Anna Merlan’s verdict on a destined-for-infamy scene in Girls can best be understood as a verdict on Lena Dunham’s feminist ethos.
Dunham’s ethos, in turn, can best be understood as an expression of the decadent cultural values of 21st-century “progressives”:
They are the Nowhere People — rootless, without loyalty to family, community or religious tradition, and thus “free” to create for themselves imagined identities and idiosyncratic belief systems. Although they usually think of themselves as unique individuals, they are really sheep in a herd, predictable and therefore ultimately boring. Any politics, as long as it’s not conservative politics; any religion as long as it’s not Christian religion; any sexuality as long as it’s not normal sexuality.
So when HBO provides a dishonest pervert like Lena Dunham a platform from which to promote these values, our objections and criticisms are automatically rejected as illegitimate if expressed in terms of our own preferences — Christian, conservative, normal.
Dunham deliberately degrades the most attractive actress on the show — Allison Williams, daughter of NBC News anchor Brian Williams — by depicting her engaged in a shameful (to say nothing of unhealthy) kind of depraved sexual activity, and why? Because it is necessary, in the feminist mind, to believe that human beings are incapable of finding pleasure in sex that is healthy, wholesome and consistent with traditional morality. A husband and wife happily having normal intercourse together? This is impossible, according to feminist theory, which construes heterosexual love is inherently oppressive to women.
“Male sexual violence against women and ‘normal’ heterosexual intercourse are essential to patriarchy because they establish the dominance of the penis over the vagina, and thus the power relations between the sexes. . . . There are numerous examples of ways that heterosexual practice establishes male domination in women’s most private and personal spheres. . . . Men see women as objects for their sexual gratification.”
— Dee Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men’s Violence, and Women’s Lives (1994)
Heterosexual intercourse — note how Professor Graham placed “normal” inside scare-quotes — is a horrific experience inflicted on women through “male domination,” you see. If a male obtains “sexual gratification” from a woman through “heterosexual practice,” this means she has been victimized by his “sexual violence.”
Feminism’s implacable hostility to marriage and motherhood — especially as these institutions are understood by Christians — inevitably produces a rhetoric that is anti-male and anti-heterosexual. Male sexuality must be demonized, and women’s universal victimhood asserted, in order to justify the feminist project of destroying the basic institutions our society. The feminist rhetoric of “gender,” aimed at subverting our normal understanding of masculinity and femininity, is an integral part of this project. Normal women prefer masculine men and normal men prefer feminine women. Therefore, if feminists can teach young people to reject their normal “gender roles” by teaching them that these roles are oppressive, this androgynous “equality” will make it more difficult for young people to form normal relationships as adults.
“Social constructions of gender, like power, stem from patriarchal ideologies . . .
“Environmentally speaking, gender is independent of sex . . . and signifies the social constructedness of what maleness and femaleness mean in a given culture. The hierarchy that implicitly positions men above women due to reproductive difference, is a harmful one.”
— Amy Austin, “Patriarchy and the Problem of Being Born Female,” Aug. 9, 2014
Parents who wish their children to be successful and happy adults, and who therefore encourage boys to be masculine and girls to feminine, are seen by feminists as part of a system that oppresses unhappy weirdos and miserable failures. In order to satisfy the resentments of unattractive women, the normal admiration of beauty must be prohibited — the “male gaze” reduces females to being “sex objects.” In order to compensate unhappy women for their personal failures, male achievement must be derogated as social injustice — men’s success is presumed to be unfairly obtained through discrimination against women.
These feminist beliefs serve the function of telling unhappy women that they are never responsibile for their own unhappiness, and the propagation of this belief system provides career opportunities for women like Lena Dunham whose only claim to fame is her devotion to feminist ideology. No matter how wretched Girls may be — it’s supposed to be a “comedy” — critics feel obligated to praise it, because Dunham presents herself as a feminist and the show’s themes are therefore interpreted as feminist messages, even if this involves the celebration of Allison Williams getting a “desperately unfun” rimjob.
The editors of Huffington Post are required to heap unmerited praise on “the incisive, witty and hilarious dialogue that Dunham and the rest of her writing team come up with every week,” and cite as examples these lines from the first episode of the HBO show’s fourth season:
Hannah on preparing to move: “I don’t usually pack. I usually leave my crap in a pile and hope it makes it to where I’m going.”
Shosh on life after college: “I finished my degree. And now I’m just in the world, trying to get ‘er done.”
How incisive! How witty! How hilarious! Between this alleged brilliance and Allison Williams getting a rimjob, we can expect Lena Dunham to collect another pile of Emmy Awards for Girls.
