Image via Complex Original
Representation—who is depicted, who gets to speak. Much of the conversation around Lena Dunham's Girls, returning for its second season tonight at 9 p.m. on HBO, has hinged on questions of representation.
Three young NYC writers revisited the first season, watching to see if they could find their own experiences in the world of the show. These are the results.
Brooklyne Gipson (@Brooklyne) watched as a L.A. transplant and woman of color.
Shanté Cosme (@ShanteCosme) watched as a woman with strong feelings about sex and self-respect.
Brenden Gallagher (@muddycreekU) watched as the token dude.
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White Much?
A couple of months after my 24th birthday I moved to New York. And by “moved” I mean that I gathered a few of my things and left L.A. without telling anyone that I had no plans to return.
I'd taken the unexpected reality of being laid off from my writing gig at a start-up news analysis website (coupled with a surprisingly decent severance) as a sign that it was finally time for me to do what I’d been talking about doing since college graduation: move to New York.
Like Hannah Horvath, the main character in HBO’s Girls, I found myself two years removed from undergrad, living in Brooklyn, pursuing a writing career, and living with a friend...and by the unspoken rules of de facto cohabitation, her boyfriend as well. Unlike Hannah, my New York lifestyle was neither fully nor partially subsidized by my parents. More importantly, I’m black, and if you let Lena Dunham tell it, we don’t exist outside the occasional stereotypical joking reference, unless we’re driving a taxi, begging for change on the street, or serving some other auxiliary servile function. A New York without minorities—imagine that.
For these reasons, among others, it would be easy for me to call out Girls for its lack of diversity or shameless broadcast of white privilege, but I can only applaud the show for the same reasons it’s being put under the microscope in the first place—it’s fucking great.
Like so many critics of the show, I can’t turn a blind eye to the lack of color in the NYC depicted by the show. The idea that a program set in the most culturally diverse city in America would be so lily white is more than an insulting oversight—it’s blasphemous. However, we wouldn’t be talking about the show if it weren’t so good, and part of what makes it so important is that it offers a unique view of dynamic women who aren’t afraid to explore sex and sexuality in an open and honest way.
No, there weren’t any minorities in the cast last season but there were definitely characters that shot me through with that "Thank God I’m not the only person who feels like this” feeling. Like Shoshanna, I remained a virgin far past what I once considered to be a socially acceptable age, and had to deal with the anxiety that comes with that. I too dated my own Adam, and though mine wasn't nearly as strange, he definitely warranted a few side-eyes and subsequent explanations to friends. And what woman doesn’t have body issues like Hannah? Watching a female protagonist with such nontraditional qualities is too rare an experience, and that's damn unfortunate since this sort of representation transcends ethnicity, economic status, and geographic location.
These white girls aren’t just like me and my circle of friends in NY, who in Dunham’s defense, tend to self-segregate as well, but the parallels are there. My parents weren’t bankrolling my New York adventures but the show starts at a point where Hannah is cut off financially and that I understand. The “trying to make it in New York on your own” struggle is real for so many young people in this city; even though her indignation with her parents is comical, their refusal to support her brought her character down to size for me.
That the show has attracted such a diverse audience that can relate to these characters who aren’t exactly like us is a testament to good storytelling and character development. Far too often, women are only cast in television shows and movies if they look like Megan Fox or Gabrielle Union. I love the idea of having more faces like mine behind the camera ensuring that narratives reflect genuine female experiences, and cannot wait for the premiere of Season Two.
Written by Brooklyne Gipson (@Brooklyne)
Most Adventurous Women Don't
The first time I saw Lena Dunham naked, I was overjoyed. Hers was not a body like any I’d seen on television. Nothing like the endless parade of taut bods that ride Adrian Grenier in Entourage, not the petite, increasingly gaunt Anna Paquin and her toned supernatural bedmates on True Blood, and certainly not the effortlessly erotic Paz de la Huerta on Boardwalk Empire. This was a woman whose body I could relate to: imperfect and pear-shaped, with breasts small and unmiraculous. Hannah Horvath (the character Dunham plays on HBO’s Girls) looks like me, and like the women I know. I felt a wave of gratitude wash over me.
Better yet, Hannah owned that body. When, in an early moment, her occasional bedmate Adam paws at the folds of her stomach and asks, “Do you eat for fun?” she makes no concessions for her shape. She is what I am, and what every woman should be: self-accepting, and at ease in her own skin.
