Bad Feminist: Essays (7 page)

Every woman has a series of episodes about her twenties, her girlhood, and how she came out of it. Rarely are those episodes so neatly encapsulated as an episode of, say,
Friends
, or a romantic comedy about boy meeting girl.

Girls have been written and represented in popular culture in many different ways. Most of these representations have been largely unsatisfying because they never get girlhood quite right. It is not possible for girlhood to be represented wholly—girlhood is too vast and too individual an experience. We can only try to represent girlhood in ways that are varied and recognizable. All too often, however, this doesn’t happen.

We put a lot of responsibility on popular culture, particularly when some pop artifact somehow distinguishes itself as not terrible. In the months and weeks leading up to the release of
Bridesmaids
, for example, there was a great deal of breathless talk about the new ground the movie was breaking, how yes, indeed, women
are
funny. Can you believe it? There was a lot of pressure on that movie.
Bridesmaids
had to be good if any other women-driven comedies had any hope of being produced. This is the state of affairs for women in entertainment—everything hangs in the balance all the time.

Bridesmaids
could not afford to fail, and didn’t. The movie received a positive critical reception (the
New York Times
referred to the movie as “unexpectedly funny”) and did well at the box office. Critics lauded the cast for their fresh performances. Some people even used the word “revolution” for the change the movie would bring for women in comedy.

A revolution is a sudden, radical, or complete change—a fundamental shift in the way of thinking about or visualizing something. Could one movie really be responsible for a
revolution
?
Bridesmaids
is a good movie, one I really enjoyed—smart humor, good acting, a relatable plot, a somewhat realistic portrayal of women in a cinematic wasteland where representations of women are generally appalling.
Bridesmaids
isn’t perfect, but given the unfair responsibility placed on the movie, the burden was shouldered well. At the same time, the movie did not bring about radical change, particularly when, as Michelle Dean discusses in her review of the movie for
The Awl
, many of the familiar tropes we see in comedies and in the depictions of women are present in
Bridesmaids
. She notes that the portrayal of Melissa McCarthy’s character, Megan, in particular, treads familiar ground: “Almost every joke was designed to rest on her presumed hideousness, and her ribald but unmistakably ‘butch’ sexuality was grounded primarily in her body type and an aversion to makeup.” Within this context, considering
Bridesmaids
revolutionary is a bit much.

Why do we put so much responsibility on movies like
Bridesmaids
? How do we get to a place where a movie, one movie, can be considered revolutionary for women?

There’s another woman-oriented pop artifact being asked to shoulder a great deal of responsibility these days: Lena Dunham’s
Girls
, a television series on HBO. The show debuted to a lot of hype. Critics almost universally embraced Dunham’s vision and the way she chronicles the lives of four twenty-something girls navigating that interstitial time between graduating from college and growing up.

I am not the target audience for
Girls
. I was not particularly enthralled by the first three episodes or the first two seasons, but the show gave me a great deal to think about. That counts for something. The writing is often smart and clever. I laughed a few times during each episode and recognize the ways in which this show is breaking new ground. I admire how Dunham’s character, Hannah Horvath, doesn’t have the typical body we normally see on television. There is some solidity to her. We see her eat, enthusiastically. We see her fuck. We see her endure the petty humiliations so many young women have to endure. We see the life of one kind of real girl and that is important.

It’s awesome that a twenty-five-year-old woman gets to write, direct, and star in her own show for a network like HBO. It’s just as sad that this is so
revolutionary
it deserves mention.

A generation is a group of individuals born and living contemporaneously. In the pilot, Hannah Horvath is explaining to her parents why she needs them to keep supporting her financially. She says, “I think I might be the voice of my generation. Or at least, a generation . . . somewhere.” We have so many expectations; we’re so thirsty for authentic representations of girls that we only hear the first half of that statement. We hear that
Girls
is supposed to speak for all of us.

At times, I find
Girls
and the overall premise to be forced. Amidst all the cleverness, I want the show to have a stronger emotional tone. I want to feel something genuine, and rarely has the show given me that opportunity. Too many of the characters seem like caricatures, where more nuance would better serve both the characters and their story lines. In the first season, for example, Hannah’s not-boyfriend, Adam, is a depressing, disgusting composite of every asshole every woman in her twenties has ever dated. We would get the point if he were even half the asshole. The pedophile fantasy Adam shares at the beginning of the “Vagina Panic” episode is cringe-worthy. The ironic rape joke Hannah makes during her job interview in that same episode is cringe-worthy. It all feels very “Look at me! I am edgy!” Maybe that’s the point. I cannot be sure. More often than not, the show is trying too hard to do too much, but that’s okay. This show should not have to be perfect.

Girls
reminds me of how terrible my twenties were—being lost and awkward, having terrible sex with terrible people, being perpetually broke, eating ramen. I am not nostalgic for that time. I had no money and no hope. Like the girls in
Girls
, I was never really on the verge of destitution but I lived a generally crappy life. There was nothing romantic about the experience. I understand why many young women find the show so relatable, but watching the show makes me slightly nauseated and exceptionally grateful to be in my thirties.

As you might expect, the discourse surrounding
Girls
has been remarkably extensive and vigorous—nepotism, privilege, race. Dunham has given us a veritable trifecta of reasons to dissect her show.

Lena Dunham is, indeed, the daughter of a well-known artist, and the principal cast comprises the daughters of other well-known figures like Brian Williams and David Mamet. People resent nepotism because it reminds us that sometimes success really is whom you know. This nepotism is mildly annoying, but it is not new or remarkable. Many people in Hollywood make entire careers out of hiring their friends for every single project. Adam Sandler has done it for years. Judd Apatow does it with such regularity you don’t need to consult IMDb to know whom he will cast in his projects.