No one can be permitted to criticize this phenomenon as what it actually is — a deliberately perverse insult to our sense of human decency — because telling the truth about feminism is a hate crime.
As some one of the same age as these Female Persons past the age of majority (to describe them perfectly), I must say she does not speak for me, or about my condition.
Also, New York is not the center of my world, and most likely never will be.
Typo: are never responsibility for
Are they kidding? DIV sex is “really” rape.
Do you have any idea how much leverage is possible using a shoulder and elbow?
Think you overreached on this one. Big deal, she got a rim job. Do consenting adults really need to have sex in a prescribed, “wholesome” way? Sounds kind of boring.
why does it matter that Williams is the most attractive character in the show? Would it have been ok of a less attractive woman was degraded thereby equating beauty with virtue?
Does Allison Williams cavort naked on that show as much as Dunham? I can’t imagine anyone watches to see Dunham.
Beauty and virtue are related though.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Is it a coinkydink that feminists tend to be misshapen Ms. Potato Head lookalikes – if not outright Lovecraftian horrors?
No, sir, it is not.
And Wiliams’ father is apparently totally cool with all this.
Jebus…
Quite.
Overreached? Personally, I…and a lot of other people…do not want to know about other people’s sexual peccadilloes, let alone see perverted crap (or even normal crap) portrayed on TV.
I’d prefer to go through life thinking that no one I know “does it”, and if a couple announces an impending birth, I’d rather not think too clearly about how that might’ve happened. Growing up, there was my 4 brothers and me, so obviously my parents only had sex 4 times (one brother was adopted, and probably he was dropped from a stork or something).
Why does it always have to be about sex? Why do shows and movies and books always have to be loaded with sex? Why can’t people keep their personal lives personal? I don’t care to know or think about people’s rimjobs, just like I don’t want to know or think about people’s bowel movements.
Contrary to popular belief, there ARE things that decent people do not discuss in public.
Because when it comes to sex, a lot of us prefer no shit, Sherlock.
It does. It makes giving this giving-you-the-middle-finger gesture more poignancy.
So the epitome of women’s wit in New York has morphed from Dorothy Parker slinging bon-mots with the gents at the Algonquin Table to Lena Dunham orchestrating salad tossing at HBO.
Well.
Call me OLD FASHIONED if you must, but I don’t see it as an improvement.
IP 70.192.66.145
Verizon Wireless, Hoboken, NJ
Fake name, fake email address, just showing up to derail the conversation, but you’re not actually anonymous, “Sherlock.”
My problem with the thing (quite aside from Brian Williams being fine with his daughter doing this… Jebus…) is that, to borrow a phrase, it defines deviancy down and skews peoples’ perceptions of what sex is and isn’t supposed to be, which is collectively unhealthy. Borrowing from DeadMessenger, we didn’t used to see this sort of thing on TV (indeed, it was confined to pr0n). It may well be that the writers imagined Ward and June Cleaver doing things that would make Jenna Jameson gape with horror, but it was never touched upon, much less showed. Instead, the emphasis was on their loving relationship as a couple and as parents. Now, acts that used to be (and by many people still are) considered perversions are showed on TV as normal, fun, and even healthy; a stable, monogamous, loving relationship between a man and a woman is, if not an oddity, then at least shown as only one of many options. “Well, SOME people seem to like it…”
If a couple discovers that they like to have “normal” sex, then more power to them. If they discover that they like to have sex that requires routine trips to the chiropractor if not the ER, that’s fine, too: it’s a free country. But do we need to be sending the message to people – kids – that they MUST engage in (ahem) extreme practices to have a happy sex life and even a happy relationship?*
And… is this what it’s come to for aspiring actors and actresses? It used to be bad enough when actresses had to be “OK” with nudity. Now they’ve got to be “OK” with analingus? What’s next?
And what the HELL is Brian Williams thinking??????
=====
(*) Upon reflection, one would think that Dunham would be the last to show “extreme sex” as happy, pleasant, normal, &c. After all, if she is to be believed (snort!), at least one of her college sexual encounters featured rather more than “vanilla” sex, and neither she nor the guy (the infamous Barry) appears to have enjoyed it very much.
Hear him! Hear him!
This is just the latest salvo in the war to turn art away from its original purpose: To allow us to approach the Truth of the Divine. Instead, over the last century, we have seen the mundane, the grotesque, and the vulgar elevated to the point where the beauty that exists is hidden among the most base and vile. The universe has thus been reduced to the byproducts of bodily functions.
What a resume builder for Williams, eh?
It probably is.
