Why People Hate Lena Dunham

it's irrational, entirely unfair, and deeply human

The headline for this New York Times interview with Lena Dunham reads “Lena Dunham is Still Trying to Figure Out Why People Hated Her So Much.” In the interview, David Marchese asks Dunham “In hindsight, what do you think the intensity of the loathing of you was really about?” They riff on it for awhile. So, as they say in courtroom dramas, “They opened the door, Your Honor.” Literally, Dunham and Marchese asked.

Which is not an initial paragraph that should suggest my own position. I don’t hate Lena Dunham; I don’t hold strong feelings for her at all. I’m not a fan of hers, particularly, but I don’t seethe with contempt towards her or any of her work. I thought Too Much was fun, and I particularly liked the central romantic relationship. It did have that modern trope I struggle with, the assumption that society always has to bend towards the personality of the individual, here the protagonist, rather than the individual also having any responsibility to bend herself. But then the notion that the whole world exists to help the individual self-actualize is stamped pretty deeply into American culture at this point. It was good, it was fine. So was Tiny Furniture. Perhaps I lack strong feeling simply because I largely missed her early period of infamy; I didn’t have HBO when Girls first came out and I found the discourse so overwhelming that I mostly tuned it out. Or maybe the truth is that hating her would be expected of me and I never like to play into what’s expected of me. Either way. Some of her antics have been aggravating - she sits at that very Millennial intersection of too much self-awareness and too little - but I honestly don’t have any beef with her.

But I do understand why she’s become a target, even if I don’t approve. I mean, some people just hate her personality or her work, and you know, that’s life as a public figure. There’s also, yes, a good deal of misogyny towards her out there, and a lot of unkind focus on her body. But I also think there’s something deeper, more visceral going on, not justifiable in logical terms but explicable. There are those who hate Lena Dunham because life is a lot harder for some people than for others, and because the whole game is rigged, and it really is all terribly unfair. The realization that slowly dawns on you when you reach adulthood that no force is coming to even things out, that there’s no teacher to make sure that the deserving are rewarded…. I think a lot of people never get over that. And unfortunately many of us need human faces on which to project their unhappiness with it all. It’s human nature.

Suffering is not a competition, and indeed suffering is one of the few truly universal aspects of human life. All lives are hard. But not all lives are equally hard. Certainly, many have been harder than mine. But some have been easier. I’m not a Sudanese Lost Boy, I was never forced into sex slavery, I wasn’t born with Niemann-Pick Type C, I didn’t grow up in a cult. So many human beings have suffered much more than I have. But I have suffered, and I have been around enough suffering to know that not every person suffers the same. I don’t love reciting my own tired story again, but it’s true that my mother died of brain cancer when I was young, it’s true that my father collapsed into alcoholism and despondency afterwards, it’s true that my siblings and I fended for ourselves as he slowly died in front of us, it’s true that he then died of liver cancer, it’s true that I had a violently bad relationship with the woman who became our guardian, it’s true that a lot of what was supposed to be ours was taken from us, it’s true I split when I was 17 with nothing, it’s true I fell into a crushing depression in my late teens, it’s true that this turned out to be the first part of a bipolar cycle that landed me in a state hospital at 20 years old, it’s true that this disorder repetitively ruined my life for the next 15 years, it’s true that I still can’t really get past it…. Like I said. There are many much harder lives. But it was hard, and I emerged into adulthood with nothing and no parents. Those are true things.

Meanwhile my wife Ami had a very difficult childhood of her own. Those aren’t my stories to tell, but if anything her upbringing was harder than mine. And she too was handed nothing in early adulthood. We both have experience with being alone and broke at far too young an age. But: we both dug ourselves out, after many years of hardship and adventure, albeit slowly, and we found each other, and eventually we were in a position to buy a house in Connecticut so we could have a family. (Yes, this is a mark of privilege of its own kind, absolutely.) So we began the long, fraught work of finding a house we could both afford and love. Which really sucked! It’s one of the most consequential decisions you can ever make, but because of the brute realities of the market, you have no time to really think it over. Rich people can just jettison a house they don’t like after a year and eat the associated costs; the rest of us are locked in for a long, long time. And you have to rush every decision because of the fear that the house will be bought out from under you, and we would agonize over what to do, and we’d submit our bid, and then womp womp, we shouldn’t have worried because there was no way we were ever going to get the house we bid on.

