Lena Dunham is ‘so sorry’ that she defended Girls writer Murray Miller after actress Aurora Perrineau accused him of raping her when she was 17. At this point, we’re used to Dunham saying things she shouldn’t have said and then being forced to apologise for them.
One particularly memorable instance of this was when she said ‘I can say that I still haven’t had an abortion, but I wish I had’ on her podcast,Woman of the HourWoman of the Hour. What Dunham meant was that she wanted to have a meaningful conversation about abortion but what she said did not convey that.
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This latest incident is another example of Dunham being quick to let the world know what she thinks and, somehow, not quite thinking it through. In a joint statement with GIRLS showrunner Jenni Konner, Dunham said: ‘during the windfall of deeply necessary accusations over the last few months in Hollywood, we have been thrilled to see so many women’s voices heard and dark experiences in this industry justified’. They continued ‘it’s a hugely important time of change and, like every feminist in Hollywood and beyond, we celebrate. But during every time of change, there are also incidences of the culture, in its enthusiasm and zeal, taking down the wrong targets. We believe, having worked closely with him for more than half a decade, that this is the case with Murray Miller. While our first instinct is to listen to every woman’s story, our insider knowledge of Murray’s situation makes us confident that sadly this accusation is one of the 3 percent of assault cases that are misreported every year. It is a true shame to add to that number, as outside of Hollywood women still struggle to be believed. We stand by Murray and this is all we’ll be saying about this issue.’
So far, so problematic. This is, undoubtedly, white feminism at its worst. The real question is not whether Dunham’s initial comments are bad and wrong. They were and are. It’s why she felt the need to make them in the first place? The lack of nuance in Dunham’s original statement allowed her to be caught in her own trap. The truth is that not all feminists are created equal. If you are, like Dunham, a white and middle-class woman then you are privileged and that privilege seeps into everything you do and say. The fact that Perrineau is a woman of colour has only compounded this and pointed to a larger problem. Rather than standing aside and letting someone else speak about their experiences, Dunham felt the need to speak out and offer her take on it even though absolutely nobody had asked to hear it.
Dunham herself is at once a product and proponent of the first-person industrial complexwhich puts the ‘I’of any first-person narrative at the forefront of everything. The ‘Lena Dunham Trap’, as I like to call it, is that reading and watching material which centres around the ‘I' can make you believe that what you think, feel and have to say is a) important and b) necessary to express. It’s worth taking a step back every time you feel compelled to express your opinion or viewpoint and count to ten.
It’s all too easy to mock and admonish Lena Dunham, she so often says problematic things that she has become a poster girl for everything that’s wrong with white feminism. What’s more difficult is to talk about how we do away with the sort of individualistic and first-person feminism she has come to represent. It’s difficult to accept Dunham’s explanation that her ‘naivety’ led her to express her views this time around because, well, you would think she’d learned to stop doing this by now. However, if we were going to read what she wrote a little more generously, it would be fair to say that most of the things she says and does seem to stem from a desire to do something, to use her platform and be useful as opposed to pure, undiluted narcissism.
Since 2012 when GIRLS first aired, a lot has changed, but it's not clear whether Dunham has kept up with the pace of change. The first personal is no longer the preserve of white women talking about themselves – be that Hannah Horvath or Carrie Bradshaw – we’re slowly but surely becoming more intersectional out of necessity more than anything else. The fact that Dunham cannot recognise this herself is, in many ways, a fitting representation of the end of an era in which one person’s experience can be trotted out to represent ‘all women’s experiences’.
Perhaps political events go some way towards explaining these changes. In the age of fake news, Donald Trump, Russian election interference and Brexit confusion, the perspectives of privileged individuals no longer seem relevant. Indeed, they seem limited and limiting because we now realise that they are only ever part of the story and never THE story.
In her apology this time around Dunham got close to acknowledging the problems that have been created by the first person industrial complex but stopped short of completing the thought and realising that she, if she would only lead by example, could be part of the solution.
On Twitter she wrote ‘I never thought I would issue a statement publicly supporting someone accused of sexual assault, but I naively believed it was important to share my perspective on my friend’s situation as it transpired behind the scenes over the last few months..I now understand that it was absolutely the wrong time to come forward with such a statement and I am so sorry. We have been given the gift of powerful voices and by speaking out we were putting our thumb on the scale and it was wrong. We regret this decision with every fibre of our being.’
If only Dunham had gone further and said that she realises that her decision to share her view and, in doing so, undermine another woman was, in effect, hijacking a conversation which she was not a part of. If only, instead, she had simply amplified that conversation or, at the very least, listened to it. This is not only about privilege, it is a question of advocacy. If you have both privilege and a platform, you must ask yourself how you can lift others up, not shut them down.
The first person narrative mode is everything that is wrong with contemporary feminism and will prevent it from ever being truly intersectional. As women, we've been told that we are the sum of our experiences. The truth is that we are so much more when we accept our own necessary limitations and make space for others. The grandmother of the first person genre, Joan Didion, is often quoted to validate the impulse to share. ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live’ she wrote but, today, we really ought to have realised that we don’t only exist to tell our own stories but to listen to those of others.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.