Gender issues

Why Liberals Are Disgusted at Those Defending Lena Dunham’s ‘White Feminism’

11 Comments

lena dunham not that kind of girl

Today Lena Dunham, beloved feminist freak, responded to an article by National Review’s Kevin Williamson where he reviewed some shocking and disgusting revelations from her latest book. She was not happy:

Williamson’s piece is really worth reading, as he’s an excellent writer, but this is probably what she’s most angry about:

And [Lena’s parents] were, in their daughter’s telling, enablers of some very disturbing behavior that would be considered child abuse in many jurisdictions — Lena Dunham’s sexual abuse, specifically, of her younger sister, Grace, the sort of thing that gets children taken away from non-millionaire families without Andover pedigrees and Manhattanite social connections. Dunham writes of casually masturbating while in bed next to her younger sister, of bribing her with “three pieces of candy if I could kiss her on the lips for five seconds . . . anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl I was trying.” At one point, when her sister is a toddler, Lena Dunham pries open her vagina — “my curiosity got the best of me,” she offers, as though that were an explanation. “This was within the spectrum of things I did.”

Williamson gives her the benefit of the doubt, going as far as he can to allow for some poetic license:

Dunham describes herself as an “unreliable narrator,” which in the context of a memoir or another work of purported nonfiction means “liar,” strictly construed. Dunham writes of incorporating stories from other people’s lives and telling them as though they were her own, and of fabricating details. The episode with her sister’s vaginal pebbles seems to be especially suspicious. When Dunham inspects her sister’s business, she shrieks at what she sees: “Grace had stuffed six or seven pebbles in there. . . . Grace cackled, thrilled that her prank had been such a success.” Dunham’s writing often is unclear (willfully so, it seems), but the context here — Grace has overheard her older sister asking whether her baby sister has a uterus — and Grace’s satisfaction with her prank suggest that Grace was expecting her older sister to go poking around in her genitals and inserted the pebbles in expectation of it. Grace is around one year old at the time of these events. There is no non-horrific interpretation of this episode. As for stroking her mother’s vagina, having mistaken it for her hairless cat . . .

But notice her tweet in response – she admits it’s a real story:

Here’s a page from her book that seems especially troubling as she details what she describes as doing “anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl.” Just a joke?

SO it just another right-wing attack? These tweets seem to suggest that even some of her erstwhile feminist admirers are turning their back on her disgust after reading her comments, while other feminist POC (“persons of color” as liberals call them), are angrily denouncing the “white feminism” of it all:

But of course, many will stick by her, calling her honesty about what she did to her sister “brave:”

There you have it, the ugly face of modern feminism. You’ve come a long way from burning bras, feminism…

See Also: Desperate Democrats Turn to Creepy Threats