You know what kept happening? We kept losing houses to people whose parents were buying them.

I’m not kidding. We put bids on six houses. And, if memory serves, half of those times, half, our realtor told us, sympathetically, that we lost because wealthy Boomer parents were paying for the house, buying it for their kid. “Can we up our bid by $10,000?” No use; the parents are paying cash. And what really made it hard to take is when you would see them. I mean, I doubt I ever laid eyes on anybody who actually won the bid for a house we wanted, right. But still, I thought it was remarkable how often you’d see them, Millennial children slightly trailing their Boomer parents (who probably started building equity in like 1975), placid, unhurried, unbothered, acting like everything the light felt on was theirs, if they wanted it. And, in those moments, they were more or less right. When I would see younger buyers with their parents at an open house or touring at the same time we were, I’d scan them for some sense of embarrassment, for some minor indication that they understood that they were God’s favored children. Never saw anyone who looked embarrassed, though. They all looked like the work of buying a house, the grind all the rest of us went through, was an imposition. I mean, I’m projecting all of this onto them, of course. But don’t worry, they’ll survive. Their parents were buying them houses, and they had spent their lives with the kinds of parents who could afford to buy them houses. Spare your tears.

After everything, it really, really did not feel good to know how many of my age-group peers were sure to defeat me in financial combat because really I was battling against their parents. To dig and dig and dig, to scramble and climb, in the face of one adversity after another, and to find that none of it makes the slightest bit of difference against the force of hereditary privilege… It’ll put hate in your heart, that feeling, it really will. And people don’t just feel that way when they lose bids on houses, mind you. They feel it when the kid who got a BMW for a 16th birthday present makes fun of the junker they bought themselves, when parents donate money to get their idiot sons into the Ivy League, they feel it when the talentless actress cuts the line in Hollywood because her father is a producer, they feel it when the bully at their private school is mysteriously not suspended after his wealthy father intervenes, they feel it when the worst player on the high school team starts every game thanks to their coach/parent, they feel it when their college peer’s worthless startup is funded by a VC firm with their grandfather on the board, they feel it and they feel it and they feel it and sometimes it seems like the only thing you can feel. And if you don’t know what that feeling is like right now you never will.

If you’re in the creative fields, you can’t help but see it, unless you’re one of the privileged few who benefit from it. That these industries supposedly run on talent but actually run on connections is as hoary and plain of a bit of conventional wisdom as you can imagine, and yet somehow we still manage to blame people entirely for their own failures within them. Who knows how many brilliant pieces of art could have existed but never did because the artist didn’t have a connected uncle? Who knows how many lovely, sad, true movies about poverty and loss might exist, if not for the fact that Hollywood has been busily raising the castle walls higher and higher every year so that no one who has ever experienced poverty could possibly get a movie made. Every inch of establishment recognition of creative work is run through the patronage machine; you think people’s books just happen to end up on a fancy “Books We’re Looking Forward to This Month” list by accident? Let me whisper a little-known industry secret in your ear: if someone who isn’t already legitimately famous gets profiled in a fancy publication, it’s very very often because they’re friends with the writer of the profile and that writer is doing them a favor. However cynical you are about this business it’s not cynical enough. I’ve had more opportunity and more success than most, in my own field, and yet every day brings me closer to giving up. Because to succeed at writing books you need the blessings of a lot of grasping and jealous people who are good at nothing except for keeping the gates.

But you’re wondering why people might direct these feelings at Lena Dunham, and it’s a fair question. Plenty of people have had famous or connected parents, most of them are far less talented than Dunham, and they don't inspire this particular flavor of loathing. There are scores of nepo babies out there, and most of them don't become lightning rods for class rage in the same way. So what is it?