But at some point midway through the second episode, that courage slips away. Watching Hannah have sex with Adam, it's hard to be convinced that she's at ease. And it's not a lack of familiarity that plagues her. She appears deeply uncomfortable. And that’s where my mirror-gazing ended.
Hannah’s sex life is a series of sad encounters that failed to spark even a flicker of recognition in me. Sex should be, at the very least, carnally satisfying. If it’s not emotionally or physically pleasurable, why do it? Hannah wants to liken herself to “most adventurous women,” but the verve she lacks during intimacy keeps her from claiming the title.
Hannah doesn’t take ownership of her pleasure. We never see Hannah on top and in control during sex. She's either a casual observer or a cajoled participant. She is inevitably under Adam, on his sketchy sofa or sheet-less bed, knees curled up to her ears: unenthusiastic, clueless and, more often that not, orgasm-less. “Lay on your stomach…grab your legs,” he says during one of the first encounters audiences see. She's degraded. It feels dirty to watch, and not in a sexy way.
The opening scene of the second episode finds Hannah once again underneath Adam while he’s gracelessly slapping away at her. He casts her in a kinky fantasy, where she's an 11-year-old he spots on a street holding a Cabbage Patch Kid lunch box. He asks, “Yeah, you like that?” and Hannah fumbles through the exchange. “I like that, I like what you’re doing,”she says with the unenthusiastic tone of Ben Stein.
After he tells her he’s going to send her home to her parents “covered in cum” and finishes, she jumps on the orgasm bandwagon, claiming to have “almost came.” But after watching her every awkward twist and compliant turn, it seems unlikely. Most adventurous women don’t look like they hate sex while it's happening.
Even after Hannah finds she actually enjoys dirty talk (in another equally uncomfortable sex scene with a hometown friend) and Adam reveals himself to be someone who truly cares for her, the idea of what she sacrificed to get there is unsettling.
Who finds out that the man they’re sleeping with has given them HPV and sticks around, especially after he shrugs off the accusation? ”I don't know what it is about me, but girls never ask me to use condoms.”
Who answers a misfired sext, a dick pic intended for another recipient, with a reward (i.e., a racy snapshot of her own)? Hannah might be taking a risk, but it’s clear there are no rewards to reap. Does foregoing common sense scan as adventurous? Not really. It’s just reckless
Much like the Hannah who's convinced of her creative worth but unwilling to fully invest in it, Hannah as a sexual being is not fully actualized; she’s constrained by her doubts and fears.
Still, there's more of her in me that I'd like to admit. Sure, most adventurous women don’t have sex like this—but girls? Girls do.
I'm bothered because I recognize a former self in her, a girl barely old enough to drink, wading through an endless tide of self-inflicted mistakes. Part of being young is the overwhelming urge to make those mistakes, and to write them off as being adventurous or “seizing the day,” but, by doing so, you don’t hold yourself fully accountable. So, even though Hannah’s terrible sex life was never mine, the boundaries she can't maintain, the self-respect she so frequently sacrifices, are the mark of any young person trying to grow.
I was Hannah once, because I was young. And, while I like to fancy myself a full-grown woman now (I take vitamins! I go to bed at a reasonable hour! I don’t get drunk on school nights!) I am not so far from that time, that self.
I like to think I see myself more in Jessa; I both recognize and admire her healthy appetite for sex. At first glance, Jessa seems Hanna’s foil: a free-spirited, sexually confident woman who takes what she wants, and gets off whenever she wants, with whomever she wants, without remorse. I recognize the self-respect that comes from taking control over your own body and actions.
Maybe all of us have a little Hannah in us. Even Jessa isn’t as “unsmoteable" as she claims to be. Katherine, the wife of the husband she lured into temptation, tells her, “You do it to distract yourself from becoming the person you're meant to be." Jessa uses her sexuality like a key, but she's at all the wrong locks. Another woman trying to grow.
I could try matching my experiences with the experiences of the show's four protagonists, like playing a game of Memory, and continually come up short.
But their stories are still my stories. Like a remix of a song you know well, even in its most outlandish iteration, I recognize the melody.
Girls is not representative of every girl’s sexual experience, nor does it have any responsibility to be. Many people have expressed misgivings about Girls based on its inability to accurately express their personal background on one level or another. But, it’s not a television show’s job to represent my truth. It’s Lena Dunham’s job to represent her truth.
