How Problematic Women Become Pariahs

Lena Dunham is flawed. Misogyny has unfairly made her—and so many other women—indefensible.

Open up an internet comments section on Lena Dunham and you’ll see three major themes: she’s fat; she’s a child molester; and, she’s a nobody (“Who?? Never heard of her!”). These apparently unrelated reactions are, in fact, of a piece. The common thread is misogyny of the kind that takes down famous and flawed women with remarkable efficiency. And we need to fight it.

I know, I know, I know. Lena Dunham is an imperfect person. The first season of her HBO show Girls was sorely lacking in racial diversity—as she has acknowledged and tried to address. Her comments about Odell Beckham Jr. snubbing her, after they were seated at the same table at a Met Gala, were racially insensitive—and contributed, as she again acknowledged, to a long and violent history of white women sexualizing Black men’s bodies. Her remarks in her memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, about her childhood interactions with her sibling, Cyrus Grace Dunham, were strange and insensitive to survivors of incest—as Dunham, once more, took pains to recognize. (The story also, like many instances of family lore, doesn’t entirely make sense: Dunham wrote that, when she was seven, and Cyrus Grace was one, the latter put pebbles in their vagina in their driveway. Lena inspected out of curiosity, before shrieking and summoning their mother. Like Roxane Gay, I find this story uncomfortable, not least because of the lack of parental supervision. I also have questions about a one-year-old’s fine motor skills and bodily self-knowledge. But no matter. The point is that this is children being weird, not anything approaching molestation.)

The thing about Lena Dunham is that she is, in a word, shameless. It didn’t occur to her not to share, or overshare, her anxious thoughts about her body in relation to a star footballer, or her sibling’s and her awkward bodily explorations. She lacks the kind of social filter that keeps most of us from spilling. That is a foible that reveals problematic thoughts and actions that most of us are able to keep hidden. It is also inseparable from her excellence as an artist.

I admire Lena Dunham’s work precisely because her shameless—or, less pejoratively, shame-free—gaze is consistently revealing. She is able to expose her body, and the bodies of women like her, in ways that opened up a lens on how heterosexual sex works for women of our generation. She is not too ashamed to show how fucked-up these sexual and heterosexual dynamics actually are either. Many of us would be hampered by a defensive insistence that, yes, we may be fat or our bodies otherwise non-normative: but we are still not only worthy of, but getting, our due in terms of love and admiration and affection. Not Dunham: she shows that ordinary-looking and tragically heterosexual women are often receiving far less than we ought to be, in the dating and marriage market. (“You’re realizing that middling white women feel terrible wherever they go,” quips one character in her recent hit Netflix show, Too Much.) That we are routinely shortchanged in these ways is, frankly, embarrassing. But Dunham is willing to go there, even when essentially exposing her own recent marriage to Luis Felber as in some ways less than stellar (at least at the beginning). (As I wrote last time, Dunham has been candid that “the germ” of Felix’s character in Too Much is based on her husband, who is also an indie musician who she had a one night stand with early on during a visit to London. Fascinatingly, Felber co-created the series. Again, I have so many questions.)

Misogyny hates a woman who can frankly admit things, especially when those things are startlingly revealing about gendered norms and mores. Misogyny, on my analysis, is the hatred and hostility women face that serves a particular social function: to police and enforce patriarchal norms and expectations. One such is that women remain conveniently, politely silent about the shitty male behavior we encounter that is not quite rape, and not attributable to monsters. When Adam pissed on Hannah’s leg in the shower during Girls, or pressured another woman to crawl to him like a dog during sex, I felt the lacerating pain—and indignity—of heterosexuality in ways few other artists have managed to provoke in me.

Misogyny also hates a woman who is not ashamed of her own body, especially when that body is imperfect by patriarchal standards. It hates a woman who is not shame-prone, simpliciter, and thus lacks one of the most powerful forces of moral self-regulation and policing that exists in human nature.

