Why You Shouldn’t Avoid Lena Dunham and HBO’s Girls
Commentary’s John Podhoretz with an enthusiastic write-up of HBO’s Girls at The Weekly Standard:
HBO’s much-discussed new series Girls is just concluding its first season, and it’s extraordinary. Girls offers the most interesting and original televised portrait of upper-middle-class American angst since thirty-something went off the air in 1991.
Like thirtysomething, it is simultaneously an infuriatingly self-referential thumbsucker and an extraordinarily intelligent dissection of infuriatingly self-referential thumbsucking. But it is, thankfully, far more the latter than the former. And it is one of the most prodigious media stunts since the heyday of the very young Orson Welles, given that it is largely the work of a 26-year-old who created it, wrote most of the episodes, directed a few of them, and stars in it to boot.
Her name is Lena Dunham, and two years ago she did the same triple duty on a do-it-yourself movie called Tiny Furniture that I actively disliked because it was purely a self-referential thumbsuck. Something good happened to Dunham in the interim between the movie and the TV series, because Girls takes the world of Tiny Furniture—post-collegiate types with no marketable skills wandering aimlessly around New York City—and gives it heft and shape and dimension.
It’s often very funny, and given that each episode runs a half-hour, I guess you’d call Girls a sitcom. But it really comes across more like a loosely linked collection of Ann Beattie stories updated from the post-1960s anomie of Beattie’s characters to the media-soaked seen-it-all world-weariness of Generation Zynga.
Read the whole thing. And let’s consider this post the conclusion of the Girls vs Women and Boys vs Men discourse for now. (Though don’t be surprised if more articles on the subject of growing up show up at PJ Lifestyle. It’s one of Kathy Shaidle’s specialties.)
Seeing the promotions for Girls, two impressions emerged:
1. Looks like they nailed the Millennial “post-collegiate types with no marketable skills wandering aimlessly.”
2. Therefore, I have no interest in watching it right now.
Just the previews alone reminded me of myself and too many people I’ve known over the last decade who were in the same limbo zone in life: just emerging out into the “real world” and wobbling between being a girl and a woman, a boy and a man, struggling to find their path to a happy, satisfying life of meaning, worth, and dignity.
With only so many entertainment hours in the day, why spend them being reminded of all the people I care about who were making themselves miserable by refusing to grow up?
Acculturated editor and Millennial Emily Esfahani Smith wrote about Girls for the Washington Times in April:
Like other Apatow creations (the feature film hits “Bridesmaids,” “Knocked-Up”), “Girls” is about how sex and immaturity collide in the early years of our adult lives. “I like to show people struggle and try to figure out who they are,” Mr. Apatow recently told The Hollywood Reporter.
There’s plenty of struggle in “Girls.” Hannah (Miss Dunham) is an aspiring writer. The only problem is, she hasn’t been published; she’s been fired from her non-paying internship; and she’s out of money because her parents, who are academics, won’t support her any longer.Adam, the actor-hipster she’s been hooking up with, won’t text her, let alone call her, and she just found out that her ex-boyfriend, whom she dated for two years in college, is gay.
“You couldn’t pay me to be 24 again,” Hannah’s gynecologist tells her.
“Well, they’re not paying me at all,” Hannah responds.
A few days later, the gyno calls to tell Hannah that she has a sexually transmitted disease, HPV. Don’t worry, a friend assures her, “all adventurous women have HPV.”
Hannah’s three close friends have problems of their own. Marnie (Allison Williams), Hannah’s best friend and roommate, has fallen out of love with her boyfriend of four years, Charlie. Jessa (Jemima Kirke), a sexual and emotional free-spirit, misses her own appointment at the abortion clinic, conveniently miscarrying the day-of while she’s hooking up with another guy. And Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet), a twenty-two-year-old virgin, may be naive, but she’s wise enough to know that “if a man doesn’t take you on a date, he’s not interested” and “sex from behind is degrading — point blank.”
“Girls” will inevitably be compared to another HBO show about young women, “Sex and the City” (1998-2004). But “Girls” is less an extension of “Sex and the City” than it is a response to it — a tacit and even subversive acknowledgement that the sex lives of young post-feminist women are bleak.
“You couldn’t pay me to be 24 again.”
In the comments to the previous posts on the Girls Vs Women debate I’ve tried to refocus the conversation. Here’s an edited exchange with several commenters and PJM’s Charlie Martin on Dr. Helen’s post. There are multiple issues in play here and one of them is generational.
Mike:
I’m attracted to women of lots of different ages, both by their looks and their personality. But is their something wrong with finding a beautiful 17 or 18 year old girl hot or sexy? I agree with Helen, it’s completely normal.
