As most of the “right wing” knows, Lena Dunham published a book – semi autobiographical, by her own words. Reviews by the usual suspects have been bordering on adoration: “While her relatable humanity is delightful, the reason why people will read this book is not because she is every woman..”.
I must respectfully disagree.
I know no one who is like her. Accusations of rape by a token Evil Republican Man notwithstanding, a review by Kevin Williamson of National Review brought about a more troubling analysis of her work: her admission of ‘experimenting’ with her younger sister’s body.
Oddly enough, the poster girl for millennial feminism seemed to have trouble with others reading her own words:
“As she grew, I took to bribing her for her time and affection…three pieces of candy if she would allow me to kiss her on the lips for five seconds…basically, anything a sexual predator to woo a small suburban girl I was trying”
– and interpreting that in a predatory manner. As more were exposed to these obviously disturbing words, the close mindedness of society at large apparently led her to believe she was subject to a conservative vendetta.
The irony here is her indignation towards people who literally repeated her own words is that it was nothing but right wing smear. She took to Twitter to refute the molestation claim:
And by the way, if you were a little kid and never looked at another little kid's vagina, well, congrats to you.
— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) November 1, 2014
Well, Lena, I can tell you that as I child I learned boundaries. There are things that are not appropriate under any circumstances. Certainly children do not behave perfectly, but bribing your sibling in order to kiss them falls squarely in the category of being straight up disgusting. Performing gynecological exams on a toddler falls in this category as well. If she doesn’t have some sort of odd fixation on sexuality and children, how is such an episode to be explained:
“Mike was the first person to go down on me, after a party to benefit Palestine, on my dorm room rug. I felt like I was being chewed on by a child that wasn’t mine”
Disregarding the obvious aphrodisiac of a Palestinian benefit rally, what, pray tell, does the second part of the sentence mean? Why does this sexual act invoke childhood/motherhood?
Part of this fault lies with her parents, seemingly the worst kind of baby boomer indulgence. Bed sharing, lack of boundaries, these are all laid bare in her book. The artistic world she grew up in was avant garde, to say the least:
Carroll Dunham’s oeuvre includes sexually explicit renderings of voluptuous, often cartoonish women with genitals that looks like mouths”
Perhaps he should have given Pink Floyd credit for that, as the movie ‘The Wall’ already tackled that pressing issue. Millennial feminism’s poster child has obviously not realized that our liberalized country still does indeed have boundaries.
The innocent experimentation of her youth, is not innocent at all. It’s something to be pitied and worrisome.
It is a symptom of a larger issue in society – that boundaries no longer exist, and all that is acceptable is in the eye of the beholder.