C/D LENA DUNHAM (THE DEFINITIVE POLL)

the "maybe shes not the most considerate person..."-style defenses of her are lol lol lol

looking fwd to the Dunham apology tweet that scores the hat trick of "trigger," "sensitive," and "privilege."

it would be dope if there was some sort of ground between 'condemning her' or 'defending her' and instead we acknowledged that she's a screen for a bunch of projected concerns

like i have no problem saying she seems like an asshole & kind of always did ... but i'm not clear on why this latest event is some kind of final straw, it illuminates a lot but doesn't strike me as nearly as objectionable as her outwardly racist earlier statements

it would be dope if there was some sort of ground between 'condemning her' or 'defending her' and instead we acknowledged that she's a screen for a bunch of projected concerns

― deej loaf (D-40), Wednesday, November 5, 2014 12:31 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This usually starts with not making 50 message board posts about her

who said it means we shouldn't discuss it?

like i'm sorry to keep hammering this but again: if we're not willing to have an actual discussion about what this says about a certain strain of thought in parenting bc we're too busy pathologizing lena dunham then we're not even being honest about why we're engaging in this discussion in the 1st place

why are you so obsessed with parenting all of a sudden and, even so, why would lena dunham's memoir be your jumping off point?

im not obsessed with parenting. im countering what i think is a harmful way of looking at the world thru open discussion that often occurs on ilx

my only real concern is that the assertions about her abuse seem like they need a lot finer critique—about the broader implications for demonizing childhood behavior that, first of all, is being subjectively described from memory, and secondly, an expert has already determined is within range of norms, and third, of course, is the notion that these 'norms' are hard lines rather than constantly shifting, debateable, and often arbitrary

― deej loaf (D-40), Tuesday, November 4, 2014 4:06 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And also, she's writing to entertain, so it shouldn't be treated as a deposition.

deej i think where the misunderstanding itt hinges is you seem to be focusing on the vagina prying episode, which as far as i can tell no one itt has said makes LD an abuser, while many others are talking about that being just one instance in a long-running (from the sounds of it) manipulative relationship combined with her initial dismissiveness about the messed-upness of the whole situation. no one itt is calling for her to be arrested, or to lose her show, or anything, as far as i can tell

it just seems to me that 2 different things are being talked about

i'm not saying her defenders dont need to do some serious soul searching maybe but the schadenfreude and 'i told you so's are still weird. like she's been proven a force for evil or something. people on twitter comparing her to r kelly. there's 'she's a self-absorbed jerk who makes a tv show some people like and some do not' then there's the demonization we're seeing now which IMO has a bit of moral panic to it that could be construed as irresponsible.

It's hard for me to muster dislike for someone who clearly won't pull herself together - that is not a threatening presentation.

However, I think she makes a poor Maypole for The same old Twitterers to dance around.

soul searching might even be a stretch, i just think that it's bad form to put artists on pedestals

deej i think where the misunderstanding itt hinges is you seem to be focusing on the vagina prying episode...

― k3vin k., Wednesday, November 5, 2014 10:10 AM (2 hours ago)

There is no misunderstanding itt -- apart from the willful ones -- imo deej has been pretty reasonable and otm throughout

that said, I can totally understand and respect the ppl whose response was "No. Just. No. This is indefensible behavior." There's just a bunch of bad faith arguing, as usual.

As to the "parenting" issue, let me note that some of the people bringing it up are of Dunham's own generation.

As someone from the preceding one, I would be surprised if the vast or maybe even a majority of people from my cohort had this issue raised for them as kids.

Sarahell otm

James Wolcott (quite a brilliant TV critic for the VV back in the day) reviews the book for TNR, and assesses Lena Inc.:

If I prefer Kylie Minogue to Madonna and the knockabout farce of Comedy Central’s “Broad City” to the clackety solipsism and passive-aggressive caricaturization in “Girls,” it’s a matter of taste, and my taste isn’t the one being targeted and courted by Dunham, Inc. I do think the premature canonization of “Girls” as a breakthrough classic does it no favors, and not just because of the backlash effect triggered every time the fawning media lifts Dunham’s Cleopatra litter higher. The excessive buildup could be the prelude to a steeper devaluation....

But it probably won’t matter for Lena Dunham herself, the life-force dervish, who already seems to have outgrown the series, having wrung about as many changes as possible from the antics and predicaments of her alter ego, Hannah Horvath, and those other bobbleheads. With the money, fame (the cover of Vogue), and formal accolades Dunham has achieved (an Emmy award, a Glamour Woman of the Year citation), she’s in the enviable position of being free to do what she wants. But there are invisible strings attached. No longer the idiosyncratic underdog, Dunham has become an iconographic bearer of an entire generation’s promise; a bold-face name in the upper tier of celebrity, feminism, and cultural liberalism, that imaginary green room where Mindy Kaling, Roxane Gay, Tina Fey, and a shimmering hologram of Beyoncé mingle; an advice counselor to other young women; an entrepreneurial success story; an inexhaustible topic of conversation, no matter how exhausted of hearing about her many of us get; in short, a role model, and being a role model entails responsibilities inimical to being an independent operator. (Nobody expects Quentin Tarantino to be a poster boy for higher causes.)

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120027/james-wolcott-reviews-not-kind-girl

having wrung about as many changes as possible from the antics and predicaments of her alter ego hair

so this book is pretty stupid. about as stupid as you would expect a "memoir" by a 28yo to be

How old was Anne Frank when she wrote her diary?

now there's a pairing.

diary =/= memoir btw

"It’s fucked up that the margin of error for white women is far greater than it is for people of color, queer people, transgender people. That necessary conversation should probably be separate from the specific conversations about Lena Dunham.