June 17, 2012 – 10:06 am
“Normal” does not equal Good.
Which is more normal? A man who wants to sleep with a bunch of young, beautiful women or a man who wants to marry and respect one woman? Which standard should we advocate for in our culture?
June 17, 2012 – 10:18 am
Oligonicella:
“A man who wants to sleep with a bunch of young, beautiful women or a man who wants to marry and respect one woman?”
Wow. How about, the first is a fantasy, not a plan; and the second is a plan and therefore in no way incompatible with said fantasy.
“Which standard should we advocate for in our culture?”
The standard of attempting at all turns to stay out of people’s thoughts and actions that in no way interfere with your life.
June 17, 2012 – 6:44 pm
“The standard of attempting at all turns to stay out of people’s thoughts and actions that in no way interfere with your life.”
This issue does interfere with my life. If it didn’t, I wouldn’t write about it.
June 17, 2012 – 7:01 pm
Charlie Martin:
Okay, I’ll bite: how does what other people think when they look at pictures of yet other people, none of whom you know, interfere with your life?
June 17, 2012 – 7:35 pm
Superbad, another Apatow production and Gen Y favorite, also depicts the journey from boys to men:
Dave Swindle (in response to Charlie):
You’re avoiding seeing the forest because you want to look at the trees. The issue is not “what other people think when they look at pictures of yet other people”. The issue is about the bigger damage done from accepting teenage boy and teenage girl sexuality as “normal” and acceptable for adults.
My little sister is off to college this year. And I’m thrilled that the boyfriend she’s found is a very mature 18 year old who acts like a man instead of a boy. (He wants commitment, not sex.) But what happens if they break up when she’s at college? What kind of man or boy might she meet and get involved with? I want her to be with a man who will treat her with respect, not a teenage boy in an adult man’s body who will manipulate her and use her for his own pleasure. And we get back to a world of men instead of boys by articulating the difference between teenage boy sex and mature husband sex.
June 18, 2012 – 1:02 pm
johninohio
Dave Swindle
Oh yeah–Your sister’s boyfriend isn’t interested in sex. And she isn’t either, I guess. This comment alone disqualifies any of your subsequent comments on this subject from being taken seriously.
June 18, 2012 – 1:31 pm
Oh they’re interested in sex, alright. They’re just more interested in marriage. Because they’re trying to be men and women instead of boys and girls. That’s the difference.
June 18, 2012 – 1:56 pm
johninohio
Oh. My. God.
June 18, 2012 – 2:37 pm
Is it really that much of a stretch to realize that a lot of Millennials immersed in a culture of porn and sex, who grew up with a President getting blown in the Oval Office, would eventually get bored with sex and be more interested in marriage?
June 18, 2012 – 2:48 pm
I’ll wait to watch the whole first season of Girls with my wife when she gets back from Europe in a few weeks. That’s how we prefer to watch our shows — at our own pace instead of having to wait each week for a new episode. Just a suggestion for what works for us. Not a mandate that everyone MUST watch TV shows that way and live the same way we do.
Regardless of the merits or lack thereof of Girls, HBO as an entity has an undoubted bias against conservatives and this country. The latest example being the less than accidental use of a prosthetic head of former president George W. Bush on a spike in repeated scenes. It was so “inadvertent” that the producers made a specific point of directing our attention to it in the DVD commentary.
There is a movement for subscribers to quit HBO in retaliation. It is having some success, as suddenly HBO issued an insincere apology. As I said, it is only the latest example. While theoretically, they could reform; the odds of them ever producing something say along the line of Band of Brothers for the Iraq and Afghan wars are nonexistent. They are more likely to reprise their anti-Marine series Generation Kill.
ab initio origo mali
Nothing that they produce is untainted by their most heartfelt political beliefs; if only because the profits of less blatant efforts enable them to fund more Leftist propaganda. Therefore, since as they are beyond hope of redemption to the point of even pretending to be even handed; regardless of the merits or demerits of individual productions it logically follows that conservatives [who presumably are the overwhelming majority of the readers at PJM] should avoid it, as an HBO production, in order to drop the ratings they need to survive.
Subotai Bahadur
You watch TV exactly the way my husband and I do. I’m often waiting for him to get back from somewhere, usually Europe, so we can watch an old series. We’re on Castle now. I will have to add Girls to our cue, though I’m afraid it will scare him. We have three young daughters. He might never let them date based upon the stuff in Girls.
I applaud your resolve, Dave, to be a voice in the wilderness of the Hook-up Culture.
