Lena Dunham, the topic of a thousand 2010s assume items about whether or not or not she is problematic, has re-emerged from backstage along with her new memoir, Famesick. However this time round, the assume items look totally different. A few of them are mea culpas addressed to Dunham.
“We owe Lena Dunham an apology,” declared Rachel Simon in a narrative for MS Now. The apology got here with a caveat: “Dunham is, and at all times has been, a flawed determine. However she by no means deserved our hatred, nor the expectations positioned on her to get every little thing proper.”
“I used to be mistaken about Lena Dunham,” proclaimed Sonia Soraiya at Slate. Soraiya argues that Dunham’s nervy, uncomfortable magnum opus Women “activated” her personal self-loathing, and that she and different critics of the period took it out on Dunham.
“I used to be one in every of Lena Dunham’s haters. I need to say I’m sorry,” wrote Dave Schilling at The Guardian. Dunham’s memoir, wherein she writes vividly about how her early fame destroyed her psychological and bodily well being, had Schilling rethinking the best way he used to put in writing about her. “Hardly ever did I take into consideration the hostile results of society turning her right into a Wicker Man-style totem for us to set on fireplace,” he wrote. “To numerous us, she stopped being an individual and remodeled into a logo. I can’t consider something extra unfair.”
In Famesick, Dunham writes that the depth of the general public dialog about her when Women premiered in 2012 exacerbated her continual sickness, which might be ultimately identified as endometriosis plus Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. The mix of the stress of fame and the stress of continual sickness drove her into an opioid dependancy and self-destructive habits, which might additional gas the discourse about her.
Even within the 2010s, on the peak of Dunham’s fame, it was pretty evident that plenty of the outcries over Dunham’s public presence had been overblown. Now, with the gap of 15 years, and Women reclaimed as a bit of essential artwork, a few of these controversies seem remarkably silly. We should always not have been so merciless to her, the consensus is growing, and we’d not have been, had she arisen at another historic second.
With Dunham’s redemption cycle, we’re performing a sped-up model of the discourse cycle that noticed the general public reexamining the misogynistic witch hunts of Monica Lewinsky, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, et al. within the Nineteen Nineties and 2000s. It’s turn into clear, with the gap of 20 years, that the gossip press of the 2000s was pushed primarily by misogyny, sometimes dressed up as concern trolling. Now, the oft-unspoken villain is cancel tradition, the slew of social media shaming and chiding that grew to become such a virulent power on the identical time that Dunham was arising within the 2010s. Apologizing to Dunham turns into a manner of apologizing for and repudiating cancel tradition, making the case that we’re not within the cancel tradition second.
However 2010s cancel tradition was a distinct beast than 2000s purity tradition. The ways of social media dogpiling and requires deplatforming had been generally misdirected at, say, recipe writers who misspoke in an interview, however in addition they helped push ahead the Me Too motion and Black Lives Matter. Defenders of cancel tradition used to say that it was much less about canceling the sinful than it was about holding the highly effective to account for his or her misdeeds — however it wasn’t at all times clear who was highly effective sufficient to be value concentrating on, and which misdeeds had been all that dangerous.
Dunham, because the showrunner of a conversation-driving tv present, had a good quantity of energy, in addition to a knack for saying the mistaken issues in public. The questions earlier than us now are: Was something she mentioned in public dangerous sufficient to justify the therapy she obtained? And, by extension, simply how harmful was cancel tradition, actually?
Cancel tradition emerged from a selected second in historical past that may be troublesome to duplicate. First, social media democratized discourse; out of the blue elites had been weak to criticism by common individuals within the public sq.. It additionally divided individuals into groups and made everybody indignant on a regular basis.
This was additionally the period of blogs — Gawker and its sister website Jezebel; The Axe and its sister website The Hairpin; Salon, Slate, and plenty of extra — which had been so enjoyable to learn and so arduous to work at. Blogs had been content material mills that wanted to be fed. The important thing metric for digital newsrooms on the time was what number of clicks any particular person story acquired, which incentivized shortly written scorching takes about polarizing figures who sparked viewers outrage.
In the meantime, the educated class was quickly shifting the norms of acceptable public habits and perception techniques towards the left. Within the post-Gamergate, post-Ferguson, post-Obama tradition wars, every little thing have to be understood as expressive of the shift in these norms, to be analyzed and evaluated for its constancy and advantage. At its finest, it was a useful refocusing that helped individuals reprocess the hegemonic beliefs in regards to the world they’d inherited. It may additionally, at its worst, be reductive. Cancel tradition was a device that held the highly effective to account. It was a weapon that punished disproportionately. It was bipartisan, vicious, scary, bewildering, exhilarating.
Confessional-style girls’s running a blog was additionally in its heyday in these days — all of the XOJane “it occurred to me” tales, the Jezebel tampon posts — which had been so prevalent that their gravitational pull warped any piece of fiction in regards to the intimate lives of girls, together with Women, into being understood as a confession. As such, it was evaluated religiously, praised for its radical political transparency, damned for its sins.