Sadly, in Hollywood, it probably is.
Rimshot. (I couldn’t resist.)
Because if they’d showed Lena Dunham getting rimmed, it might just have singlehandedly killed the show.
I was thinking, too, that when they showed Ward and June’s bedroom, all you saw were bounce-a-quarter-off-’em twin beds. And that was going quite far enough, thank you.
You are spot on when you conclude that children are given the idea that they MUST engage in deviant practices or they won’t be happy, or “normal”. They DO think that, most definitely. Hardly such a thing as an innocent crush or puppy love anymore. Now it’s twerking and booty calls and pimps and ho’s and the other crap you see in music videos and hear in…ahem..”songs”, so-called. Little kids, sexting…and the parents are oblivious or don’t care.
The world has been Fed Ex’ed to hell on a handcart by progressives, and the sheeple stood around bleating into their iPhones while it happened.
Give Hollywood some credit. They gave a movie about a patriarchal oppressor in training (otherwise known as a boy) their top award. OK, it was journalists who gave the award but there was a lot of applause.
Despite my attempts on Twitter to yell “The Emperor has no cloths” (Translation – Lena Dunham/Girls is asinine, idiotic and moronic) Lena is still the toast of the world and sold as the greatest woman on earth.
On the other hand, a poet saying that “beauty is truth” is a lot like an investment manager saying that “money is happiness.” 😉
Why is it that when conservatives talk about art they always sound like Nazis? Hitler had a very similar outlook when it came to creative works, and even held “Decadent” art shows to show the German public how rotten modern art was.
You tradcons are funny. You act as if feminism is some sort of new disease. You unwillingly support it by giving it credence and attention. Ignore trolls and they go away.
If Lena Dunham is “sold as the greatest woman on earth,” all it means is that she’s a big fat overpriced whore.
Stopped clock, etc.
Yeah, because that’s worked so well over the last 50 years.
“Beauty is a French phonetic corruption of a short cloth neck ornament.” – Frank Zappa
umm ignore means NOT giving legitimacy and institutional power. If feminism was opposed as ruthlessly as communism, we wouldn’t have this problem.
If feminists had their way, it would be a crime to pee standing up.
Feminists and the PC in general are expert liars. Now that we’ve signal-boosted Andrea Dworkin they are saying she wasn’t the real face of feminism. The Charlie Hebdo shooters aren’t the real face of Islam. But an anomalous shooting of Mike Brown is the real face of an ideological white supremacy with a secret white Koran somewhere. One lunatic warlord in Uganda is the real face of Christianity but an endless list of terrorist attacks are lone wolves divorced from ideology. A rape hoax is nonetheless the real face of rape in America. So real even a hoax is a legitimate stand-in because rape is that pervasive on campus. Dunham isn’t a real child molester because women can’t be that but men default to perverse oppression like Mongols just by having sex with their wife.
On old TV shows they used to sometimes have a monkey just because someone thought an animal that mimicked humans might be worth a commercial ad dollar or two.
I sometimes wonder if intellectual and moral trainwrecks like Dunham and Amanda Marcotte aren’t used in the same way. They generate ad dollars by the spectacle of their sheer stupidity. It’s fun watching one monkey then praise Laurie Penny, who may be one of the stupidest people to ever have a by-line. At some point the monkey-wranglers go away and it’s just the monkeys running the ship. Arianna Huffington has become rich beyond the dreams of avarice by assembling a montage of monkeys who largely violate union rules and work for free in a remarkable zoo of stupidity that makes Pravda look like a search for truth. The Daily Kos is what I would imagine a mental hospital would let its patients do to deal with their sociopathic retardation. Jezebel is an intellectual cul-de-sac that gives us a hint one doesn’t need an asteroid impact to make a line of animals go extinct. Without the male patriarchy and its Bill of Rights, Jezebel would be published from a slave pen of comfort women in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
The entirety of PC thought resembles an archaeological dig that doesn’t yet know it was destroyed by its own addiction to stupidity.
Who knows what you progcons mean when you use words. Why not just say ignore means never having to say you’re sorry or is a species of tuna fish. The idea we promoted Nazism by fighting it is too stupid to entertain. Does ignore mean ruthlessly oppose or ignore? If a black guy ignores the noose around his neck in the old South does he escape and run into the arms of his loving wife or does he get yanked short of that fantasy all Ambrose Bierce-style?
Wrong. Nazis wanted correct politics embedded in their art. Read your Shirer. I want art embedded in my art.
A bit of selective ass-munching would’ve made The Hobbit retro-trilogy more amusing and interesting. They added in the fem, why not gay rim-salads and vomitoriums?
