Lena Dunham wrote a book. And now things are getting a bit ugly.

[DinoR]

@Greekfreak

The sooner people go back to ignoring her, the better. She’s not incisive or witty, and she can’t act.

Sweet. Reading this thread is the most attention I’ve paid to her. Part of the motivation was trying to figure out why I was even supposed to recognize the name. I now know that whatever exposure I’d had was promptly ignored and purged.

[Fotheringay-Phipps]

I find it rather unlikely that a 1 year old could put 6 or 7 pebbles in their vagina (they would generally be wearing diapers almost all the time, and tend to be supervised), but I find it incredible that a kid that age could do it as a “prank” - even if a kid that age is capable of the concept of a prank, they wouldn’t appreciate the prank aspect of such an act. (I would also have to imagine that it would have caused a lot of irritation.)

So it’s likely that she either invented/distorted the story, or it happened at an older age.

[I’m not all that familiar with LD, but FWIW my impression is that she likes to push the envelope and also likes to play the victim, which sometimes go hand in hand, as in this instance. I also recall her being outspoken about Woody Allen being a molestor, so it’s good to see her getting some of her own flak in this area.]

[Amateur_Barbarian]

I have no idea who Lena Dunham is, and after skimming this thread, I believe that’s a positive.

[IvoryTowerDenizen]

@Fotheringay-Phipps

I find it rather unlikely that a 1 year old could put 6 or 7 pebbles in their vagina (they would generally be wearing diapers almost all the time, and tend to be supervised), but I find it incredible that a kid that age could do it as a “prank” - even if a kid that age is capable of the concept of a prank, they wouldn’t appreciate the prank aspect of such an act. (I would also have to imagine that it would have caused a lot of irritation.)

So it’s likely that she either invented/distorted the story, or it happened at an older age.

I assume Lena put the pebbles in there herself, and then made up the story, and remembers her sister being delighted as a way to distance herself from what she did.

[Saint_Cad]

@iiandyiiii

I was talking about the perjorative “attention whore”.

Because her entire bit is about getting everyone to look at her. She intends to be controversial and then bitches about the controversy. Her whole show is about that. She is now complaining about people criticizing her for what she put in the book even though it was meant to get people talking. You know why she’s complaining? To keep the attention on her.

I don’t think “attention whore” is necessarily a negative label although it sounds like it. Women like Madonna and Lady Gaga embraced it as part of their persona. Likewise these celebrities in the Film Actors Guild that go help starving babies in Africa just so they can talk about how great they are as people are worse attention whores than Dunham is.

The Guardian even had a review when they wrote

This choice was particularly hard to bear in Dunham’s retelling of a sexual encounter for which she was only half-conscious, that damaged her vagina so badly she required medical attention.

Dunham writes that what happened was “aggressive”, and goes as far to say that she didn’t “consent” or “give permission” to be treated so roughly. But she never calls what happened to her “rape”. Now, the right to name that experience is Dunham’s alone, but when she retells the encounter to a friend – who immediately tells her she’s been raped – Dunham writes, “I burst out laughing.”

Of course that needs to be reconciled with

I was at a party, drunk, waiting for attention,” Dunham told NPR. “And somehow, that felt like such a shameful starting off point that I didn’t know how to reconcile what had come after. But I knew that it wasn’t right and I knew in some way that this experience had been forced on me.”

I didn’t really go to any more parties. I just stopped going. I stopped putting myself into – I don’t think I – I basically didn’t have a drink for the rest of college. It was a painful experience physically and emotionally. And one I spent a long time trying to reconcile.”

She continued: “It was a painful experience physically and emotionally. And one I spent a long time trying to reconcile.”

So what is her motivation about writing about a clearly violent rape being no big thing in her book even though it clearly was?

[Gus_Gusterson]

@Saint_Cad

So what is her motivation about writing about a clearly violent rape being no big thing in her book even though it clearly was?

It’s hard to know how you feel about events you’ve made up. You can’t fall back on your actual feelings about the event, since it never happened, so you also have to make up the feelings. And then you have to keep the lies straight. It takes a lot of work.

[Amateur_Barbarian]

Without diverting the thread too much - does “consent” mean full agreement on every single thing that happens? If a woman consents (fully) to sex and parts of it don’t go a way she likes, do those parts become “rape”?

[TriPolar]

@iiandyiiii

I was talking about the perjorative “attention whore”.

Besides what **Saint Cad **said, it’s also a term disproportionately applied to gay men. But it’s used for plenty of straight men also, or whatever Donald Trump is for example. It could just be describing activity that is not distributed equally across the human spectrum.

However, I have to admit that there are many perjorative terms that are applied disproportionally and unfairly to women. I just think in this case the shoe fits.

[Thudlow_Boink]

@not_what_you_d_expect

So, what do you guys think about this?

TMI

[gallows_fodder]

@Amateur_Barbarian

Without diverting the thread too much - does “consent” mean full agreement on every single thing that happens? If a woman consents (fully) to sex and parts of it don’t go a way she likes, do those parts become “rape”?

