C/D LENA DUNHAM (THE DEFINITIVE POLL)

D-40 otm and, yes, this totally should have been a teaching moment.

― Benson and the Jets (ENBB), Tuesday, November 4, 2014 2:07 PM (57 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

(we are of course assuming her mom knew ... i do think that the right wing critique of left wing 'permissiveness' is what this latest argument is mostly about...but they see it like a spectrum or like the broken windows theory, i'm guessing? where encouraging her narcissism is part & parcel w/ the slippery slope to abusing your sister) (which maybe it is to a degree? but i don't think this is a prob w/ leftist political thought, maybe a prob with parents who dont have common sense)

Also Aimless OTM

She's always good at apologizing afterwards, she always *gets* that people are upset by something and even seems to feel bad that people are upset by it, yet it seems like she only becomes aware of these things based on feedback.

this is some classic narcissist behavior fwiw but then this is not a particularly challenging diagnosis...

"narcissistic"

no we arent assuming that her mom knew. she states explicitly that her mom didnt care and didnt even ask why her hand had been in grace's vagina because "this was within the spectrum of things i did"

read the passage

Yeah but she was seven and might not remember this correctly

hahaha so there's a chance that it's not true! ok so its all totally fine

treezy...

"yeah but"

read the passage

― jello my future biafriend (roxymuzak), Tuesday, November 4, 2014 3:16 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i read it—but it's a subjective reading of a particular situation, who knows what was going through her mom's mind at the time: oh crap, there is stuff inside my daughter might have looked more worrying at the moment than, wait a minute, why were you looking in the first place ... idk, 'spectrum of things i did'—in that moment, she's putting herself in her own mother's head, and kind of implying that she was always doing stuff like this, which ... we've established this is an unreliable narrator. I guess basically i don't trust that she's not playing up the 'disfunction' in a memoir, unconsciously

or otherwise

treeship, for the purpose of the discussion at hand, it doesn't matter if her memory is correct in each detail or her characterizations fit some platonic version of truth, since we are discussing her account as written, which she has very deliberately made public and hopes we will all read and talk about.

why is anyone still engaging with this dummy

Since when was her hand "in" her vagina? I thought she was just looking and that the looking was in the realm of things that she did and yes I think that makes a difference. The details of that particular instance are pretty vague and maybe I misread it but I do think that makes a difference. I'd prob handle a kid I thought was curious and looking at her younger siblings Gentiles a lot different than one who had been touching them.

xxp so many possibilities as to the referent there

Errrr genitals not Gentiles - phone

lol

why is anyone still engaging with this dummy

― kissaroo and Tyler, too (DJP), Tuesday, November 4, 2014 2:41 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think this thread proves she is an enormously successful artist

artist / provocateur

also Idgaf about Dunham in general but I think the discussion around this is interesting. Mostly I just can't believe how tone deaf she must be to have framed these experiences the way she did and not expect people to lose their minds. The I remember she's 24 but stil.

she's 28

i doubt she "pried it open" with her eyes

xp sleepingbag thanks but i prefer masculine pronouns

I assumed she was prying open her legs.

Like someone changing a baby might do to clean it? Will reread.

"and I leaned down between her legs and carefully spread open her vagina. She didn’t resist..."

she literally said "opened Grace's vagina".

From the Jezebel article—the writer interviewed "Debby Herbenick, PhD, an associate professor at Indiana University, writer for the Kinsey Institute, and author of Sex Made Easy.":

Anyone who has worked in K or pre-K will tell you that you're often having to remind little children not to touch their genitals and to keep their hands to themselves, because genital exploration is very, very common among young children. Ask any parent of young children and they will also have stories to tell (I've worked with parents of young children for years about how to talk with their own children about bodies, puberty, and so on and these instances always come up: not just about kids exploring their own bodies but about how kids explore with each other).

