Saving Lena Dunham
I volunteer to reclaim Lena from the woke mob. Because she's worth it...
Do they run Big Sister programmes for rich, famous women? If they do, I’ll sign up to be a mentor because I think Lena Dunham needs me.
In case any of you dear readers aren’t familiar, Big Sisters is a programme in the US and the UK that provides mentorship to what we euphemistically call “at-risk youth.” It matches adults with kids and teens from challenging backgrounds, with the aim of helping them “avoid risky behaviour”. When you are a Big Sister, you meet up with your Little Sister and do wholesome activities like take trips to the museum or the park and if there are problems in her life, and let’s assume there are, you talk it out.
Unlike most “at-risk” youth, Lena Dunham is rich and famous, and she isn’t particularly young anymore either. But we do live in opposite socio-economic realities — her rich and famous, me poor and obscure. Plus, she is younger than me and she is definitely is at-risk.
At risk of what, you ask? Of being lost to wokeness forever. Also: she’s trapped in a vicious cycle of apologising for being herself; she is definitely a victim of cyberbullying. And for all her recent Instagram posts about loving her latest project, being at peace and loving the sober life— she doesn’t look like she feels any of those things. Girl looks lonely. And huge.
Here’s what I would do if I was Lena Dunham’s Big Sister: we’d read Camille Paglia and Jordan Peterson together. I’d show her videos of Candace Owens so she’d learn to see past the harmful negative stereotype that all black women are left-wing feminists. We’d meet up in the park and do burpees because let’s face it, we both have a lot of weight to lose, and we’d laugh at how ridiculous we look, and then high-five when we’re done. I’d introduce her to my chef/small-business owner boyfriend, so he could carefully school her in how the minimum wage is an evil government tool designed to keep working-class people poor and undermine financial independence. And most importantly, I’d be her shoulder to cry on when the jealous race bullies and mean girls attack her — which happens every time she has any kind of success whatsoever. I’d be all like, “Lena, it just drives them crazy that a chunky over-sharer got a TV show while they toil away at click-bait content farms, drowning in hook-ups and student loan debt, starving themselves and binging on cocaine or Adderall with their many roommates.”
Lena is just naturally gifted with insight into the human condition, and as such I suspect there is a tiny little voice inside her questioning the woke orthodoxy. She’s just too much of a people-pleaser to say so, especially in our current Neo-Maoist cultural climate. But I think, if it was presented to her as an opportunity to “listen and learn”, she might just be open to my shaping of her still-impressionable, youngish mind.
I just got done reading her 2014 memoir “Not that kind of girl: a young woman tells you what she’s learned,” and because Lena Dunham is the openest of open books, the memoir contains exactly zero surprises. She is the pretty much the same over-sharing, self-obsessed, disarmingly sweet neurotic weirdo that she played on tv. A bit nicer, actually. She recounts painfully embarrassing and gross stories about her sex life and her character flaws as enthusiastically and with as much detail as most women describe a particularly fun brunch. She pries open her chubby body, she lays bare her disordered mind, with nary a thought for what she’s giving away.
And that’s where she needs my help, because I have a suspicion that’s the kind of thing you do when you are young and then regret when you hit middle age. You look back on your enthusiastic youth and wish you had kept a little more for yourself. You wish you had not made yourself quite so available to that Brooklyn carpenter with a dusty loft, or spent so many hours trying to impress an influential editor. We all did that kind of stuff. But I would have definitely warned her that she would live to regret making public the story of that time some boy wiped his penis on her curtains after sex. Nobody needed to know that, Lena.
But she deserves to succeed because her brutally transparent treatment of her own flaws, physical and otherwise, is downright radical in an age of fake beauty, fake virtue and fake kindness.
Most importantly: she’s humane, though not always to herself. She’s curious about other people, despite her profitable self-obsession. She brings together the left and the right: as the object of resentment from both vengeful Millennials, and predictable conservatives whose criticisms of her are both humourless and banal.
As her sassy, straight-talking Gen X mentor, I could help her weather the PR storms she causes with clumsy statements like “I wish I had an abortion” — which was immediately greeted with howls of opportunistic offence but was actually a statement that contained a nugget of something interesting and real. Under pressure, she apologised and blamed a “delusional girl persona.” Which only faintly addressed where that crass statement came from: a mental space that many safe and well-off young girls live in, in which they yearn for drama, pain, and loss. Because it is out of those terrible things that adult women are forged — and girls want nothing more than to be bad-ass, world-weary, adult women.
When I was 15, my best friend was a 16 year old aspiring actress from a famous Yankee family who dearly loved her mother. One day, as we tromped around Rome (we lived in Italy because we had artist parents who wanted to paint and write), full of the nervous energy of recently-released-into-the-wild adolescents, she confessed to me: “Sometimes I wish my mother would die.” She whispered these shocking words knowing full well how transgressive they were.
But I understood. She did not mean she wanted her mother to literally die — she meant that she longed for the kind of extreme experience that would feed her ravenous desire to live beyond the safe confines of her sheltered girlish existence. She meant that she wanted to experience adversity, then overcome the suffering. She wanted to participate in one of life’s great trials (the death of someone you love) and emerge out the other end, wounded but interesting. How else do you become the hero of your own story? No young person who has an easy and comfortable life actually wants it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that paradox didn’t feature in some way in her new show about beautiful young people working in the high-pressure world of international finance, set in London. Judging from the show’s trailer , Lena took to heart the most frequent criticism of her work, which was its lack of diversity. I just hope that it isn’t tailored more to the optics of skin colour than the far more interesting palette of human emotion and experience, of which she is a true artist.
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I too love Lena Dunham’s work, and loved her book “Not that Kind of Girl.” She is like the brainchild of Woody Allen and Nora Ephron. And yes, she is very woke. It is hard for me to get my mind around how a gifted artist like Lena does not understand that without objective reality (something woke-ism denies the validity of) there can be no human condition. Without a human condition there is no art. Maybe she will get there on her own some day, but she certainly could use the services of a Big Sister like you, Jenny.