I came of age in the era when sex was still dirty, and I raged against what I regarded the hypocrisy of sexual taboos, and looked forward to a time when sex would be out from behind the conventional shutters. One should be careful what one asks for.
Sex in our post-Christian era is beginning to resemble what it was in the pre-Christian period: an expression of power over those who are subordinate. It is a pelvic sneeze which expresses nothing except the release of an animal urge.
While nobody wins in this loveless paradigm, the immediate losers are the young women, who end up with the pregnancies, and are ten times more likely to get the STDs from their male hook-ups than the other way around.
Your little sister is lucky to have a protective big brother like you. God save her from a life-support system for his gonads like johninohio.
Let it go, Luke. Let it go.
Dave, I’m finding your point a little hard to understand. I agree with everything you’ve said about waiting until marriage and committing to one woman. I don’t think underage (however we define the term) women should be used to sell things to adults. (Frankly, I consider the whole industry a kind of low-level protitution. There is a reason actresses used to be considered that way.) This is how I lived my life, and I married late in life.
What I don’t understand is the problem with being attracted to younger women without actually attempting anything? Isn’t this simple biology, particularly if one does not have children to compare them to?
I don’t have a problem with men being attracted to younger women. I have a problem with them being attracted to girly girls and women who act immature and promiscuous. I have a problem with men and women who still treat sex the same as they did when they were teenage boys and girls.
Sorry you have a problem but I have the solution for you.
Go home.
Go inside.
Open a book.
And get over it.
Your problem is precisly that. Your Problem. And having had to deal with one problem (Oh you don’t want to have sex? Prude…) I have NO DESIRE to push people to another.
You don’t have to approve or like their choice but making a hubbub is about useful as pissing in the wind.
How exactly was Generation Kill anti-Marine? I’m a Marine and I thought the show was great.
I don’t know what alternate reality Mr. Swindle lives in. Here, in this reality, most college girls are on the order of Karen Owen and the Duke F-list. Well goodie that Mr. Swindle’s sister and boyfriend live on Planet Commitment, that puts them on the order of the Chinese NBA players. They exist. They are exceedingly rare.
Bottom line, even non-extraordinarily beautiful women can and do get hook-up sex with hot, Alpha males. Swindle does ACTIVE HARM to young men struggling to find love and affection by pushing stuff that DOES NOT WORK. That leads to a destructive life of loneliness and anger, following rules fit more for an Amish colony or life in 1910 than today.
What works for a guy who wants commitment, is to first and foremost: BE SEXY. Then, BE SEXY. And after that, BE SEXY. And finally, to keep any relationship ESPECIALLY MARRIAGE, BE SEXY. Be Sexy! Sexy! Sexy!
That means being an amoral, aloof, cocky-funny a-hole, first and always. PARTICULARLY when you are married. Or in a relationship.
Why the heck does one of the “Girls” dump her boyfriend? Because he’s not an aloof, distant, amoral, cocky-funny ahole, like the artist she meets who aggressively suggests sex. She fantasizes about the guy while stimulating herself in some sleazy bathroom. Soon the boyfriend who is nice and commitment friendly is out the door.
The obesity epidemic, anonymous urban living, cheap contraception that works, rising female income, and mass media consumerism make sex ridiculously easy for non fat women and very, VERY hard for most men. Most women will have more on the side of 15-35 partners by their late twenties, so if you look at them as potential wife/girlfriend material, you better be THAT MUCH SEXIER than the other 35 guys they slept with. If you want them to keep you around. And YES this includes religious girls who like sex and HAVE IT just as much as other women. How lasting a union will be with such a huge partner count on the part of the woman is I don’t know. But that is the life of most women in urban areas.
The $1.5 million DAILY that Erika L. James makes from her bondage-romance novels “Fifty Shades of Grey” which started out as Twilight fanfic, ought to tell you the falseness of Swindle’s take on female sexuality. It is voracious, and unchained. And it craves dominant, aloof a-holes whom it hopes to tame.
These are the women who will be potential wives and mothers. If you don’t want a “you’ll do beta male” marriage in their late thirties as they get desperate, followed by an inevitable “settling remorse” (because they did settle for you, when they could no longer keep an Alpha male’s attention) divorce a few years later, you better up your GAME beta male boy.
Women prefer vastly (the marketplace sales of the “Grey” porn-romance-bondage novels and Twilight prove this) “taming” Alphas to commitment than any guy offering it.
Women want commitment, just not from YOU. You have to be the Alpha Ahole that they “earn” and tame you into, they find guys who offer commitment the way men find fat chicks. Unsexy. Repulsive even.
