C/D LENA DUNHAM (THE DEFINITIVE POLL)

Anna Holmes ‏@AnnaHolmes
Some of these audience questions are coming from people who remind me of certain internet commenters.

Anna Holmes ‏@AnnaHolmes
I think she was serious!

Anna Holmes ‏@AnnaHolmes
Question from 20-something female: "What are you setting out to do with the show if not to portray my life?"

Anna Holmes ‏@AnnaHolmes
"The criticisms that disappointed me were the whole privilege and nepotism thing."

UH OH

― lag∞n, Sunday, October 7, 2012 2:34 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the nepotism shit that was flying around abt. the parents of the lead actresses was pretty sexist and gross

bad company was pretty sexist and gross tho

sure but on the other hand why is ever actor on the show a child of someone noteworthy, its weird!

and i mean lol plz

Anna Holmes ‏@AnnaHolmes
"I have plenty of counter-arguments to that but it's not elegant to say them."

Mobutu Sese Seko ‏@Mobute
DUNHAM: "People accuse me of benefiting from nepotism and privilege, and I have a lot of mega-owns to disprove that, but I can't say them."

I don't think that's really Mobutu Sese Seko's twitter

i will not engage w/yr argument ill just say im v disappointed in you <-- this is not at all a typically privileged behavior

Anna Holmes ‏@AnnaHolmes
"I've been in therapy since I was 7 so I figured I'd cornered the market on self-criticism." --Dunham on processing critiques of @GirlsHBO.

i have already dealt w/this through the proper channels

i got over privileged young new yorkers being overrated and talented when the strokes happened

c0reY aNN cLaRk ‏@coreyannclark
Lena Dunham is trying to be so edgy too fast someone tell her to stop this always happens to nice girls when they get a haircut

tell us more tweets

i am right now getting v angry about and trying v hard not to get involved in a twitter argument about girls (not yet actually an argument, more a string of people saying how racist lena dunham is)

how is she...not?

i mean i haven't seen girls and have no comment on it but the amount of questionable shit she's come out with outside of it is...more than most

In the latter category, Dunham revealed what Louis C.K. said when he hugged her at the Emmys: “What you’re doing is really important.”

...comedy

we may have seen overlapping conversations earlier, lex, and a great deal of it was based on fake quotes what was pretty clearly a piece of satire.

+from

Said it before on the Girls thread, but it's a good sign for society that a show playing off of Jewish/Gentile differences gets labeled as all-white.

(aka homogenous)

jews r white

http://images.betterworldbooks.com/081/How-Jews-Became-White-Folks-9780813525907.jpg

bah I still haven't gotten ahold of that to read it, curse my lack of a college library

it says we needed more whites, youre next latinos, welcome to the sweetest ass club in the world

we need more panblasians

it says we needed more whites

what won't white ppl do to keep up the side?

sweatiest ass club in the world

...comedy

― lag∞n, Sunday, 7 October 2012 21:14 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i love you lagoon but don't keep pummeling this how dare they speak of it in hallowed tones angle itt; it is too cynical to scoff at anyone thinking that comedy could possibly be important/art/significant/&c. i totally think LD's stuff is important. think about how profoundly & permeatingly Friends defined stuff & controlled the lens for relationships & shit for a whole bunch of people; having something remotely thoughtful on tv is a real big thing.

we may have seen overlapping conversations earlier, lex, and a great deal of it was based on fake quotes what was pretty clearly a piece of satire.

no, i know about the fake piece, and nothing i think is based on that

unless you mean the japan piece was satirical in which case um

yesterday was Learning About Lena Dunham Day for me and what I'm really left thinking is, WOW #WHITEPPL what are u like. sooooo many white people declaring what racism is and isn't and how talking about race is just SILLY. sooooo many

and - i'm not commenting on the show, because i haven't seen it, though i don't think it's inherently problematic if an individual writer doesn't include ~token minorities~ - the stuff lena dunham has come out with aside from that is a...pattern. there are more questionable public examples than most people manage ever.

tbh no one would care about the racial makeup of the show if it weren't originally presented as a feminist thing, by the media and also sort of by lena. if it were called, say, "friends," (or "bored to death") it wouldn't be the same. but (for ex.) calling yr show "girls" is a sort of statement in itself, like, hey this show is about young women and womanhood. presenting it like that and then apparently forgetting that not all female brooklynites are white is just like... going out of your way. and she seems so willing to criticize everything about her character, who is some sort of extension of herself, but she's not willing to interrogate this in any substantial way, instead just saying "i dunno how to write non-wite characters, what, why"

i'm not saying that this show is any more deserving of this particular scorn than all the other all-white ones, just pointing out why

i've also read ppl pointing out that her bit part non-white characters are usually stereotypical or exclusively 'the help' chars, and from the few eps i've watched i can see that