Dunham's story is not one of sexual exploration and she doesn't describe any sexual acts. The story she tells is one of bodily exploration; sex is not a part of it. Her story also includes her sister's own exploration in that it turns out her sister had been putting pebbles inside her own vagina (some small girls put things in their vaginas—toys, pebbles, Legos, etc—there is a case study of a 4 year old girl who put a Bratz doll in her vagina).

People who are attaching sex to these stories seem to equate the genitals with sex, but that's not how young children see their genitals. Dunham's story is not an uncommon one. The research (and any preschool or home with young children) is full of stories of childhood 'play' not so different than this one.

i think this thread proves she is an enormously successful artist

― sleepingbag, Tuesday, November 4, 2014 4:44 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

artist / provocateur

― sleepingbag, Tuesday, November 4, 2014 4:44 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thank you for finally making the most boring non-point that can possibly be made about this, that "she got us talking."

pre K kids are 4

People who are attaching sex to these stories seem to equate the genitals with sex, but that's not how young children see their genitals.

^^^

ftr I was talking about Treeship

pre K kids are 4

― jello my future biafriend (roxymuzak), Tuesday, November 4, 2014 3:50 PM (14 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

roxy, she read the piece.

like, is this slightly outside the norm bc lena is a weird kid, yes. is being 'slightly outside the norm' = def sexual deviance? i would argue no

yep and "I've worked with parents of young children for years about how to talk with their own children about bodies, puberty, and so on and these instances always come up: not just about kids exploring their own bodies but about how kids explore with each other" - this didnt happen according to the story

fwiw when my brother was 2 he put a bunch of pachinko balls in his butt and then informed us of this fact; however I can't say I felt the slightest urge to look.

I was grossed out by the porny phrasing personally - the language was, "spread her legs". I'm not shocked by a messed up kid doing this, but I feel for all of the sensitive folk out there who were molested as kids who get depressed reading that. I'm a sensitive person, I had a baby sister and I had an emotional reaction to it.

nope, the language was what i quoted above

you'll argue whatever you need to in order to avoid any recognition that this might fall outside "weird" for some people. particularly given that plenty of children are abused by older siblings in ways not so different from the various ones described upthread, but hey, Jezebel got some psychiatrist to do a very selective overview of the passages, not asking what she thought of the ongoing patterns of behaviour, or the significant age difference, so it's all cool!

"and I leaned down between her legs and carefully spread open her vagina. She didn’t resist"

this is a quote from the memoir

no one said it was "cool"

im open to the idea that this was bad parenting. i dont know that it's an open & shut case ... the right wing critique is that this is a slippery slope, right? permissive parenting that was like, "it's natural that you explore each other's bodies" that leads to unusual stories like this are the result of the left's abdication of personal responsibility, or something. Not to say that this critique is wrong, i'm cool with "we keep our hands to ourselves" norms. but using this as an excuse to beat up on someone who's a product of this particular philosophy seems beside the point, if the philosophy itself is what we should be attacking

you'll argue whatever you need to in order to avoid any recognition that this might fall outside "weird" for some people. particularly given that plenty of children are abused by older siblings in ways not so different from the various ones described upthread, but hey, Jezebel got some psychiatrist to do a very selective overview of the passages, not asking what she thought of the ongoing patterns of behaviour, or the significant age difference, so it's all cool!

― gyac, Tuesday, November 4, 2014 3:55 PM (44 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no, i'm arguing that it's not an open and shut case and acting like it is, or that people who think it might be more complicated are basically complicit in abuse, is ridiculous. i do not know for a fact that this wasn't sexual abuse but neither do you

"an excuse to beat up on"? lol

i mean at least jezebel got a psychiatrist who specializes in this, you're just throwing conjecture because lena decided to use particularly porn-y words

that's an xp to gyac

this is absurd

Yeah who the fuck said any of this is cool?

deej otm. It's the slippage between different critiques of lena dunham, between objecting to her way of writing about the issue to saying she was an abuser that bothered me most about this situation.