Pretty sure that would divert the thread a whole hell of a lot. Maybe a GD thread is in order.
I think, in this particular instance, Lena Dunham was so focused on seeming edgy that she didn’t see that likening yourself to a sex offender is…you know…going to make other people liken you to a sex offender and mean it.

[Scumpup]

I didn’t know who she was before I opened this thread. My life was better back then.

[ZipperJJ]

Lena Dunham is a quirky young woman who grew up in NYC with her two quirky artist parents (see: penis noses). She went to Oberlin college and came back to NYC, made a quirky movie starring herself, her mother and her sister and that is kind of about herself, and then started making a hit HBO TV show starring herself which is kind of about herself. She is 28 years old and it is 2014.

If anyone is still shocked, appalled or confused by Lena Dunham and the things she does after that short biography then maybe you need to re-read it?

The things she says and does might be slightly shocking if she were Hannah Horvath (the character she plays on Girls) because that girl came from Michigan and has two boring midwestern parents who want to support her but they sure do think she’s weird. But she is actually Lena Dunham from NYC, daughter of artists, who went to liberal arts college and her parents probably think she’s a-ok and nobody in her family thinks any of this is weird.

Plus, she’s 28, she’s an artist, she’s out there representin’, it’s a different time and young people are different than they used to be, just like how every generation of young people are different than the ones before them.

I just don’t see a reason to get riled up about Lena Dunham. She is what she is. Let’s get back to discussing Miley Cyrus, who was one thing and is now another. Shocking!

[TriPolar]

@ZipperJJ

If anyone is still shocked, appalled or confused by Lena Dunham and the things she does after that short biography then maybe you need to re-read it?

The issue here is that she is getting the expected reaction to her biography and going ballistic over that reaction. I don’t know much about her, but this seems to be her modus operandi. I’m happy for her if she’s successful with this, but suing people who say she said what she said is just reinforcing the attitudes people have about her.

[Inner_Stickler]

blink blink

I’m two years younger than Lena and pebbles in vaginas and co-sleeping with siblings while masturbating were not part of my childhood and if they were for anyone in my cohort, I certainly don’t want to know about it.

[ZipperJJ]

@Inner_Stickler

blink blink

I’m two years younger than Lena and pebbles in vaginas and co-sleeping with siblings while masturbating were not part of my childhood and if they were for anyone in my cohort, I certainly don’t want to know about it.

Heh, I’m not saying that that part is something that shouldn’t be shocking due to her age. My bad, it came out wrong. More like the over-sharing, and how her work could be appealing to people in her age group and maybe not that shocking.

The weird sexual stuff with her sister is indeed weird! But taking into account the weirdness into which she was born and raised, it’s not anything more than eyebrow-raising.

I’m seeing it all like when people were outraged at the Duck Dynasty guy for being an old white from Louisiana who had some racist things to say. They were not appropriate and hopefully not agreeable but were in no way surprising.

[TriPolar]

@ZipperJJ

The weird sexual stuff with her sister is indeed weird! But taking into account the weirdness into which she was born and raised, it’s not anything more than eyebrow-raising.

I’m seeing it all like when people were outraged at the Duck Dynasty guy for being an old white from Louisiana who had some racist things to say. They were not appropriate and hopefully not agreeable but were in no way surprising.

It seems to be like that. I don’t know how to evaluate the credibility of her statements, but assuming a little exaggeration it’s not way outside normal activities of kids (not sure how old she was in the quoted excerpts though).

I don’t know much about her, mainly from when she makes news like this. In this case she seems to be saying things that people usually follow up with “Is that weird?”, because they know it is, and she has the attitude that no one should even consider it unusual, when she knows it is. Anyway, that’s what it sounds like to me.

[Eddie_F]

@iiandyiiii

I was talking about the perjorative “attention whore”.

I call other men that, and hear and read men being called that, all the time.

[Eddie_F]

@Amateur_Barbarian

I have no idea who Lena Dunham is, and after skimming this thread, I believe that’s a positive.

You should be thanking your lucky stars.

[Soylent_Juicy]

I don’t know about you guys but I think she’s being pretty disrespectful to her sister for publishing what she did to her when she was a baby.

I’m also skeptical about the “pebbles”. Don’t most one-year-olds wear a diaper all the time and have pretty much constant adult supervision when awake?

[RickJay]

It’s already a rather open secret that much of the book is either made up or constitutes Dunham taking other people’s stories and passing them off as her own, which in comedy is a pretty common tactic. It’s kind of weird in a memoir.

Having said that,

1. Dunhamis absolutely one of the most purely successful attention whores in the history of entertainment. Her entire act, on which she has based a movie, a television show, and a book, is “I’m Lena Dunham, look at me.” The problem with “look at me” is it requires increasingly brazen levels of clowning to hold people’s attention. Dunham pretty much has to admit to weird shit in her youth - whether it happened or not - at this point.

2. That said, I am loathe to call someone a pervert because of something they did when they were SEVEN YEARS OLD. She was, you know, seven. Assuming it happened at all.

The babbling about her being from a “useless generation” is stupid. Every generation’s as good or better than the last. LENA DUNHAM herself is about the least representative member of her generation you can possibly find; she’s a rich girl who has spent more of her life wildly far from anything similar to a normal life.