I would personally agree with Mr. Swindle that a sex-dominated life is one that ends poorly when adopted widely socially. However the fact is that nearly all the women an ordinary guy will come across and be a potential husband for (and yes, this includes overtly religious women) remain uniform in their desire for some sexy dominant Ahole they can tame. If you want love, if you want affection, you must first get SEX, and be EXACTLY the kind of guy about 90% of men are not: that dominant A-hole. To think otherwise is to be in denial about the nature of female desire and love. Which is radically different from men.
Men prize intelligence (less likely to cheat, impulsively), youth, beauty, and agreeableness, and will trade off some factors particularly beauty to get youth and intelligence. Women generally despise male intelligence unless leavened by aggression and dominance, the “dark triad,” as it correlates nicely with poor social dominance and interest in abstract thinking and objects. More Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates than Charlie Sheen and Russell Brand in other words. Men don’t care which girl is dominant, just which is hot, nice, smart, and young. The more partners a man has, the more desirable he is (social proof he’s that dominant Ahole, think George on Seinfeld and the picture of Man-hands). For a woman, the more partners she has the less desirable she is.
Bottom line, in the real world* everything Swindle advises men to do is wrong, and gets them a sexless, loveless life of loneliness. Everything, say Roissy at Heartiste or other PUA bloggers advocate allows those men who WANT commitment to get it, by making themselves first and foremost, into SEXY SEXY SEXY men. ALWAYS be SEXY! You have to be a PUA to get sex, it is your choice to constantly work on one woman to remain sexy, or be sexy with many, many women. Yours and yours alone.
No man however who is not first and foremost working on being sexy will get love. At best he’s going to be the asexual, semi-gay best friend the girl will cry on the shoulders after the latest sexy! dammit ahole broke her heart by having her best friend and younger sister.
*Who did overtly Christian Katy Perry fall hard for, pursue, and marry? Some “nice guy” offering commitment or the guy who bragged he had sex with over 80 women a month? I will take Mr. Swindle’s word for things re his sister, but if I had to put real, hard cash on the line knowing how most women react most of the time, I’d bet that her boyfriend had a significant notch count, every other woman in his circle wanted him (and a number HAD HIM), and his sister has hopes of “taming” him. I could be wrong, but most of the time that’s how it works. And by most I mean like the percentage of non-Chinese NBA stars. Of course noticing how the world ACTUALLY works is evil and we can’t have anything smacking of observation and even worse … science.
Your post was a bit long, but your argument seems to be that since many people live their lives differently from Mr Swindle’s recommendation, therefore it must be false.
You make a good point that competition can be cutthroat, but I think you take the wrong lesson from it. Your “be sexy” advice will lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy, because believing that your worth lies only in your appearance will make you treat other people the same way. This breeds more selfishness, superficiality and hate towards the opposite sex, which is destructive both on a personal level and in the society as a whole.
Your criticism about Christians who give in to lust and sex outside marriage is noted. It would be like saying: “you were given a recipe for a delicious cake, and you didn’t follow it”. Christians who fall from the “golden standard” are a sad lot, I wish they have family and friends for help and advice. Atheism, on the contrary, doesn’t give you any recipe for your life, so you cannot say that one “goes against the teachings of atheism”. You can only criticize a worldview if it has actual content with regard to sexual ethics.
This sites’s constant shilling for HBO is why conservatives are losing the culture war. Keep on giving money to people who openly mock you and provide political propaganda that pushes for government policies you oppose…
Meanwhile, liberals are pretty much in a lockstep, so there’s only a few stations that are even vaguely right of center. Imagine if there were channels as far to the right as HBO or MSNBC is to the left?
“Of course noticing how the world ACTUALLY works is evil and we can’t have anything smacking of observation and even worse … science.”
Actually, he has a “science”, based on “observation”.
It is called “generational theory”.
It has numerous flaws, not the least of which is a propensity for it to be turned to a rather vicious generational warfare that makes class warfare look mellow, though David Swindle is one of the rare proponents who avoids that for the most part.
More critical are the rather egregious observer and group member biases that dominate it, which overlap heavily with the cross-discipline failures in historical analysis.
But he does have a theory behind his assertions, and which, however much I might disagree with it, happens to have a significant following in conservative circles.
yup that’s my observation as well treat them like shit and they respond. nice guys finish last and monsters live forever!
HBO… That’s the same company that has Bill Maher in their employ, right? Isn’t he the guy who gave $1 million to Obama? And he’s the one that has called Sarah Palin a “dumb tw@t” and a “c_nt”, right? Also referred to Palin and Michelle Bachmann as “boobs” and “a pair of bimbos?” Made vibrator jokes at the expense of Rick Santorum’s wife?
So, tell me again why we should support HBO, the company that employs this sleazeball?