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Say Yes! to M!ch!gan!

Image Credit: HBO
Image Credit: HBO

Girls did not start out particularly well this week. Hannah doesn’t own a suitcase? Really? If she’s a middle-class girl from Michigan, her parents own approximately 22,000 suitcases. Every piece of luggage I own is a hand-me-down from my father, who incidentally went to Michigan State, which leads me to my second point. This episode hit a little too close to home. I grew up outside a college town in Michigan. I am trying to make it as a writer in Brooklyn. In my early twenties, I often considered how much easier living in Michigan would be only to realize I couldn’t exist outside of New York for more than a few months. Also, my name rhymes with banana. It was a little freaky.

In the past few episodes, especially in the handsy boss storyline, Hannah’s self destruction was not so much funny as unbelievable and pathetic for the sake of being pathetic. Girls has been termed “inventive” and “daring” because it showcases the type of acerbic, normal looking, awkward girl we never see on screen. However, if this girl is incapable of eliciting desire or achieving even a modicum of happiness, then the show isn’t doing much more than reinforcing the female fear that existing outside of conventional gender norms will lead to a lifetime of unanswered texts and uncomfortable attempts to sleep with your sixty-year-old boss. Hannah may still be a mess in East Lansing, but in the tree-lined and strip-mall filled Midwest, she finally reveals herself to be the kind of maturing mess we can root for back in Greenpoint. Continue reading “Say Yes! to M!ch!gan!”

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Race: Even More Awkward than Sex

Image Credit: Michael Buckner/Getty Images North America
Image Credit: Michael Buckner/Getty Images North America

In an office of twenty people, I’ve encountered at least four women recently discussing Lena Dunham’s “Fresh Air” interview with Terry Gross. Clearly, we all listen to a lot of NPR, which puts us solidly in the white, educated, privileged demographic Girls is geared toward, but the primary reason we listened to the interview was to hear Dunham discuss race. Even though Dunham’s Hannah may claim that she is only “a voice of a generation,” the title of the show suggests that this comedy is supposed to be representative of more than just Dunham and her hipster friends. Obviously, Privileged, White, Straight, Liberal, Agnostic, East Coast Girls would have been a less pithy title and sound far too much like an undergraduate honors thesis, but I found it disheartening that Dunham, so hyperconscious of her class privilege, did not immediately recognize the attendant privilege of white skin.

Dunham did sound genuinely troubled by the criticism of the show’s lack of diversity, and she did not try to belittle it like her pal Leslie Arfin (who defines hipster racism). She argued that she was writing about the specific experience of a half Jew/half WASP living in Brooklyn and that she felt uncomfortable writing about the life of a black or hispanic character without having access to this cultural experience. Obviously, the best solution would be to have fewer Arfin-type co-writers and instead hire a more diverse crew of writers who could narrate the lives of privileged young women of color who might also date douchy guys and still expect their parents to pay their cell phone bills. Continue reading “Race: Even More Awkward than Sex”

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Are All Men Gay?

Image Credit: HBO
Image Credit: HBO

If you went to a college like New York University or have lived in New York for even a brief period of time, you have likely asked yourself this question. Not only does NYC have a higher than average gay population but even the straight men seem a little too willing to wear scarves. Girls is located within this confusing sexual landscape as it explores the eternal dichotomy between the nice, effeminate guy you should like and the sexy douche you keep sleeping with even though you know you shouldn’t. Although Dunham described this conundrum using the Brian Krakow/Jordan Catelano analogy, you know she really wanted to reference the Aidan/Big dilemma but felt it would be uncool to do so.

The show keeps inserting sly, visual references to Sex and the City (e.g., the girls sitting on a park bench eating ice cream or Hannah typing on her computer late at night), but the literal hue of the composition is darker. Where S&TC was awash with bright colors and streaming sunlight, Girls is NYC viewed through a dim brown lens. Similarly, Girls focuses on the dark underbelly of modern sexual politics, which S&TC hinted at in its first three seasons but then discarded in favor of more shoes and an emasculated Big. Girls complicates the linear nice guy/asshole dichotomy not by turning all of the men into unthreatening rom-com ken dolls but by simultaneously reiterating and troubling this formula. Masculinity, like everything else in this amber-colored Brooklyn, is decidedly in flux. Continue reading “Are All Men Gay?”

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Getting Physical

Image Credit: HBO
Image Credit: HBO

Lena Dunham has been called an exhibitionist, which is probably true, but what do critics mean with this label? If frequently appearing nude on camera makes you an exhibitionist, then most actresses, models, and a lot of sexting teenagers would be considered deviants. What most commentators probably mean is that she enjoys revealing her “imperfect” female body, throwing it in the audience’s face in a way that seems jarring not because of the nudity itself but because of the “excess,” unstylized flesh. Additionally, she is using her own body as a tool. No middle-aged director is forcing her to take off her top. She is choosing nudity, which somehow makes the sight of her naked flesh seem raw and unsettling. One of the more interesting details that emerged in the media cacophony surrounding this show was a tidbit about Dunham’s on-screen fashion: she tries Hannah’s clothing on with Spanx and then removes the Spanx so that everything fits just slightly off. Sex and the City—the show which is like the tacky mother that influenced Girls yet which Girls defines itself against—used the naked, and excessively fashioned, female body to delineate character, but the characters were always dressed or undressed to appear as sexually attractive as possible. Girls is working in the opposite direction, making the bodies seem more naked than nude. Consequently, the show is much, much naughtier.

This would not be a novel phenomenon if we were discussing Culture with a capital CULTURE. Over the past forty years, countless female visual and performance artists have made nudity one of the oldest feminist tools in the oldest vagina-shaped toolbox.  In response to the hoary artistic tradition in which the nude female body was rendered passive, contained, and, consequently, depersonalized by the male artist, female artists like Karen Finley and Annie Sprinkle (with many more before them) began reclaiming their bodies as material bodies—bodies that shit, piss, bleed, and fuck. Cindy Sherman, who currently has an extensive retrospective at MOMA, seems tamer than some of this shock-value feminist art, but she managed to use her body as a subversive and multifaceted tool. Like Dunham, Sherman is her own model, photographer, and costumer, often occupying the position of both the male artist and the female subject. In her frighteningly sad aging socialite series as well as her centerfold and grotesque works, Sherman has also, like Dunham, used her own body to call attention to the unavoidable materiality of the body. Continue reading “Getting Physical”

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Unsatisfied Girls, Nervous Dudes

 

Image Credit: HBO
Image Credit: HBO

Lena Dunham’s interview in Salon makes me have a little more faith in the direction of Girls if only because she focuses less on the “I’m-too-good-for-a-job” hipster dilemma and more on what it’s actually like to be a sexually active young woman in New York City. All we good sex-positive feminists often feel uncomfortable even mentioning some of the negative aspects of contemporary sexuality for fear it will make us seem man-hating or prudish. Also, ”social scientists” love to cling to these details to argue it would be better if we all went back to guarding our hymenical treasures until marriage. Therefore, I’m impressed that Dunham is willing to handle the complex, sticky (sometimes literally) problem of young women being sexual, wanting to have sex, but also finding themselves continually used sexually in ways that are not particularly satisfying and sometimes hurtful and borderline rapey. Unfortunately, even though women are now much more willing to talk about cum in their faces or whether or not to include said face in a sext, many still find it difficult to express their own needs for fear of losing a guy or even seeming like a killjoy.  We still have a long, long way to go until women are getting the enjoyable sex they deserve, and this show seems like it could be one small, awkward step in the right direction. Also, she won me over by referencing the eternal Jordan Catalano/Brian Krakow dilemma.