Girls star Lena Dunham hits back at feminist website Jezebel’s criticisms

LENA Dunham has hit back at feminist website Jezebel after they criticised her Vogue cover shoot.

Dunham’s excitement at her Vogue spread was dampened by the Jezebel criticisms. Picture:

LENA Dunham has hit back at feminist website Jezebel after their criticisms of her February Vogue cover.

After Vogue released images of Annie Liebowitz’s cover shoot with Dunham back in January, Jezebel claimed that the images were heavily photoshopped, and put out an offer of $10,000 to anyone who could provide the original unretouched photos from the Girls creator’s shoot.

The stunt backfired on Jezebel, with the site facing a backlash of its own when it got hold of the original pictures and published them for all to see — only to show that Dunham hadn’t been that heavily Photoshopped at all. Jezebel then faced a barrage of criticism from supporters of Dunham, who felt the implication — that the Girls star’s glamorous image must’ve been achieved through heavy Photoshopping— was offensive.

Dunham’s excitement at her Vogue spread was dampened by the Jezebel criticisms. Picture: AP

“That was messed up. I think Jezebel is really smart and funny. I think it’s just like, once you’ve been attacked that way, it’s hard to enjoy. It’s hard to enjoy once you feel like they’ve made such a monumental error in their approach to feminism,” Dunham said in a video interview with Grantland’s Bill Simmons.

“Instead of saying, ‘Hey, we kind of f***ked up, these pictures aren’t that retouched. Lena, enjoy the Vogue spread you’ve been excited about since you were 8 years old,’ [Jezebel] was like, ‘She’s not retouched, but she could have been.’ It was this weird, almost like political manoeuvring that I just had a lot of trouble respecting.”

In an odd twist to the story, Dunham gave Jezebel a friendly shout-out on her show as the furore was blowing up, in a scene that was surely filmed months beforehand.

Challenged by her boyfriend Adam in a recent episode as to why she gets her news from Gawker, Dunham’s character Hannah says, “It’s a web portal that celebrates the written world. And its sister site, Jezebel, is a place where feminists can go to support one another, which we need in this modern world of slut shaming ...”

Seems Dunham might not be so kind if she refers to the site again in a future episode.