To say that Dunham has been a lightning rod for misogyny is, of course, an understatement. (“Am I the Meghan Markle of, like, fat white bitches?” Dunham’s lead character of Jessica, played by Megan Stalter, wonders in Too Much.) When Ben Shapiro’s Truth Revolt website trawled through Dunham’s memoir and took her uncomfortable disclosures about her relationship with Cyrus Grace out of context, the people poised to hate Dunham for her success, her shame-free attitude, and her—then merely slight—fatness had remarkably effective moral ammunition. Dunham was suddenly painted as a monster and a molester, to Cyrus Grace’s fury and horror. (The pair are close, and Cyrus Grace apparently signed off on everything in their sister’s memoir.) The concerns about Dunham’s racial insensitivity and cluelessness were, in contrast, perfectly valid. But they’ve also been weaponized in ways that reflect a desire to take her down more than a consistent concern with, say, white-centered dramedies and other prestige television. There’s a noticeable strain of misogynistic unforgivingness in reactions to Dunham: nether her apparently sincere apologies, nor her actual growth and improvement on this score, have made a dent in the hatred. That is predictable. And telling.

And then she had the audacity to age, and to gain weight. The comments sections got more brutal, especially among people who don’t bother to dress up their misogyny in moral garb, pretending they hate Dunham for purely high-minded reasons. (As for the “Who??” crowd: you know exactly who she is, otherwise you would not be commenting. It did amuse me though, for that reason, when Felber remarked that he had to google his future wife when they started dating.)

Part of what interests me about Lena Dunham is how reluctant I’ve been to defend her. I have followed her career, with a curiosity that borders on morbid, ever since I started watching Girls when it first premiered. (I even know far more about the backstory with her dog, which became a plot point in Too Much, than befits a dignified academic.) As a highly shame-prone person, I’ve found Dunham’s work liberating and pointful, and the reactions to her persona a cautionary tale as well as a study in the misogyny directed toward prominent, problematic women. In the public imagination, her foibles became fatal flaws; her selective vision became exclusion; her sometimes thoughtlessness, erasure; and her occasional cluelessness made her a cunt. To be candid.

When a person is painted as disgusting, and held to be beyond the pale, there are powerful incentives for the rest of us not to tangle with them, lest we be deemed disgusting too. In part this is a reflection of how disgust tends to work: when one object that garners disgust, including moral disgust, is associated with another, the second gets tarnished—rendered gross by association. And that is how merely problematic women become moral pariahs. They are rendered indefensible because those of us inclined to come to their defense—noting their talents, their virtues, and holding that their flaws are not fatal—fear being subject to misogynistic moral disgust too if we do so. I’ve wanted to write about Lena Dunham for almost a decade. That it’s taken me this long to put pen to paper says a lot about the way we lose, and lose out on, interesting, smart, talented, imperfect female artists—and politicians and other public figures—because of a credible threat. We are credibly threatened with being dismissed as morally unserious, and even shameful or disgusting, if we support any woman who is morally problematic. (Meanwhile, as goes almost without saying, men in comparable positions—and more—get away with rape and murder.)

But, unfortunately, in the end, we are all morally problematic. And some of the most talented women among us are, non-accidentally, prone to moral errors that are serious—and, I would argue, ultimately forgivable. Lena Dunham has very little filter, and she is strangely impervious to the shame that dogs me and so many other women. That means she makes significant moral mistakes. And that she produces work that is not only compulsively watchable but also culturally and morally important.

There’s a hidden principle often at work in public discourse: defend or support a woman and be held to condone everything they’ve ever done, even if they’ve since apologized and amended their behavior. This is not only a silly idea, but one that means we will never have nice things, aka women in prominent and respected roles. I hope you can see the flaw in that logic, and the problem—not to mention the profound tedium—in that plan. Whatever you think of Lena Dunham, it is time to call out this moralism and stop putting an anxious asterisk on our admiration of women who fail to be perfect.