There is a great distance between thinking LENA DUNHAM IS A CHILD MOLESTER and thinking, yeah, inspecting her sister’s vagina seems like an awesome choice. There are multiple places within that distance and I stand in that place where I think the shit is weird, it makes me uncomfortable, but I understand why the information was disclosed in the memoir, and it did not diminish my experience of reading the book or my opinion of Dunham as a talented but flawed young woman."

Roxane Gay OTM.

http://roxanegay.tumblr.com/post/101801523290/on-lena-dunham-and-all-that

What's important is that we all come to a carefully considered, nuanced ethical position on what Lena Dunham did with her sister's vagina, as well as a detailed matrix of how the media would likely respond if various characteristics of Dunham's identity were changed.

the parts where she affects "wisdom"/looks back fondly with a mixture of pride and embarrassment at the travails of her youth are v eye-rolly. Ditto the parts where she affects an ironic distance from cliches while simultaneously embracing them as "magical". There are some funny lines. A lot of filler ("10 things I found in my purse", yup that's a "chapter").

my understanding of lena dunham's personality is pretty neatly encapsulated by this single sentence excerpt from the new yorker profile piece on her mother:

Cindy Sherman recalls going to a party at the Dunham apartment, and Lena, who was in high school, saying, “Cindy, it’s so good to see you. We should have lunch sometime.”

though actually the whole paragraph that's from is pertinent to the current conversation in terms of early exposure to graphically sexual art, so:

On the way back to Cornwall, we talked about Lena. “She didn’t have a lot of friends in school,” Simmons said. “As a child, she was diagnosed as having obsessive-compulsive disorder and put on medication for it. She had her own adult world. Lena would say, ‘Parents, what are we doing this weekend?,’ and I’d say there was an opening at the Sonnabend gallery, and she’d say, ‘Great!’ ” Cindy Sherman recalls going to a party at the Dunham apartment, and Lena, who was in high school, saying, “Cindy, it’s so good to see you. We should have lunch sometime.” One Friday, when her father was having a show at Sonnabend, Lena invited six of her classmates to the opening. Dunham’s paintings were no longer completely abstract; many were inhabited by rectangular shapes sprouting male genitals. When Lena arrived at school the following Monday, the girls accosted her and said, “Your father paints penises.” “Those aren’t penises,” Lena replied. “They’re guns.” The girls stopped speaking to her after that. “We felt terrible, as though we’d damaged her socially,” Simmons recalled. When Lena and Grace were eight and two, respectively, Simmons took them to visit her friend Lisa Yuskavage, the painter, in her studio. Yuskavage was working on a canvas of a voluptuous, kneeling nude, whose title was “Big Blonde Jerking Off,” and Simmons took pictures of both girls in front of it.

should prob note that, raised by ex-hippies myself, I was also raised with exposure to a fair amount of graphically sexual art (predominantly in the comic format) and I don't necessarily feel like it did any serious damage except in my judgment of other people's boundaries of the appropriate.

sheesh, NYer profile yet another example of how heteronormative society has deemed some parenting strategies as "normal" and others harmful

Simmons’s first show opened at Artists Space in January, 1979. ... Barbara Gladstone and Max Protetch were both interested in showing Simmons’s work, but when she heard that Helene Winer was leaving Artists Space to start her own gallery she decided that was where she wanted to be. Winer opened Metro Pictures in 1980

There was actually an article in the most recent n+1 about Artists Space in 1979, and an exhibition (maybe the one right after Lena's mom's) by a white artist of abstract works called "The N*****r Drawings" (the actual word).

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-20/essays/color-theory/

It's funny - I don't think the right-wing press has weighed in on parenting and childhood in a long time, when in the Moral Majority era they did it all of the time. Too busy in the Middle East? If they think today's young adults were raised in a too-permissive environment, they should be clearer about it. Or would that be an admission of failure?

least surprising headline

Lena Dunham: Clinton coverage 'rabidly sexist'

"The media is not fair to my candidate" is the most grating kind of political commentary in general.

Oh huh, Lena Dunham is trending again, surely it's not because she said something inappropriately glib and self-centered about a disturbing situation, she's learn her les...

you're a professional writer, literally how do you keep fucking up this much pic.twitter.com/gpQCPu9vmr

— Natalie Shure (@nataliesurely) October 10, 2017

but surely her apology will strike the right ton..

I'm sorry I missed the mark. I won't try to explain myself but simply say I hope you feel the love from me and many fellow assault survivors

— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) October 10, 2017

actually whatever her apology isn't really that bad, I think I misread it the first time

Lena Dunham is the only person I'm aware of that's blocked me on Twitter. It's funny because I'm more of a fan of hers than many, but when she tweeted a photo of her book Is It Evil Not To Be Sure?, I couldn't stop myself from immediately responding "Is it wicked not to care?"
A few seconds later, I was blocked.

2018 is good pic.twitter.com/yCx7mbCYyX

— Leah Finnegan (@leahfinnegan) January 10, 2018

Looks like JACK ANTONOFF is more like ANTON JACKINOFF now, amirite

huh someone in Western culture should invent some kind of 'eternity' ring as a symbol of neverending love or sth

these poll results!

these poll results!

― #TeamHailing (imago), Wednesday, January 10, 2018 5:52 PM (one month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lmao true

voted classic, at the time girls was still s1 only... i thought she was being funny ;_;

yeah i'm sure people used to think you were being funny

they're not thinking it now

More like Lena dudham