-into-each-others’-arms-hugs”), while New Yorker editor David Remnick celebrated the day on the magazine’s podcast.
In addition to showrunning a successful TV series, Dunham and Konner had now expanded their hub of feminist activity by creating a newsletter for young women, Lenny Letter, and a production company, A Casual Romance. The latter produced several documentaries (including one about the illustrator of Dunham’s favorite children’s book, Eloise) and Max, an HBO pilot that never aired about a feminist magazine writer in the 1960s. In her personal life, Dunham had settled into a long-term relationship with Jack Antonoff of the band fun.
Dunham could also take pride at having been in the vanguard of a TV “fem-o-lution,” as Liz Lemon once called it. When she first conceived Girls, there was nothing like it anywhere on television. “Looking at the landscape in this current moment and then looking back to the landscape before Lena started, it’s hard to deny how she’s changed television,” Judd Apatow says.
The landscape now changed, Dunham decided it was time to bow out gracefully. As soon as the producers and HBO agreed that Girls would end with the sixth season, the writers set out to discover what it might look like for Hannah, Jessa, Marnie, and Shoshanna to grow up. Konner and Dunham had begun joking about how to conclude the series before it even premiered.
“I remember being at SXSW, we were in separate hotel rooms talking on the phone. We pitched how everyone would die,” Konner recalls with a throaty laugh. “I think it was inspired by the end of Six Feet Under, which was so satisfying—and we were like, what if we go the opposite direction and just make it really unsatisfying?”
Dunham says it was important to her that the ending “didn’t feel like it flew in the face of the aesthetic of the rest of the show, which was not a super plot-driven, plot-heavy, finality kind of show. And that it feel authentic—which is such an overused word—but so that you would have a sense of their growth without it being too tidy.” Her hope was that viewers would see Hannah as “a more empathic, engaged, and wise person” than they had previously understood her to be. “She may not be Joan Didion, but she is able to write and share her stories in a compelling way.”
The final season’s shoot was riddled with problems. Dunham ticks off a litany of complaints: “I was sick, I had surgery twice, I broke my elbow, we had actors starting rehearsals for other things and being in Star Wars and blah blah blah . . .” On top of all that, one of the sets caught fire, and the production had to switch plans at the last minute when their Florida shooting location was infested with the Zika virus.
“There were moments when I just thought, Does whatever is the higher power want us to get this show done?” Dunham recalls. But, she adds, “what is interesting is that all that pain and anxiety—it doesn’t show on the screen. I am the only one who knows ‘Oh, that is the day that I felt like my arm was going to fall off because I did physical therapy and it made me cry.’ ‘That was the day that I had to totally reconfigure our entire August schedule!’ ” Is that a testament to their professionalism? Dunham pauses, and then admits, “I guess by the end we did get good at what we were doing.”
Sitting in a downtown Manhattan lounge late in the summer of 2016 as the production enters its final weeks, Konner sounds nostalgic. “We just shot the last day in Hannah’s apartment, which was heartbreaking,” she says, her mouth crinkling into a frown. “We were looking at all the pictures on the walls of our sets that have been there for years—photos we took [of the actresses] before the show even started, that we used as pictures of their friendship. I looked at them and I thought, Who are those babies? I could barely recognize them. Six years at those ages is such a long time.”
Several months later, working on the final edits for the series, Dunham confides that the last shoots were intense. “I was not quite prepared for how emotional it would be, you know? It’s not like anyone
is dying or anyone is breaking up, but, in a way, it is like someone is dying and someone is breaking up. We definitely had that sense of intensity and just like, every day there would be a new good-bye and every day there would be a new sense of grief.”
As they moved toward the finale, each of the central characters began to grasp at maturity: Shoshanna trades stringent career goals for figuring out what she enjoys doing; Marnie begins to see her Pollyanna-ish tendencies as a liability; Jessa tries to stop chasing self-destructive thrills. And Hannah—well, like Murphy Brown and Liz Lemon before her, Hannah contemplates what it would feel like to care about someone else’s problems as much as her own. She approaches motherhood in the same dysfunctional, vaguely self-defeating way she approaches everything: hoping her flawed best will be good enough. In April 2017, the characters, actresses, and fans all went their separate ways—out into a world more unstable and threatening to women than many of us could ever have imagined when Girls began.
CHAPTER 7
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Gross Encounters:
Inside Amy Schumer and Broad City
Amy Schumer takes to the streets in April 2014 for Inside Amy Schumer.
Broad City’s Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson make the city their playground in December 2014.
“On its best day, my pussy smells like a small barnyard animal—like a goat at a petting zoo,” Amy Schumer confided to me—well, to me and thousands of other people at the Los Angeles Forum.