And Let All God’s Children Say ‘Amen’

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Jim Goad on @LenaDunham:

As the “brains” behind the inexplicably acclaimed HBO series Girls and the author of the #1 bestselling book Not That Kind of Girl, Dunham is hailed as a cultural pioneer for doing what has become as stale as a yeasty vagina — namely, she is a female who is congenitally incapable of writing about anything besides being a female. It’s the same way that black writers can only write about being black and gay writers can only write about rump-wrangling.
Since I was born on the wrong side of the tracks and then booted out of the house in my teens onto the tracks and forced to start running lest I get hit by a train, the fact that she was born into insane levels of wealth yet can’t shut the fuck up about being “oppressed” makes me wish that she would accidentally overdose on painkillers and wake up to find herself stewing in a cannibal’s pot somewhere in Swaziland where there is no iPhone coverage.

One hundred sixty-three words of pure truth there, Jim.

 

37 comments

  4. Any fool can complain. It takes brains to be able to criticize in a meaningful way. Dunham apparently thinks she’s of the latter persuasion. Goad shows why she’s clearly of the former.

  5. Jeez, some people are not physically attractive but they become attractive the more you know them. Lena Dunham is physically unattractive and she becomes far more unattractive the more you are exposed to her.

  6. Good for Goad.

    I want to gather up all these precious little special snowflakes like Dunham and set them around a pot-bellied stove, then tell them what I love most about the Spring.

  11. Amen, indeed.
    That stung almost as badly as Ace of Spades’ takedown of Penny Laurie (which I still periodically re-read and which still cracks me up every time).

  12. Typical narcissist progressive, repeat their own PUBLIC words and they are outraged. Dunham lawyers must be lower than toilet scum implying that repeating Dunham public revelations about herself is defamation.

  15. I go to a lot of theatre new works festivals, and every time there’s an Asian playwright, you can guarantee that the play will be about being Asian. His dad is “old world,” speaks only Chinese, runs a Chinese restaurant or dry cleaners, and is disappointed that his son is so westernized; mom tries to understand the son… blah, blah, blah…

    I’ve seen this same play countless times – as drama, musical, rock musical… you name it.

    If a white person wrote such drivel, he would be spat upon for making such cliched characters.

    I long for the day when an Asian writer can write without me knowing that he or she is Asian.

  16. The fill-in-your-ethnic group perspective in American literature is interesting: once. After that, it becomes hackneyed. That’s not to say a “clash of cultures” theme is necessarily a bad thing, but too many young writers see it as a ticket to instant fame and validation in our world of identity politics trumps all. For that reason, most of that sort of stuff is simply derivative, provides no new insight, and is not worth the time.

  17. Reading Goad’s smack-down of Ms. Dunham reminded me of my reaction to Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye. I did not hear a “voice” of my teenage years, but rather saw an over-privileged schmuck who needed a good ass-kicking. Dunham is the same sort of character. Her angst is born of a progressive, upper class life which bears no resemblance to the lives of the vast majority of women in this country, to say nothing of the women in places which are absolute hell holes. The sad thing is, women of her age seem to be lacking the discernment necessary to comprehend that fact.

  21. All true. But OTOH, the no-talent morons who gave her a public voice are more to blame. I think everyone here would agree that I can’t write, but if some idiot offered me a bunch of money to do it, probably I would. Dunham’s enablers are the real problem here, which, I suppose, would include her audience, as well as her publisher and producer.

  23. Can’t stand her, but she had a good joke about her short-lived TV series.

    The producer came to her and said, ‘We had a meeting and decided you should lose about ten pounds.’

    Cho said, ‘I don’t know what hurt more, that they said I have a big fat ass, or that they actually had a meeting about it!’

  24. In terms of television, the term ‘critically acclaimed’ now means, ‘no one watches and we’ll have to cancel it eventually, but it hits all the latest leftist talking points.’

  26. My guess is, she got the job because of pedigree and not talent. She waved the necessary Progressive bona fides and was the daughter of a relatively famous “artsy” couple. Throw in gratuitous nudity and a demographic consisting of brooding twenty-somethings, and presto! One wonders, however, whether the recent “diddled my sister” revelations are causing HBO to have second thoughts.

  30. So ‘critically acclaimed’ really means Critical Theory??

    It seems the truth was staring me in the face for years but I didn’t notice.

  33. This is a common problem with the elites among the left: never having really experienced poverty, they come to believe that poor people must think and behave as they imagine they would think and behave if they were poor themselves. They are constantly amazed that not everybody thinks the way that they do. Given the left’s beliefs in multi-culturalism, their ego-centricness becomes more poignantly ironic.

  34. The Leftists camouflage their paternalism for the “Other” in various ways, but the bottom line is, they view the mythical poor and downtrodden as something to be pitied and “saved.” As I’ve said before, it’s simply Kipling’s White Man’s Burden without the Christianity. [Insert some sort of Progressive “missionary position” joke here.]

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