*just pointing out why it gets the scorn, i mean

anyway dud, haven't seen the movie but the show literally does nothing for me, esp make me laugh

oh fuck it's late why did i just post that i was supposed to stay out of this

oh white british journalists just nooooooooooo

http://eve-barlow.tumblr.com/post/33109972052/wtf-is-woc-weapons-of-colour

such fucking ignorance on display there i can't even

(and i HATE the term "POC" but omg @ a white person mocking it like that)

who the hell is this person and why are you on their tumblr!!

[Note: I’m NOT being racist against Chinese people, I’m just exaggerating shit to illustrate some nonsense that’s been going on regarding criticism of Lena Dunham’s show Girls and its apparent “racist” agenda with it’s lack of casting ‘Women Of Colour’. Don’t get all weird on me now.]

"In case you can't tell, i'm being SARCASTIC"

unless you mean the japan piece was satirical in which case um

o no, it seems with that she went in there with a faux naive blank slate and the results of that were unsurprisingly ~questionable~ in a way I don't have much interest in defending. But we seem to have an echo chamber effect where people have decided that she's racist on a bad reading of Girls (which is not just SHE'S WHITE WHAT OF IT like that terrible defence you posted, but is much more aware of the narcissistically self-enclosed milieu it's representing than any of the criticisms are willing to accept), and everything she does gets caught up in that. Hence the couple of hours yesterday where these very intelligent people were quoting from the ridiculous satirical article and expressing their outrage. It's not a matter of viewing her in a way that exempts her from critique, just judging her for what's actually there, which so little of the discourse around her does.

OTM. There's a witch-hunt mentality now.

that's because there are things to hunt that are really massive and obvious and it boggles my mind how her white apologists love playing the victim

that eve barlow blog, i mean, jesus christ it's fucking gross. i hadn't heard of eve barlow before last night but she seems to be a generally respected journalist and that post didn't get any sort of backlash til i tweeted it. no fucking idea how. what a div.

We don’t need to constantly pat ourselves on the back for living in a multicultural world, we can get on with enjoying it, enjoying being humans together. Because at the end of the day, that’s what we all are - humans.

#keepcalmandcarryon

ughhhhhh i am still fuming about this piece of shit article. what an absolute moron.

i liked how the all the @ replies to that tweet were white people saying "spot on!"

in a shocking development, also in agreement was that one woman who tweeted a while back that she wanted a miniature le1f to dance for her on her desk all day

like, i am at the TORY BLOODY CONFERENCE right now and nothing i have come into contact with here has been as straight-up offensive as eve barlow

the most hilarious thing about that post is that she starts off with an extended riff of the same tone of that infamous lesley arfin tweet which is just like, wow, once again, if you're a white person and you can't enter a conversation about race w/o assuming a sneering aggravation you should probably sit down and think about things a little harder

But we seem to have an echo chamber effect where people have decided that she's racist on a bad reading of Girls (which is not just SHE'S WHITE WHAT OF IT like that terrible defence you posted, but is much more aware of the narcissistically self-enclosed milieu it's representing than any of the criticisms are willing to accept), and everything she does gets caught up in that.

to be fair the charges of racism are based more on stuff like her and her writers' responses to criticisms of girls than they are based on readings of girls itself.

but you bring up something that kind of bugs me, viz the way girls defenders (and i am one, generally) handwave away the problematics of race and class &c. with "well its self aware." because, like, yeah, but... so?

self-awareness as pre-emptive defence for knowingly doing or saying a shitty thing is s0 old

i think the self-awareness thing is sometimes germane in conversations about Girls since the characters in the show, especially Dunham's, are often unsympathetic and unlikable or a vessel for satire, but people talk about the show like it's this unapologetic celebration of self. doesn't hold up as much w/r/t what we're talking about, i'm just saying.

it's funny to see this stuff flare up again now, though, i was hoping nobody would feel like talking about this show again until the second season started or at least when it comes out on dvd

incidentally "well its self aware" is also the defense for aesthetic critiques as well

xp, some dude seems to be saying something similar

i think its mostly a pretty well-written and quite beautifully shot show. that being said tiny furniture imo was much better a movie than girls is a TV show