Lena Dunham controversies: A (non-comprehensive) timeline
Not that sort of pseudonym. In December 2014, Dunham publishes a memoir, Not That Type of Woman, wherein she describes her sexual assault. She provides her attacker a reputation and modifications particulars of his identification, however the ensuing character seems to match an precise individual whom Breitbart and the Nationwide Evaluation each monitor down. They lambast Dunham for her “false” accusation ruining the person’s repute.
Not that sort of scandal. Additionally in Not That Type of Woman, Dunham describes inspecting her youthful sibling’s genitals as a toddler. Conservative retailers accuse her of sexual assault.
That’s a method of placing it, half 2. On her podcast Ladies of the Hour in 2016, Dunham declares, “I nonetheless haven’t had an abortion, however I want I had.” Backlash as soon as once more ensues.
Of all of the individuals who had been canceled within the 2010s, Lena Dunham was certainly not probably the most deserving. She was the younger showrunner of a critically acclaimed however little-watched HBO drama, with most episodes garnering nicely beneath 1 million viewers. How a lot affect may she probably have wielded? However Women grew to become one thing larger than itself; generally it felt that each one of many few hundred thousand individuals who watched it had been writing essays about it.
A few of that criticism was straightforwardly misogynistic: Individuals wrote indignant screeds about how a lot they hated Dunham as a result of she was bare on her present rather a lot and so they thought she was ugly. A few of it was in dangerous religion. Dunham’s Women alter ego, Hannah, was abrasive and entitled, and within the discourse, the gap between them collapsed. Individuals had been livid at Dunham for making them watch a personality as unlikable as Hannah.
An excessive amount of the criticism of Dunham was plausibly in good religion, however it was terribly loud. There was the criticism that Dunham and all of the younger girls she solid had been nepo infants. Then there was the best way Dunham’s real-life presence generally evoked the identical clueless conceitedness as that of the character she performed. A part of that concerned her saying numerous thoughtlessly provocative issues, a lot of which displayed a constant obtuseness towards class and race.
To start with, Women was set amongst younger individuals in various Brooklyn, and but all the principle characters had been white: Why? Some argued that Dunham’s blinkered, privileged characters had been precisely the kind of younger New Yorkers who would encompass themselves with different white individuals, whereas others argued Dunham’s refusal to have interaction with race was an indication of racism in and of itself.
Dunham responded with a attribute mixture of purpose and hamfisted trollery. “If I had one of many 4 women, if, for instance, she was African American, I really feel like — not that the expertise of an African American lady and a white lady are drastically totally different, however there needs to be specificity to that have [that] I wasn’t in a position to converse to,” she instructed NPR in 2012, after the primary season aired. “I did write one thing that was super-specific to my expertise, and I at all times need to keep away from rendering an expertise I can’t converse to precisely.”
Dunham was proper that the appeal of Women lay in its specificity, and it was affordable for her to concern that she couldn’t deliver that stage of sensory, bodily element to the lifetime of a Black character. However the next season, she adopted up the controversy by casting Donald Glover as Hannah’s short-lived Black boyfriend, who was revealed to be a Republican — a wierd inventive selection that tokenized what was, at that time, the present’s sole Black character.
Within the meantime, outdoors the present, Dunham stored making unforced errors. “I nonetheless haven’t had an abortion, however I want I had,” she mentioned on a podcast in 2016. In 2019, she described sitting subsequent to the NFL star Odell Beckham Jr. on the Met Gala, and feeling insecure that Beckham, who’s Black, didn’t appear drawn to her. “The vibe was very very similar to, ‘Do I need to fuck it? Is it sporting a…yep, it’s sporting a tuxedo. I’m going to return to my cellphone,’” Dunham mentioned. Theoretically she was speaking about her personal insecurities, however in follow, the quote was so particular and bizarrely sexualized (really the Lena Dunham story) that critics argued it performed right into a dangerous narrative about how Black males reply to white girls. (Dunham later apologized.)
Whereas the criticisms of Dunham’s physique and nudity had been simple misogyny, the criticisms of her oversight round race had been extra affordable. Nonetheless, few of them merited the depth of response Dunham obtained within the 2010s: not simply the well mannered and well-reasoned essays, however the vitriolic and endless Twitter posts accusing her of monstrous bigotry and evil ideas. In some circumstances, it felt as if the social justice outrage round Dunham’s racism had been giving cowl to individuals who hated her as a result of they thought she was ugly and annoying, like right-wing commenters who declare they’re criticizing white girls as an act of allyship with individuals of coloration.
In Famesick, Dunham declines to apologize for any of her missteps — save for what was most likely her biggest controversy: her 2017 protection of a white Women author accused of raping a Black lady.
