As an embodiment of so-called “white feminism,” Lena Dunham is controversial even within progressive circles. This played out in interesting ways over the weekend, when she stepped forward to defend a colleague against accusations of sexual assault, and consequently inspired a viral response from an author who announced she would sever ties with Dunham’s newsletter.
Dunham has since apologized for defending her friend Murray Miller against actress Aurora Perrineau’s allegation he raped her when she was 17, stating, “I never thought I would issue a statement publically [sic] supporting someone accused of sexual assault, but I naively believed it was important to share my perspective on my friend’s situation as it has transpired behind the scenes over the last few months.”
In her initial statement of support, released jointly with “Girls” showrunner Jenni Konner, Dunham said, “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% of assault cases that are misreported every year.”
Insider knowledge?
(For what it’s worth, Dunham has also struggled with allegations of sexual abuse.)
In response, writer Zinzi Clemmons, who says she “ran in the same circles” as the “Girls” star in college, posted a statement to Facebook announcing she would no longer contribute to Dunham’s Lenny Letter, claiming many people in the actress’ social group possess “well-known racism.”
“I’d call their strain ‘hipster racism’, which typically uses sarcasm as a cover, and in the end, it looks a lot like gaslighting,” Clemmons wrote. “‘It’s just a joke. Why are you overreacting?’ is a common response to a lot of these statements.”
“In Lena’s circle,” she continued, “there was a girl who was known to use the N word in conversation in order to be provocative, and if she was ever called on it, she would say, ‘It’s just a joke.'”
In both accounts, it seems there’s a lesson about wealthy, educated progressives struggling to live by the rules they apply to just about everyone else.
As one of the staunchest feminists in Hollywood, Dunham has been outspoken on the issue of sexual assault since her ascension to fame earlier this decade. After news of the allegations against Harvey Weinstein broke, Dunham penned an op-ed for the New York Times that concluded, “Making noise is making change. Making change is why we tell stories. We don’t want to have to tell stories like this one again and again. Speak louder.”
Just over a month later, Dunham went right ahead and sought to turn down the volume on one woman who told her story — a woman who, by the way, has taken a polygraph test — nebulously citing “insider knowledge.”
In a poorly aging 2014 PSA, Dunham joined her “Girls” co-stars to pose the question: “Why is our default reaction as a society to disbelieve or to silence or to shame?”
How about this 2014 essay for BuzzFeed? “You can help by never defining a survivor by what has been taken from her,” Dunham asserted. “You can help by saying I believe you.”
I don’t know if Clemmons’ charge of “hipster racism” against Dunham and her friends is accurate, but Dunham has taken heat (and apologized) several times over the years for making what many progressives perceived as racially insensitive remarks and crossing boundaries she would likely impose upon others outside her own circle.
Just as Dunham would almost certainly critique anyone who used “insider knowledge” to imply a woman reporting a specific, detailed account of rape about which she has passed a polygraph test is lying.
“Hipster racism” is an interesting, oxymoronic concept, suggesting those arbiters of progressive cultural coolness, those wealthy Oberlin graduates who read Ta-Nehisi Coates but tell jokes like this one, believe their modish politics elevates anything they say above the rules to which they hold others, to some level of vogue unattainable without the “insider knowledge” they’ve gleaned from years spent subscribing to the New Yorker.
Dunham is famous for her candor, for her comfort with nudity in a physical sense and in an intellectual one. If you watched “Girls,” you’ve seen her genitals. If you follow her work, you’ve seen her naked mind, that of a privileged, young, well-educated, progressive urbanite who initially resonated in a powerful way with many other such people. She’s like your neighborhood Middlebury graduate with truth serum and 5 million Twitter followers.
In all this, I can’t help but be intrigued that Dunham keeps having to apologize for violating progressive standards in moments of candor.
