Lena Dunham's fall from feminist icon to alleged hypocrite and racist

Lena Dunham has achieved a prominence most affluent liberal arts stud­ents can only dream of. Her fall from grace is deserving.

Lena Dunham: ‘I am a half-Jew, half-WASP, and I wrote two Jews and two WASPs.’ Picture: Getty Images.

I­n five years, Lena Dunham has achieved a prominence most affluent liberal arts stud­ents can only dream of. An award-winning debut feature film made on a shoestring budget, a book deal worth upwards of $6 million and six ­seasons of the era-defining comedy-drama Girls have accelerated her to the kind of cultural ­renown rarely bestowed on young women, let alone those who, like ­Dunham, buck Hollywood’s aesthetic norms.

But such accolades have come with a bitter aftertaste: Dunham has long been accused of privilege, nepotism and racism. She has issued countless apologies through the years after sparking widespread offence in navigating the rules of what is and isn’t appropriate to joke about online.

The past month, however, may have been her nadir. After actress Aurora Perrineau report­ed Girls co-writer Murray Miller to the Los Angeles police for sexual assault, Dunham, a rape survivor­, publicly defended Miller. In the past, Dunham has maintained that all femal­e accusers should be believed. However, in this case she claimed Perrineau was “misreporting” what happened. Further muddying the waters, Perrineau is an actress of colour.

Dunham apologised but was labelled a hypo­crite and a racist, notably by Zinzi Clemmons, a writer for Dunham’s feminist news­letter, Lenny Letter. In a scorching explanation of why she would no longer write for Dunham, Clemmons claimed that she had known her since college, when she avoided Dunham and her friends “because of their well-known racism­”. Clemmons added: “In Lena’s circle, there was a girl who was known to use the N-word in conversation in order to be provocative, and if she was ever called on it, she would say, ‘it’s just a joke’.”

Dunham’s name, much besmirched, now feels blackened for good.

Her descent is one that seems, initially at least, improbable. While the tall-poppy syndrome has afflicted innumerable artists, Dunham­’s fall from grace feels more deserving than most: she found repute through giving a voice to the misrepresented, and lost it when it became apparent she was willing to make noise for only a certain few.

The scorn poured on her feels more potent than the usual backlash suffered by prominent stars, in part because it’s coming from people with so much less power than Dunham herself. How did Dunham, a white woman of privilege with connections across the showbiz and publishing industries, come to be exposed?

Right from the beginning of her ascent to fame, the narrow confines of Dunham’s background and representation have come under scrutiny. Even before Girls premiered, the Los Angeles Times was among those who sniffed at its propensity to “dwell on privileged white-girl problems”.

Within a few episodes, Girls had already been marked as having an issue with diversity: there were barely any people of colour in the show, and casting calls had been unearthed that enforced racial stereotypes, namely an overweight, humorous black woman who “MUST DO A JAMAICAN ACCENT” and a “sexy” actres­s who “MUST DO A SOUTH AMERICAN/CENTRAL AMERICAN ACCENT” to play a nanny from El Salvador.

While Dunham was praised for presenting realistic friendships between women in their mid-20s, uncomfortably familiar sex scenes and bodies that defied Hollywood convention, her largely WASPy and Jewish portrayal of New York City — one of the most diverse cities in the world — was deemed problematic.

The cast of Girls: Jemima Kirke, left, Allison Williams, Lena Dunham and Zosia Mamet.

As academic and author Roxane Gay wrote for literary website The Rumpus weeks after the first episode of Girls: “The stark whiteness of Girls disturbs and disappoints me. I wonder why Hannah and her friends don’t have at least one blipster friend or why Hannah’s boss at the publishin­g house or one or more of the girls’ love interests couldn’t be an actor of colour.”

Most of the criticism was kind to Dunham, however. She was, after all, just 23 when she create­d one of the most talked-about television shows in years. Her writing, while myopic, was sharp, funny and keenly aware of the ­context it emerged from — namely, Sex and the City, that other prominent pop culture vehicle that changed how women were seen on screen.

Instead, people asked, why weren’t the more experienced gatekeepers of Girls — those at the network, her co-writers, lauded producer Judd Apatow — stopping this from happening?

A 2012 piece in The New Yorker, however, is revealing in the light of Clemmons’s accusations. Anna Holmes wrote that “one could draw a direct­ connection between the postmodern hipster ‘irony’ of someone who thinks that racial insults are amusing and the show’s (perhaps inadver­tent) erasure of a large swath of the city’s inhabitants”.

Even at the time, Lesley Arfin, a white co-writer of Girls, was exposed for making racist insults and using the N-word ­online.