I mean there’s the misogyny I mentioned, right, and there’s the the fat shaming, and again some people just don’t like her or her work and that’s fine. There’s also a refusal to recognize the difference between her and her artistic creation Hanna Hovarth, some 14 years after the premiere of Girls. And then there’s her carefully-calibrated public performance of cluelessness that I know is intentional, to some degree or another, but which stays with people. There’s also her fumbling attempts to understand her own privilege, which are both appreciated and wince-inducing; like a lot of people in her position, her attempts to understand how incredibly lucky she’s been are both necessary and doomed to failure. Marchese, fawning over her like he’s at a job interview, is not in any rush to press her on that subject, and success in Hollywood pretty much requires both a reflexive self-obsession and a willingness to ignore the role of connections and chance in success. Maybe the truest thing to say is that Dunham is hateable, to many, because she has breezed into one site of human creative struggle after another and been blessed by The Elect over and over again, whatever genre or medium she chooses to breeze into at any given time. She’s got a new book out, and every last newspaper and website and magazine that stills draw breath has treated its publication like a very big deal. That’s not sufficient for success, but it’s more or less necessary, these days, and if anyone knows that all publicity is good publicity, it’s Dunham. A lot of people labor for years and never get a moment’s review from the velvet rope class. I get why they’re mad about it.

Of course, she’s talented. That’s obvious to me. If nothing else she has a talent for making the most of the attention and opportunities that were an accident of her birth. I think what bothers people is that “Hey this nepo baby is talented!” risks contributing to the widespread belief that talent is enough, when it certainly isn’t. The idea that the cream will rise and talent and good work will inevitably be rewarded is a way of asserting that life is fair, and life isn’t fair. Because, yes, you have to be talented to have the career Dunham’s had. But you also need to get the attention of HBO, and to get the attention of HBO you need to make the buzzy indie movie, and to make the buzzy indie movie you need some financing and networking and people who know how to shoot a movie in New York, and when it comes out, well, it helps if you know someone at the Times who will compare your writing to “both the novels of John Cheever and the comedy of Seinfeld creator Larry David”.…. Dunham was 23 when she made Tiny Furniture. At that age, I would have appreciated having parents just so they could cosign on a lease for a shitty apartment. What we need and don’t get is fractal. The irrationality of who we blame, well. We’re a species that in the last few hundred years has decided to constantly reference a dedication to equality of opportunity that has never existed and that we don’t particularly care to achieve. We talk about self-made success, then we acknowledge that nothing about any of it is fair, and yet when anyone complains, we say that they’re owned, cringe, that it’s embarrassing. We’re all supposed to be savvy enough to know that the game is rigged but cool enough to never complain about it. Is it any surprise that it all drives people crazy?

That’s an awful lot to put on one person, though, isn’t it. Marchese and Dunham consider the possibility that the negative fixation on Dunham has started to ebb, and I hope that’s true, although the NYT commenters seem not to have gotten that memo. As she - we - have drifted into middle age, both the anxieties and the attention that come with youth have attenuated. Maybe she can just make things now, and perhaps she will receive both less praise and less hate for what she does. She will, no matter what, continue to have absolute freedom to pursue whatever artistic pursuits she chooses, and she will receive outsized attention in doing so, and she will never lie awake at night worrying about how to pay the rent. Long ago I realized that there really are two human species, the ones who have known desperate, clawing, grinding fear of poverty and the ones who haven’t. The paradox, of course, is that experiencing that both sets your heart on ensuring that no one ever has to feel it again and makes you kind of wish that every soul on Earth could spend one day in that state of terror. But Lena Dunham didn’t do any of that. She’s just bobbing along in a system that is bent on rewarding the already rewarded, a society that has become a vast and intricate Rube Goldberg machine for the purpose of putting more money in the pocket of the moneyed. She got here the same way I got here; it’s not her fault, anymore than it was mine, all those years ago. And I would love to meet her in the other world, the one where none of this matters, “when I from black and she from white cloud free.” Until then, honestly, she doesn’t deserve your hate. She’s not guilty.

But I understand.