Things You Just Don't Care About

Wow barf

Dunham is kind of to media what Rubio is to politics, overestimated and beloved by a tiny elite minority, and also much more awful than the veneer suggests.

dunham's whole deal is portraying herself in the worst possible light, like god i'm so awful, i know i know. but then, even reading through that, she's awful.

yeah, I'm all in favor of making light of norms and finding humor in the "whoa, all this crazy fucked-up stuff happens" aspect of life but sometimes you need to realize some stuff genuinely is fucked up and writing about it in that way is not helpful

i'm fine with her being the generational celeb face of Clinton's prez campaign; richly deserved

i'm reaaally skeptical of the 'grooming' charge about her. but past that it's like, you don't get to air out all the weird details (which everyone has!) about someone else's childhood under the guise of being super uncomfortably transparent about your own.

she had said that she only wrote about that stuff with her sister's explicit permission tbf?

alas HRC has been using Cher the most, bcz her old gay donors relate more
xxp

LD takes that 'everything is copy' dictum to yucky heights

xp

didn't know that. still...

I have a kind of sneaking admiration for unremitting soul-baring but that might be a feeb way of justifying my own darkness as universal

xp yeah the Dunham "sexual abuse" stuff I'm a little on the fence about, largely because (1) her sister has publicly said she does not think she was abused and even thought it was "funny" that people claimed as much, or something and (2) I think she is probably employing hyperbole in the book. That said, sort of in line with goole's point, she was clueless and assholish enough to think that employing hyperbole in that context was a great and funny idea, which almost makes me wonder if she is clueless and assholish enough to have actually abused her sister and not recognize it as such.

That's some spiral you're in there

maybe they're just all mutually-abusive jerks

brb sending them ilx invites

Feel bad for all you who get Lena Dunham shoved down your throats. All I've ever seen of her is like 90 seconds as the barista in Ti West's "The Innkeepers" and have somehow managed to avoid everything else ever.

That's 90 seconds more than me.

Feel bad for all you who get Lena Dunham shoved down your throats.

Well, it's not like I'm her sister or anything.

Had to be done.

Had no idea she was in The Innkeepers. But I probably seen it before I was aware of her.

Lena Dunham as Barista. Fairly sure that's not that big a part.

i like girls, thought that tiny furniture was meh. had managed, until this thread, to completely ignore the lena dunham and her sister stuff. pretty o_0 for sure

girls

do you not care about the tv series or girls in general

I'm guessing his answer is "yes"

(1) her sister has publicly said she does not think she was abused and even thought it was "funny" that people claimed as much

I don't think this is great evidence to show her sister wasn't abused. It's one of the most common responses to these situations to say everything was OK, and even adults do it. So to make a decision whether or not Lena did abuse her, this is not something to go on.

It's a murky area, and it all depends on whether or not grooming your underage sister to sexually exploit her, which are admitted facts, counts as sexual abuse. Because this is the standard that's going to be applied to other cases, too.

apple product releases

poorly formed joeks about apple product releases

It's a murky area, and it all depends on whether or not grooming your underage sister to sexually exploit her, which are admitted facts, counts as sexual abuse. Because this is the standard that's going to be applied to other cases, too.

u are deranged nothing written in a memoir - specifically created to "be funny" + sell books - is an "admitted fact", much less the basis for legal standards

It's not about prosecuting Dunham, but about what people on here, and elsewhere, are accepting as normal. Apparently you and man alive are OK with what Dunham did to her sister, because her sister considered it OK. So as long as a child considers it OK, it's fine to groom and manipulate them so that you can masturbate next to them in bed.

Now that's something I consider deranged.

idk what dunham did to her sister and neither do you

like omg celebrity whose celebrity is built around being provocative wrote some deliberately provocative shit in her "memoir" as clickbait/joeks/plea for attention. it is not a factual or reliable narrative.

It's about what standards we're willing to accept in society. People giving a pass on Dunham's stated behavior, even if it's 100% completely untrue, still has a potentially negative effect of normalizing it, which can harm a lot of people.