Dunham issued an explanation of Girls’s whiteness on US public broadcaster NPR shortly afterwards. (“I wrote the first season primarily by myself, and I co-wrote a few episodes. But I am a half-Jew, half-WASP, and I wrote two Jews and two WASPs. Something I wanted to avoid was tokenism in casting. If I had one of the four girls, if, for example­, she was African-American, I feel like — not that the experience of an African-American girl and a white girl are drastically different, but there has to be specificity to that experience [that] I wasn’t able to speak to.”)

And she returned with a short-lived black love interest (Donald Glover) in the second season­. A racially awkward joke was scripted to poke fun at Dunham’s character, Hannah, but it proved to ­expose Girls’s diversity problem only further.

But the success of Girls gave Dunham — who already had a social media following of severa­l hundred thousand before the show aired — a platform rarely afforded emergent television writers, directors or even stars. She was deemed a tastemaker by thinking publications, a curiosity by the tabloids. When she posted off-­colour jokes to social media, there was a large audience ready to devour them — and a media primed to cover the furore to sate the interested parties.

The first came through Twitter, shortly after Girls first aired, when Dunham posted a photograph of herself wearing a scarf in the style of a hijab and captioned it: “I had a real goth/fundamentalist attitude when I woke up from my nap”, mere hours after six people were fatally shot at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin.

Dunham swiftly made the first of what would become many apologies issued through Twitter during the next five years. Since April 2012, she has said sorry countless times for situations including: comparing allegations of rape made against Bill Cosby to the Holocaust; comparing negative online coverage to an abusive husband; not calling out white friend Lisa Lampanelli for referring to her as a ­“nigger” on social media; suggesting that she and two fellow comedians should dress up as Canadian serial rapists and murderers Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka and their victim; and making a joke about child molestation.

Each apology followed a similar format. Dunham said sorry, sometimes explained the circumstances in which she made the offence, thanked her followers for raising her awareness, and commented on how comedy can be misconstrued in the online space. She would vow to improve, before quipping about her life to lighten the mood.

Dunham is not alone in being a prominent female comic accused of racism. Amy Schumer, whose brazen, sexually charged brand of comedy has landed her, too, a multi-million-dollar book deal and a film, has faced repeated charges of making jokes that betray her white privilege. The responses to Dunham have been more frenzied — and her apologies so increasingly ineffective that a parody Twitter account, @lenadunhamapols, was set up last month.

Things worsened with the publication of her memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, in 2015. The book was a hodgepodge of essays, lists and extract­s from her diaries. Dunham detailed the circumstances of a rape but described her (anonymous) rapist in a manner that caused a real — and innocent — man to face persecu­tion once the book was released. She issued a lengthy essay of apology to him through ­Buzzfeed.

Lena Dunham and Matthew Rhys in the prescient American Bitch episode of Girls.

Also problematic was the instance in which Dunham compared herself to a “sexual predator” while describing her relationship with her baby sister Grace, writing about how she opened her vagina and made her kiss her on the lips as a child. When critics accused her of molestation, Dunham reacted angrily on Twitter before releasing a calmer statement, explainin­g that she was dismayed and sorry for the comparison.

It’s worth noting that Dunham continued to win praise for Girls throughout its six seasons. Its last was widely considered the most accomplished and she was praised for her arresting — and eerily prescient — portrayal of sexual misconduct by a powerful author in the episode­ ­titled American Bitch.

But the main cast didn’t get any less white or less privileged. While Hannah closed the final episode with a biracial baby, it was a clumsy inclusion: the child was fathered by a two-dimension­al surf instructor played by Riz Ahmed. As Refinery 29’s Ariana Romero argued­ in March: “People of colour are treated as story machines and objects, not multidimensional people.”

The fall of Dunham as a feminist symbol didn’t happen in a vacuum. The past five years have, thankfully, witnessed an awakening of social consciousness that has seen ingrained racism in all walks of life held to greater account. Pop culture is now examined more closely through a lens of cultural reappropriation, with artists including Katy Perry, Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus held accountable.

Movements such as Black Lives Matter and #OscarsSoWhite have increased global awareness of the gulfs of racial inequality in every aspect­ of society from politics and crime to the arts. In September, a record number of Emmy awards was won by people of colour, after shows that follow the lives of communities previously­ not portrayed on screen — such as Atlanta and Master of None — were given the celebration they deserve.

Against this genuinely revolutionary backdrop, Dunham’s achievements in putting a differen­t kind of woman on screen look less remarkable and more willingly exclusive. During the past five years, the cultural conversation has changed for the better — and Dunham has struggled to participate in it. Until she does, she will continue to be lambasted for not using her position of power to make a difference.