In 2017, on the peak of the Me Too motion, actress Aurora Perrineau filed sexual assault fees in opposition to Women author Murray Miller, saying that he raped her in 2012, when she was 17 years previous. In response, Dunham and her Women co-showrunner Jenni Konner despatched a press release to the Hollywood Reporter defending Miller.
“Whereas our first intuition is to pay attention to each lady’s story,” they wrote, “our insider data of Murray’s state of affairs makes us assured that sadly this accusation is likely one of the 3 % of assault circumstances which can be misreported yearly.”
“I consider in numerous issues however the first tenet of my politics is to carry up the individuals who have held me up, who’ve crammed my world with love,” Dunham added on what was then Twitter.
For an outspoken feminist like Dunham to accuse a girl of mendacity about her sexual assault, on the grounds that the person accused was somebody she knew, was a betrayal of a few of her most clearly said rules. To make issues worse, the accused man was white, and the alleged sufferer was a girl of coloration, enjoying immediately into one in every of Dunham’s largest weaknesses.
In Famesick, Dunham describes her resolution to publish this assertion as “the narcissism of fame in its purest kind.”
“I used to be so deep in my very own misery — bodily, emotional, existential — that I had ceased to have the ability to think about anybody else’s,” she writes. She additionally says that the response went out the identical day she returned house after a full hysterectomy, excessive on ache killers, beneath strain from Konner, and he or she doesn’t keep in mind drafting it.
Each time I learn this apology, I discover myself going forwards and backwards on it. Dunham sounds genuinely contrite — however then Dunham at all times does sound genuinely contrite in all her apologies, which by no means appear to finish.
The medical context from which she was writing her authentic assertion sounds nearly unimaginably troublesome. Dunham evokes the bodily and psychological ache of the hysterectomy with brutal effectivity, likening her disease-ridden uterus to “the Chinatown Chanel purse of nightmares, stuffed with each refined and obtrusive flaws”; one in every of her docs tells her later that he doesn’t know the way she was in a position to maintain strolling. I’m reluctant to tar somebody eternally for a poor resolution made so quickly after the trauma and ache of main surgical procedure.
But there’s additionally a slippery manipulative high quality to the best way Dunham writes about this assertion, a refined passing of blame. Konner turns into the chief agent in Dunham’s model of occasions, the lady of sound thoughts and sound well being who pushes the fateful assertion on a woozy, dissociating Dunham and supposedly publishes it over Dunham’s mom’s protests. Such villainous, boundary-crossing, ill-intentioned figures recur all through this memoir at a few of Dunham’s lowest moments: out of the blue, we encounter individuals who whom Dunham tells us are merciless or unempathetic in a manner she says that she shouldn’t be.
“It’s in these moments that I felt not sure whether or not Dunham is a sufferer or a narcissist,” wrote the essayist Eleanor Halls in her evaluate of Famesick; “the reality is you could be each.” And isn’t it at all times each with Lena Dunham?
Realizing every little thing we do about Dunham, it feels affordable to determine that she has crossed the road too many instances and you might be finished with giving her second possibilities. It feels affordable to conclude that you simply don’t need to take note of her public persona however are keen to present her constantly high-quality TV work one other attempt. And it additionally feels affordable to determine that you’re keen to permit her the grace of her apology, even with caveats.
That, in the long run, is the place I find yourself. Dunham has a compelling voice, and I discover that she hasn’t finished something so appalling that it interferes with my curiosity in seeing what she does subsequent.
A part of the explanation so many individuals are invested in parsing out how dangerous Dunham is or was, and the way a lot she deserved her therapy within the 2010s, is as a result of it’s a manner of figuring out by proxy how a lot we collectively have to really feel ashamed of cancel tradition. Within the midst of the vicious backlash to progressive politics that supposedly led to Trump’s reelection, there’s a rising sense amongst many progressives that the keen, ugly, censorious glee of cancel tradition was a tactical mistake, that it alienated supporters, that it was even immoral.
Wanting again at Dunham’s profession, although, reveals that cancel tradition by no means went alongside any explicit social gathering traces. It was misogynistic: It attacked girls with a selected glee, notably girls like Dunham, who was thought-about ugly but nonetheless took her garments off on TV. It was additionally feminist: Dunham’s largest wave of backlash got here after she defended an accused rapist whose accuser was a Black lady.
Cancel tradition was an expression of what was new and thrilling about each social media and digital media, and likewise what was monstrous and destabilizing about them. It was a device utilized by individuals on either side of the political aisle, and likewise individuals who didn’t determine as political in any respect. It devoured individuals like Lena Dunham, and it was additionally a supply of consideration she appeared to court docket, upsetting and trolling and apologizing in an limitless cycle of discourse.
Dunham was within the distinctive place to grasp each the panicky horrors and the perverse thrills of cancel tradition higher than practically anybody. Just like the individuals apologizing to her, she, too, doesn’t appear to know if it was all that dangerous — solely that she needs it had not been so dangerous to her.
