Lena Dunham knows hate — the petty, unworthy emotions that seethe inside us. In season one of Girls, the HBO sitcom she created and starred in, her character Hannah Horvath goes to the launch of a memoir by a college frenemy. The book isn’t even good, Hannah complains — the author just got lucky because her boyfriend killed himself and gave her something to write about. “Your boyfriend should kill himself. You deserve it,” says her sociopathic friend Jessa, consolingly.
Girls captured millennial womanhood in all its grubby, hateful entitlement — clever, raw, and often insufferable. It was also brutally funny. The trouble is, when the show began in 2012, a large chunk of viewers immediately took against it. They thought Hannah was Dunham. If Hannah was a selfish, self-dramatising, oblivious horror, it couldn’t be because Dunham was a good writer: it must be because Dunham was simply playing herself on screen. And so her brilliant satire of millennials made her the millennials’ most hated.
One of Dunham’s problems was that Girls seemed so naturalistic, people assumed it was artless. The dialogue felt like things real people would say to each other, not the ricocheting wisecracks of Friends; Hannah’s outfits, described as “lovingly dishevelled” by the show’s costume designer, looked like the wardrobe of a real 20-something arts intern rather than the designer gloss of Sex and the City. Dunham made it look too easy, like anyone could do it. Some people wondered why they hadn’t been asked to do it.
Scratch away at all this, and at the bottom you’d find the exact same resentment that Dunham mined for comedy: why this bitch and not me? The splenetic judgement of everything she did reeked of envy — and the not-very-feminist anxiety of women that, with only so much cultural space allotted to women, one woman’s success was blocking the path for the rest. As one critic wrote in The Stranger:
“All culturally literate twenty-somethings who are funny on Twitter and have listened to, like, Exile in Guyville at least three times are capable of writing a shrewd take on what it means to be in your twenties. But Lena Dunham was given the backing of a network giant and a $150,000 per episode salary, and that’s what makes her so hateable. Fuck, for $150,000 alone I could write you a TV show about what it means to be a white woman. Lord knows I’ve watched enough Greta Gerwig films to do so.”
That piece was written in 2018; its author has not yet produced a multi-series, Emmy-winning show — or any show at all. Nonetheless, it was a struggle for some to believe that Dunham had truly earned her status. And though liberal critics at least were mostly too polite to say this part outright, her “unconventional” looks were part of this.
Dunham’s audacity in putting herself on screen — pear-shaped, small breasted, “13 pounds overweight” per Girls’ script and often naked — offended people. All this attention, and she wasn’t even hot! On the Right, people were happy to just come out and say as much. “It’s not every day in the TV world of anorexic actresses with fake boobs that a woman with giant thighs, a sloppy backside and small breasts is compelled to show it all,” wrote The New York Post’s (female) TV critic.
Liberal outlets wanting to indulge the same impulse had to garnish it with righteousness. After Vogue put Dunham on its cover in 2014, the feminist website Jezebel put out a $10,000 bounty for unretouched pictures from the shoot. Jezebel primly declared that this wasn’t about shaming Dunham, but about revealing the tyranny of Vogue’s beauty standards; it sounded phony. Hating Lena Dunham was a micro-industry in the media of the 2010s. A picture of her looking rough would have done big numbers.
The Jezebel stunt was savage — as Dunham said at the time, “I don’t understand why, Photoshop or no, having a woman who is different than the typical Vogue cover girl could be a bad thing.” But people weren’t mad about the typical Vogue cover girls. They were mad, specifically, about Dunham, about her success, about her elevation. Girls had been celebrated precisely because it was a raw and flawed rendition of life in your 20s; and then people wanted to punish Dunham for her imperfections, political as well as physical.
Hating her was more than a pastime: it was an identity. Dunham was outspokenly liberal and pro-choice, so the disgust for her from conservatives was to be expected. But the richest seam of loathing for her came from her own kind. If you, say, were a young woman — perhaps a young woman in the media, perhaps especially a young woman in New York — Dunham had everything you wanted. Tearing her down felt like getting closer to your dreams. It was also a statement of taste: you knew enough to know that Lena Dunham was bad, actually.
She was hated for being privileged (her parents are both successful and respected artists): what right did she have to portray the grind and hustle of trying to get by in Brooklyn? She was damned for being racist (the first series of Girls was criticised for having no black or Asian actors in the core cast): how dare she call her show Girls as though it was some kind of universal representation when she was only portraying people like her? Worst of all, she was full of herself: when Hannah blustered to her parents that she might be “the voice of my generation — or at least a voice of a generation”, the haters attributed the grandiosity to Dunham herself.
At one point, the dislike for her was so frenetic, Jezebel ran a “not watching Girls recap”, “where we detail the real-life foibles, exploits, and hot and hilarious haps of what we were doing in our exciting, glamorous, and emotional lives in our Brooklyn apartments during the half-hour the critically acclaimed HBO series Girls airs.” The joke was — haha! — that Dunham was being denied the attention lavished on her everywhere else. The bigger joke was that this was just another way for the website to parasitise the traffic Dunham’s name could conjure.
“How can you be a good writer if your dominant impulse is to shield yourself?”
The strange thing is that, while other female celebrities mastered the art of turning hatred into publicity — most of all the Kardashians, with their carefully crafted grasping bimbo personas and their relentless conspicuous consumption — Dunham never seemed to understand this. She had a talent for feeding the rage against her. Just like when she spoke up for a Girls writer who was accused of rape (he was never charged with an offence), only to then retract her defence and apologised to his accuser. The end result: absolutely no one was happy with her, and it could have all been avoided by reserving her judgement in the first place.
She had a wild, unfiltered naivety that was hard to square with her sophistication as a showrunner. Even her nudity had something of this to it. Artistically, all the naked Hannah scenes in Girls were a perfect choice for the show; but for Dunham personally, they had a cost that she never seemed to have reckoned with beforehand. How can you have so much wisdom as a writer and so little self-protection? But then, how can you be a good writer if your dominant impulse is to shield yourself?
Dunham has got warier. Her new show Too Much, which started on Netflix this week, is — like Girls — loosely based on her own experiences, in this case of moving to London and starting a new relationship with a British man. But unlike in Girls, she doesn’t play the lead. “I was not willing to have another experience like what I’d experienced around Girls at this point in my life,” Dunham told The New Yorker. “Physically, I was just not up for having my body dissected again.”
Her body has also changed. She’s not a little bit overweight these days: since a 2018 hysterectomy to treat endometriosis, she seems to have grown steadily bigger. There’s a theory, put forward by psychotherapist Susie Orbach in Fat is a Feminist Issue, that being fat can be a kind of self-protection for women who have suffered from objectification and intrusion — a way of putting yourself safely outside the field of the potentially sexualisable. If that holds any truth for Dunham, it would hardly be surprising after what she went through in the 2010s.
Too Much is good, but it’s no Girls: it’s got a seam of treacly sentiment in it, and it feels anxious to be liked sometimes in a way that Dunham at her best never did. In her 20s, she was a blazing talent, and she was despised for it — ripped apart by well-intentioned liberal girlies pouring the petrol of righteousness on their own jealousy. That girl-on-girl violence broke her in some ways. If we never get to enjoy her being that good again, female rage at female success will have to take the blame.