Girls
also represents a very privileged existence—one where young women’s New York lifestyles can be subsidized by their parents, where these young women can think about art and unpaid internships and finding themselves and writing memoirs at twenty-four. Many people are privileged, and again, it’s easy to resent that because the level of privilege expressed in the show reminds us that sometimes, success really starts with where you come from.
Girls
is a fine example of someone writing what she knows and the painful limitations of doing so.

One of the most significant critiques of
Girls
is the relative absence of race. The New York where
Girls
takes place is much like the New York where
Sex and the City
was set—a mythical city completely void of the rich diversity of the very real New York. The critique is legitimate, and people across many publications have written deeply felt essays about why it is damaging for a show like
Girls
to completely negate certain experiences and realities. In the second season,
Girls
tried and failed to bring race into the show in a relevant way. During the premiere, Hannah has a black boyfriend and it’s handled fairly well. The boyfriend, Sandy, is conservative, and there’s a clever moment in which Hannah claims she doesn’t see race, thereby exposing that she is not nearly as evolved as she might believe. The episode is smart, but not smart enough because it misses the point—clever defiance does not a diversity problem address.

Every girl or once-was-girl has a show that would be best for her. In
Girls
we finally have a television show about girls who are awkward and say terribly inappropriate things, are ill equipped to set boundaries for themselves and have no idea who they’re going to be in a few years. We have so many expectations for this show because
Girls
is a significant shift in what we normally see about girls and women. While critics, in their lavish attention, have said Dunham’s show is speaking to an entire generation of girls, there are many of us who recognize that the show is only speaking to a narrow demographic within a generation.

Maybe the narrowness of
Girls
is fine. Maybe it’s also fine that Dunham’s vision of coming-of-age is limited to the kinds of girls she knows. Maybe, though, Dunham is a product of the artistic culture that created her—one that is largely myopic and unwilling to think about diversity critically.

We all have ideas about the way the world should be, and sometimes we forget how the world is. The absence of race in
Girls
is an uncomfortable reminder of how many people lead lives segregated by race and class. The stark whiteness of the cast, their upper-middle-class milieu, and the New York where they live force us to interrogate our own lives and the diversity, or lack thereof, in our social, artistic, and professional circles.

Don’t get me wrong. The stark whiteness of
Girls
disturbs and disappoints me. During the first season, I wondered why Hannah and her friends didn’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 color. The show is so damn literal. Still,
Girls
is not the first show to commit this transgression, and it certainly won’t be the last. It is unreasonable to expect Dunham to somehow solve the race and representation problem on television while crafting her twenty-something witticisms and appalling us with sex scenes so uncomfortable they defy imagination.

In recent years, I have enjoyed looking at pictures from literary events, across the country, wondering if I will see a person of color. It’s a game I play that I generally win. Whether the event takes place in Los Angeles or New York City or Austin or Portland, more often than not, the audiences at these events are completely white. Sometimes, there will be one or two black people, perhaps an Asian. At most of these literary events I attend, I am generally the only spot of color, even at a large writers’ conference like Association of Writers & Writing Programs events. It’s not that people of color are deliberately excluded but that they are not
included
because most communities, literary or otherwise, are largely insular and populated by people who know the people they know. This is the uncomfortable truth of our community, and it is disingenuous to be pointing the finger at
Girls
when the show is a pretty accurate reflection of many artistic communities.

There’s more, though, to this intense focus on privilege and race and
Girls
. Why is
this
show being held to the higher standard when there are so many television shows that have long ignored race and class or have flagrantly transgressed in these areas?

There are so many terrible shows on television representing women in sexist, stupid, silly ways. Movies are even worse. Movies take one or two anemic ideas about women, caricature them, and shove those caricatures down our throats. The moment we see a pop artifact offering even a sliver of something different—say, a woman who isn’t a size zero or who doesn’t treat a man as the center of the universe—we cling to it desperately because that representation is all we have. There are all kinds of television shows and movies about women but how many of them make women recognizable?

There are few opportunities for people of color to recognize themselves in literature, in theater, on television, and in movies. It’s depressingly easy for women of color to feel entirely left out when watching a show like
Girls
. It is rare that we ever see ourselves as anything but the
sassy
black friend or the nanny or the secretary or the district attorney or the magical negro—roles relegated to the background and completely lacking in authenticity, depth, or complexity.

One of the few equivalents to
Girls
we’ve ever had was
Girlfriends
, created by Mara Brock Akil.
Girlfriends
debuted in 2000 and ran for 172 episodes. It followed the lives and close friendships of four black women in Los Angeles—Joan (Tracee Ellis Ross), Maya (Golden Brooks), Lynn (Persia White), and Toni (Jill Marie Jones). I particularly admire how the show rarely made race its focal point. Joan, Maya, Lynn, and Toni simply lived their lives. They were all professionals (a lawyer, a writer and secretary, a real estate agent, and an artist/actress/whimsy of the week) who dealt with job stresses, romantic troubles, romantic successes, and new adventures, and tried to become better women. It took me years to appreciate
Girlfriends
and I’m not sure why, but once I fell in love with the show, I fell hard. Finally, I was able to recognize something about myself in popular culture. The writing was smart and funny, and the show did a good job of depicting the lives of women of color in their late twenties and thirties. The show wasn’t perfect, but the women were human and they were portrayed humanely.
Girlfriends
, to be sure,
is
a show that never received the critical attention or audience it deserved, but it lasted for eight seasons and still has a very dedicated fan base of women who remain so relieved to see themselves in some small way.