I know all good aspirational people want to rally behind wealthy and influential people like Dunham, but this is pretty bad.

if lena and her sister are both in general accord on the outline of the story, then it considerably strengthens the presumption that it is broadly correct.

your faith in attention-seeking celebrities is remarkable

to be clear, I think her writing about it is at heart a bad joke. It isn't funny, it's poorly conceived, and it's attempt to derive humor from childhood sexuality is misplaced and a basically dumb idea.

I do not at all believe that it is a credible account of actual events, there is no way to judge it on that basis.

I'm not sure I would categorize lena's sister as an attention-seeking celebrity. Does she have an agent?

She doesnt even have agency according to ppl itt

this thread is vile. later guys

There are two options here:

* Take it as true and hold Dunham to account for her behavior in order to keep the bar of acceptable conduct at a certain level

* Or, Dunham disavows what she wrote in her memoir against social pressure (which has not happened), which she has not done due to the aforementioned, which would discredit anything she says afterwards. So I understand why she hasn't taken this route considering her pattern of outrageously selfish and remorseless behavior, and people like Outis and others giving her a pass on it

Is it any wonder why someone like Trump has become the nominee of one of our major political parties here? The bar for conduct here we're willing to accept has been lowered so far that we're giving people a pass now on sexually exploiting their little sisters. People don't even need to hide that shit anymore because it's now OK.

Dehumanization and exploitation of others is what our social standards are now, and it's not any different between the Trump camp's racism and anti-semitism and Dunham bragging about exploiting her sister. Nor is it much different from corporations exploiting their employees, or state governments leaving children and mothers to die.

It's all basically the same thing: our social ethos of what's acceptable and not acceptable to do to other people. Dunham, Trump, corporate behavior, government behavior that exploits, harms and kills others, are all OK now. It's a strange time we're living in here, and it's sad to watch the bar getting lower and lower.

it is a strange, high horse you ride on

Yeah, having concern for other human beings, that really shouldn't be considered a "high horse". Yet here we are.

would you like a medal for self-righteousness, I think I have some lying around somewhere

trump voters and dunham defenders (dunfenders) are different people, motivated by different ideas, and shaped by different forces in the culture. imo.

xp No, I've just seen a lot of bad things in this world, and my interest is in seeing as little pain and suffering happen as possible. And it's depressing and frustrating just watching things get worse instead of better and otherwise intelligent and educated people going along with it.

I respect your motivations and question your judgment

Two whole options!

xp If you question my judgment then you must not keep up with what's going on in the world much. Just look at Trump, another example -- his rise is due in large part to a media system that values profit over the long-term well-being (and potentially, survival) of others, and they have the unchecked power to do it.

Extremely selfish behavior that can seriously harm others for personal profit, accepted as normal by society at large. I don't see much difference between that and giving a pass on Dunham's behavior. It's a belief system we have now that's pervaded our lives in the US in all aspects.

These things don't happen in a vacuum.

So it's incredibly worrying not just from the angle of exploiting children for sex, which is deplorable, it also connects to a whole mess of other serious issues, too, in a race to the bottom for human conduct with incredible amounts of wealth and power behind it and a whole train of people following it. That's what especially worries me.

I give up, feel free to continue alternating between handwringing and patting yourself on the back

i didn't read dunham's book but the excerpt strikes me as being more like a shared gross joke among siblings looking back on their childhood than it does a literal portrayal of what their childhood was really like. i have a hard time imagining a 7-year-old being self-aware enough to have the conscious motives dunham attributes to herself ("i took a perverse pleasure in delivering bad news to her"). i don't find the excerpt funny or anything, but it seems like a real stretch to interpret something in a jokey bs memoir so literally. plus there are plenty of solid other reasons to be annoyed or disgusted by lena dunham.

she was trying to talk about her emotional dependency on her sister in an "edgy" way and she fucked up and produced a piece of text that was tasteless and disturbing because she isn't that good of a writer