Hannah’s sex life may not resemble my sex life, neither in past nor present, but her sexual failings and vain attempts at finding pleasure scratch at a truth that must resonate with all of us.
We've all been naked and exposed out there, just trying to find our bearings. In bed and out.
Written by Shanté Cosme (@ShanteCosme)
Mean People Suck
“It kind of ticks me off when I come to Williamsburg after working hard all fucking day in the real world and I see all these stupid little daddy’s girls with their fucking bowler hats...and you come over and flirt and flirt and kiss and kiss and listen to my amazing tunes and drink my beautiful wine and then spill it on my gorgeous rug and laugh about it.”
Sometimes even the words of an asshole will stick with you. In this case, they were uttered by a venture capitalist trying to seduce two young women with booze and lame “mash-ups” at his classy Brooklyn high-rise late in season one of Girls. But why did they come back to this douchebag’s apartment? Was it really just to laugh at him?
Questions like this pile up as you work your way through the show's first season. Why does Adam masturbate in front of Hannah and deny her sexual pleasure? Why do Hannah’s bosses let her go without a note of sympathy or compassion? Why does Marnie stay with her boyfriend after repeatedly, dismissively mocking him behind his back? Why do the characters on the show casually and cruelly dig at each other about their weight and their jobs and their sexual inexperience so often?
Maybe this cruelty is a defense mechanism against the harsh realities of post-collegiate life. Maybe this level of cruelty truly is the experience of New York for some people. In the show’s pilot, Hannah is denied the chance to turn her year-long internship into a real job. The only reason she is given is that she doesn’t know Photoshop. This is the first in a series of career disappointments and missteps that hound these characters. This I can relate to. I feel Iike all of us, except for a lucky few New York transplants, have that experience time and time again, knocking hard on the door they’ve spent their entire young life trying to find, only to be left freezing, stuck outside in the cold. It makes sense that these people would be frustrated and angry.
But that's exactly why I don’t understand the relationships between the characters in Girls. My experience in New York has largely been that my friends and, and often my acquaintances, co-workers, and even bosses, are too exhausted to be mean to each other at the end of the day. After being screamed at by an Upper East Side trophy wife or some Wall Street hotshot for bringing them the wrong drink, the wrong size, the wrong whatever-it-is-you-peddle-at-your-day-job, all you want to do is sit around and not be mean to each other…and drink heavily, of course.
Almost anyone I know will say the same thing: The first six months you spend in New York City are the worst months of your life. For my part, I moved into a warehouse apartment next to a matzah ball shop in Williamsburg. I lived in a plywood closet with a platform on top where I kept my desk and a few books. The J roared two feet from my window all night, scaring the dirty fat orange cat who would fall through the handmade staircase, landing on me as I slept on my mite-ridden mattress. I don’t consider myself special for this experience. It just makes me part of the club. My “first months in New York” story probably only ranks 47th worst among my friends and acquaintances. I think these experiences make you the kind of person who will let someone crash at your place or borrow cab fare as much as they harden you.
Eventually you figure it out, at least a little bit. You figure out what neighborhoods you like, what job you can bear to do while trying to get the job you want, and who your friends are. And then your friends move away. That’s one thing they don’t tell you about before you move here. Some go back to grad school. Others move back home and start a family in the town where they grew up. Most of them move to Portland. Sometimes Austin. Sometimes Chicago. Sometimes Denver. But mostly Portland. They leave because everything is so expensive. They leave because they aren’t as good at trombone as they thought they were. They leave because they were searching for something here and it was actually back down the block from their parent’s house in the country. And every time, it really sucks.
New York has not been about cruelty for me. There have been terrible moments. I've gotten into shouting matches with cab drivers and I’ve been casually stood up for dates in strange parts of Brooklyn. I’ve taken the two-and-a-half hour late-night subway journey back to Queens. I’ve been abused by so-called “internships.” But these won’t be the things that I remember about New York City.
I will remember the quiet moments in bars with people from somewhere else, scraping together quarters for another Bud bottle. I will remember nights spent with friends from Pennsylvania, California, and Tennessee, just trying to come up with a pleasant word of encouragement for each other, begging each other not to move to Portland.
Written by Brenden Gallagher (@muddycreekU)