Girls is literally leave it to beaver minus the children, family, fathers, mothers, and normalcy. As much as Girls celebrates beavers they don’t seem to know what they’re actually for or even that anuses don’t take a licking and keep on ticking. I’m surprised they didn’t put a playdough i-bar mold on her ass and have her shit out girders they make a feminist dollhouse out of with a physically appropriate Barbie doll instead of a wasp-waisted alien which doesn’t even have an anus to polish.
My apologies for not being clear. Right now all could be done is to ignore it. Feminism is on a last wave.
It should have been viciously opposed initially.
I’ve noticed there are some feminists on your Twitter feed who don’t really understand where their own ideology stems from. I’ve seen Laurie Penny and Amanda Marcotte also outright try and disavow their actual ideological ancestors.
I recently commented here about my theory that modern feminists often don’t truly understand their own legacy. They carry forward all the trappings of a psychotic sociopathy but filtered through the phony anti-oppression/equal rights narrative that has been successively obscured as we go from De Beauvoir to Wittig to Dworkin to McIntosh to Sarkeesian and Marcotte.
In other words they’ve adopted the hate and madness but shorn of the ideological underpinnings; some of them. That’s why they’re so mystified we call them “man-haters.” Many of them seem to genuinely believe they are fighting for equal rights and diversity. Those are the naive water-carriers for hate speech we call “social justice warriors.” They use hate speech but a speech and rhetoric that has been so obscured they just don’t get they are in principle members of a KKK.
That will always happen to any human who adopts identity as a moral code rather than an actual moral code. They can’t make simple comparisons. A cop – wrong identity – becomes a member of a white ideology. A terrorist – right identity – becomes a lone wolf.
The more we quote their own icons (whose names they don’t know) back at them the more mystified they are. Science fiction writers are writing about white privilege on their blogs and asking us to learn about intersectionalism without a clue as to who Audre Lorde or Judith Butler is or what it is they are actually promoting. Right identity is all that matters, no matter how much in principle it resembles a racist supremacist KKK.
Or all the viewers would have killed themselves.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
It was, to a point, but it was actually just one of a series of movements that came at us one after the other in the 60s and early 70s. Civil rights, anti-war movement, hippie counter-culture, sexual revolution/free love, “ecology” (environmentalism), and feminism, in about that order, but all scrunched into about 10 years. It was like a tsunami.
You don’t understand my comment. I’m not talking about “decadence” in the sense of movements like Surrealism or artists like Picasso, which and who looked at the world in a different way. And as Fail Burton mentioned, I do not advocate for the purely didactic in art, like socialist realism. Rather, I speak of the elevation of the vulgar to the point where it is deemed to be a worthy goal–and end point for existence.
So much of what is called art–so called by the purveyors alone–consists of the infantile tantrums of people who have no talent; who are unable to inspire. Rather, they take the mundane, the trivial, the commonplace–like taking a piss, superimpose some postmodern jargon upon it and expect the rest of us to gasp in awe.
I suppose as a reflection of our society, it works, but it is not ironic. It’s serious, and the fact the progressive elites feel compelled to praise it tells us much about the state of the modern world.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CVa4GdPixpk/VLUPj6b8hcI/AAAAAAAAqN8/V2begtv_0dM/s1600/Squad_1976.jpg
Episode of HBO’s Girls? Nope, just those Buckeyes!
It is intellectual laziness. It is easier to adopt wholesale the positions of whatever tribe one desires to belong to than to analyze the philosophical underpinnings of those positions. It’s as if these people have gone through a philosophical, moral drive-through and have ordered a “Supersized Feminism with a Diet Coke.”
O-H!
Excellent 2 comments Fail Burton.
I would guess that almost all that identify as feminist (or even feminist friendly) know very little about its ideological roots.
I don’t know whether people are stoopider now or it has always been thus, but very few people know anything at all about even recent history.
Feminism is a religion, a cult that fills a void for empty-headed people that would have been filled by a traditional religion pre 1980.
I guess I just answered my own question – it has always been thus.
The film clip to Another Brick in the Wall is emblematic of what has happened to our culture, progressed through new-age education.
What Floyd was saying was that kids were being indoctrinated with traditionalism – discipline, christian morals, responsibility – by imperfect hypocrits & all it turned out was grist for the mill. Individualism was discouraged & I can well see merit in that argument.
But, as will usually happen with socialistic entities like which Western education has become, the indoctrination has changed. But it’s still indoctrination.
Most people are still empty-heads that repeat mantras that have been downloaded by older empty-heads.
If you miss it already is.